What Obama's win means for Lebanon

[Originally posted at NOW Lebanon]

With the announcement Wednesday morning of incumbent Barack Obama’s defeat of Republican challenger Mitt Romney in the US presidential elections, a natural question for many Lebanese is what the consequences, if any, will be for them and their country, and how those might have differed had Romney been the victor.

Though analysts contacted by NOW Lebanon have divergent views on the specific implications of Obama’s win for Lebanon, none believed the outcome would have a direct impact in the short term; any effects that could potentially unfold being indirect and longer-term.

Some argue the result will make next to no difference whatsoever. “I do not think there will be any difference regarding Lebanon,” said Riad Kahwaji, head of the INEGMA think tank. “The US has already been leading from behind when it comes to Lebanon, granting the leading role to France. [French] President Hollande’s visit to Lebanon on Sunday was a clear indication who leads the way in the country from the Western side,” he told NOW.

Elias Muhanna, assistant professor at Brown University and author of the Qifa Nabki blog, largely agrees. “There is no evidence of a substantial difference between Obama and Romney on foreign policy. The third presidential debate demonstrated that on this area, the candidates are very difficult to tell apart. What that means for Lebanon is an extension of the status quo,” he said.

Others, however, argue that a Romney victory would ultimately have been in Lebanon’s better interests. “There are two elements to consider here: the Lebanon policy of a Romney administration and the Syria policy of a Romney administration. Both would have been to the benefit of Lebanon,” said David Schenker, director of the Program on Arab Politics at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

“We don’t have anything on record from Romney about Lebanon, but if we look at the people involved in his campaign, such as Eric Edelman and Elliot Abrams, these were very big supporters of the pro-democracy March 14 movement during the Bush administration,” he told NOW. The Obama administration, on the other hand, “really dropped the ball in 2009 by not having any creative ideas or a vision about how to consolidate the election victory of the pro-West March 14 coalition.”

As for Syria, Schenker argues that Romney’s support for “the arming of the Free Syrian Army to try and end the Assad regime was a real big distinction between the two candidates. It’s been 20 months so far, and I think everybody can acknowledge President Obama’s policy of focusing solely on the hapless Syrian National Council was really a waste of time. By not providing sufficient support to the opposition fighters on the ground, the largely secular opposition has lost ground to jihadists and more militant Islamists. And that is certainly to Lebanon’s detriment, particularly vis-à-vis the future of post-Assad Syria.”

Romney did indeed say during the third presidential debate that the US should “make sure [Syrian opposition fighters] have the arms necessary to defend themselves.” Other analysts, however, are less convinced that he would put these words into action. “[Romney] spoke in strong neoconservative terms while seeking the Republican Party nomination, but has shifted to more centrist, cautious views as he bids for independent and centrist voters in the general election […] on Syria and Iran he has generally endorsed Mr Obama's cautious approach while vaguely suggesting that he would be tougher,” wrote Paul Salem, director of the Beirut-based Carnegie Middle East Center.

Obama’s victory may also allay fears that US funding of the Lebanese Armed Forces—typically amounting to some $100 million per annum—would be reduced under a Romney administration, given the latter’s campaign pledge to reduce foreign aid.

However, Kahwaji believes this question hinges not on the US president but on the Lebanese cabinet itself. “The US funding of Lebanon depends on the cabinet. When March 14 was in power, there was a great deal of spending and military support. After the Hariri cabinet collapsed and a cabinet considered to back by Syria, Iran and Hezbollah was formed, there was a significant reduction in military aid. To this day, US is no longer sending heavy weapons,” he told NOW.

As for Iran itself, analysts were in agreement that a Romney administration would have been more likely to take military action against the Islamic Republic, with the strong possibility of consequent battles between Hezbollah and Israel. That scenario, they believe, is now less probable given Obama’s re-election.

Amani Hamad contributed reporting.

Romney's frightening fundamentalism

[Originally posted at NOW Lebanon]

I’ve watched this five times now, and I think what shocks me more than the Mormon beliefs themselves (which, though certainly crazy, are not much more ridiculous than “ordinary” Christianity) is the aggressive, almost thuggish manner in which Romney defends them when they’re challenged. The furious glare; the belligerent lurch forward; the rapid rise in speech volume and speed: all the classic symptoms of a quick-tempered confrontational character are on display. And to what end?

Clearing up the details of how Christ, when he returns, will divide his time between Jerusalem and the State of Missouri.

Interesting, and very useful, to know what matters most to the potential future commander-in-chief.

She's no philistine

[Originally posted at NOW Lebanon]

I have to begin with a confession. When I sat down to read Atrium, the debut release of the 26-year-old Palestinian-American poet Hala Alyan, I didn’t have the highest hopes. It was going to be a formulaic rehash of the familiar tropes, I decided: A railing against patriarchy here, a riff about imperialist hegemony there. Perhaps a paean at some point to the stoic wisdom of the olive tree.

Events, however, didn’t go to plan. Over the course of the proceeding hour, Alyan chewed up my arrogant, sexist, Orientalist prejudices and ceremoniously spat them down my trembling, humiliated face. And she did it with style. For Atrium is, in fact, a formidable volume: irreverent, clever, hyper-erudite and laugh-out-loud funny, with moments of arresting darkness and disturbing intensity to boot. Whether it’s Greek mythology, nightclub culture, obscene sex acts or Beirut, there is scarcely one subject in these 88 pages to which Alyan doesn’t bring fierce originality, feeling and flair [Disclosure: I am a slight acquaintance of hers].

Take these lines from “Scarlett O’Hara at the Nightclub,” an unsettling reflection on the one-night-stand: “My newly waxed legs/ emerge from the sequins/ of this tiny dress […] In the bathroom,/ women huddle/ like grazing things […] Like origami, I garlanded myself./ Met you with my bones. I forget that sometimes,/ remember only the fog, the scuff/ your shoes left in the foyer./ Remember only the dead moon of cigar ash./ Your bastard exit.”

That description of sex as a meeting of bones betrays an almost Larkinesque morbidity. In an email exchange, Alyan told NOW Extra that her “unease” about today’s youth culture was a muse of sorts. “For all things romantic, I think the unrequited can be a fertile ground for creative expression. There can be something fragile, even damaged, about certain aspects of youth culture, and I think it is important to draw attention to it.”

Not that Alyan is a mere lugubrious brooder. More upbeat is “Pandora,” perhaps the shortest poem, and the funniest: “i./ When you sin,/ you go to church./ Cut your hair and watch French films./ Drink nothing/ but tea for/ an entire winter./ ii./ I just wash my sheets.”

Part of what makes Atrium such a refreshing read is its utter lack of the sentimental or saccharine. Alyan actually writes, in “Gemini,” “I think/ sometimes/ it is better to say the/ essence, to say, simply, the sky is beautiful today […] instead of reaching always for the poetry.” As she elaborated to NOW: “There was a time, in my teens, when I began to metaphorically frown upon what I considered to be ‘sappy’ […] And that evolved into something more organic over the years, so nowadays I’m drawn to poetry (whether I’m reading it or writing it) that has some degree of distance, or even cynicism, but still manages to excavate a certain veracity.”

At the same time, when she does “reach for the poetry,” the results are quite astonishing. Her command of metaphor, for example, is superlative. From “Taurus”: “You know this earth will please you:/ hills mauve-lipped, vaginal,/ rivers bruised with tiny flowers.”

Moreover, as with all good poets, Alyan takes an evident delight in words themselves: toying with them; inventing them. In “Barbie,” she nicknames the doll her “cuntless confidante.” And in “Palestinian-American,” she brilliantly turns marriageable “Daughters” into “Arable girls.”

Indeed, there are attacks on patriarchy, and these are some of best poems in the book. “Sahar & Her Sisters” is an especially dispiriting story of misogynistic, homophobic familial violence: “Their father set fire to the midwife after the/ fourth, rammed into his wife bark etched with holy verses/ to free her of the cancer that is girl […] When a story comes/ to the village about women who love women, women who drain/ women, the fathers say, Close your legs, daughters. Say,/ You don’t love the way that I love so that can’t be love […] It is foxes,/ foxes that come/ sniffing/ the/ river’s edge, foxes/ that find/ Sahar and her sisters,/ ink-haired quartet,/ hanging/ like constellations/ from the trees.”

Darkest of all are the appearances of the July 2006 war, during some of which Alyan was in Lebanon. “You ruin everything,” she tells Beirut in the eponymous poem. “I cannot wear/ lipstick/ without seeing cupped palms gathering blood from/ wounds […] Mediterranean witch. Baby, save your/ thunder.” As she explained to NOW: “I adore Beirut. Some of the language I use toward the city is harsh, but it comes from a place of frustration, not censure. It has a lot to do with watching a place I love being wounded, in a variety of ways, and feeling powerless to protect it.”

Which raises a natural question, given Alyan’s nationality: How is it that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is virtually absent in her poetry? “The political situation there is something I have found very difficult to write about in any coherent, structured manner,” she told NOW. “I would say, though, that while politics might be absent, Palestine itself is very much a presence in my writing, in that it informs how I perceive the world, the themes I am drawn to, the emotions I choose to focus on.”

In which case, contra the Mitt Romneys of the world, with Atrium we have incurred yet another debt to the enduring richness of Palestinian culture.

Atrium was published in 2012 by Three Rooms Press (New York).

Why are the Republicans snubbing their one (semi-)sane candidate?

With enemies like these, Obama has very little need of friends. The ballistic rise of the reptilian governor of Texas, Rick Perry, to leading candidate for the Republican presidential nomination in barely a month on the campaign trail confirms a number of invaluable lessons for any other GOP hopefuls aiming to mount a last-minute dash for the White House. First and foremost, be a Christian fundamentalist, with unshakeable conviction in the absolute inerrancy of scripture; by no means excluding the biblical account of human ‘creation’. With commensurate fanaticism, oppose all tax increases of any kind, whilst at the same time making loud complaints about the fiscal deficit and, indeed, creating a multi-billion dollar budget shortfall in your own state. Be utterly contemptuous of the intellectual in general and the scientific in particular. Praise capital punishment – indeed, if you happen to be the governor of a state which murders its criminals, boast warmly about the number of deaths for which you have personally been responsible. Declare undying ideological fraternity, or filiality, with Ronald Reagan, even while in fact advocating positions on anything from taxation to illegal immigration that are leagues to the right of anything the senile statesman ever signed into law. Finally, just to distinguish yourself, find a niche subject about which to make a statement of forehead-smacking fatuity, such as referring to the social security system that sustains the welfare of 54 million retired, disabled or otherwise dependent Americans as a “Ponzi scheme”. 

Such has more or less been the template for all the major GOP candidates this year – from Perry to the Mormon fruitcake Mitt Romney to the fantastically ignorant Michele Bachmann (whose campaign is at least, or at last, showing signs of decline). Yet against this orthodoxy of cultism and crackpottery, there sounds a lone voice of what bears an alarming resemblance to something almost like reason. The voice belongs to the former governor of Utah and ambassador to both Singapore and China, Jon Huntsman, a polished and erudite speaker whose composed and cool-headed manner has already been compared to that of the incumbent Democrat. With his soundbite-friendly description of himself as a ‘centre-right candidate for a centre-right country’, Huntsman appears to be the only Republican candidate of the lot to realise – as surely all educated Republican voters have been growling into their Journals since Sarah Palin announced that homo sapiens cohabited the earth with dinosaurs – that the anti-intellectual demagogy of the Tea Party and its affiliates is not only a shameful spectacle of stupidity in itself but moreover the greatest contributing factor to the utter unelectability of most GOP candidates in the eyes of every ‘moderate’ voter:

When we take a position that isn't willing to embrace evolution, when we take a position that basically runs counter to what 98 of 100 climate scientists have said, what the National Academy of Science has said about what is causing climate change and man's contribution to it, I think we find ourselves on the wrong side of science, and, therefore, in a losing position.

One is fondly reminded of Dr Francis Collins, the eminent geneticist and evangelical Christian who wrote in his book The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief to the effect that Christians only do themselves harm by rejecting evolution, and the sooner they grow up and repudiate the pathetic pseudo-science of ‘intelligent design’, the immediately more credible will be their standing not only in the scientific community, but in the broader community of educated persons. 

Nor is this by any means the limit of Huntsman’s appeal as a candidate. In an election that everyone seems to agree will be decided on matters economic, Huntsman brings formidable credentials. Indeed, he can claim to rival Rick Perry’s much-touted ‘economic miracle’ in terms of job creation; Utah having led the country in exactly that respect during his gubernatorial tenure (by one method of counting). A profile in Vogue further elucidates the highlights of that period:

In office, he took progressive stands on immigration and the environment, signing on to a Western-states agreement to reduce carbon emissions. His big emphasis was on economic growth and job creation. Cutting the state income tax from 7 to 5 percent helped fuel business investment that by 2007 brought Utah’s jobless rate down to 2.3 percent—the lowest in its history. The resulting bonanza in revenue allowed the state not only to avoid spending cuts but to make investments, such as raising pay to attract better teachers. The kind of intelligent long-term planning that the Pew Center for the States cited in listing Utah as one of the three most well-managed states in the country helped boost Huntsman’s approval rating above 90 percent. Reforming antediluvian liquor laws and using his state’s natural wonders as a backdrop for his motorcycle rides didn’t hurt either. In 2008, he was reelected by a wide margin.

That Huntsman could simultaneously reduce income taxes and carbon emissions, while also making it easier for a guy to get a glass of bourbon in a hotel room, illustrates well his admirably – perhaps better say refreshingly – human brand of conservatism. That he is also a polyglot who has (like the current President) lived for several years outside the United States is surely not to be overlooked lightly, either.

Of course, he is hardly without shortcomings. He’s laden with much of the standard 'pro-life', anti-homo reactionism that any self-styled proponent of the ‘family values’ contingent might be expected to carry (though it is, I suppose, to his credit that he’s unopposed to gay civil unions). On foreign policy he is especially discouraging: objecting, for instance, to American participation in the NATO intervention in Libya – which was, I need hardly remind my reader, a strictly humanitarian operation, solicited not just by the Arab League but also by brave defectors from the Libyan regime itself, for the protection of the long-suffering victims of one of the Middle East’s cruellest and most obstinate despotisms. Huntsman, apparently, thinks this a wasteful allocation of American resources, and does not believe the saving of innocent Libyan lives to be “core to [America’s] national security interest” – this despite the believable claim made in February by the former Libyan justice minister that the murder of 189 American citizens on Pan Am Flight 103 in 1988 was done on Qaddafi’s direct orders. This agoraphobic isolationism naturally does not extend to the American-Israeli ‘special relationship’, Huntsman’s support of which is as staunch as it is unqualified. In 2009 he managed to visit Israel with a delegation of the America-Israel Friendship League – an outfit that last caught my attention when they excoriated President Obama for daring to request that Netanyahu stop expanding illegal Jewish settlements in Arab East Jerusalem – and to be interviewed on camera about his experience of the country without once mentioning the occupation or, indeed, the Palestinians at all. (I ought to say that, dismal as this is, it’s infinitely preferable to the undisguised Christian Zionism of the current front-runner, who says without embarrassment that “I’m a big believer that [Israel] was given to the people of Israel a long time ago, by God, and that’s ordained”.)

Incidentally, of Huntsman’s flaws, I find that I don’t consider his religious faith a cause for especial concern. For while he is ostensibly a Mormon, his religion is plainly not that of Mitt Romney’s. As the aforementioned Vogue report explains: 

People tend to see Mormonism as a binary, you-are-or-you-aren’t question, but Jon Huntsman is something more like a Reform Jew, who honors the spirit rather than the letter of his faith. [...] [His parents] were mostly what Utahans call “Jack Mormons”—people with positive feelings about the Latter-Day Saints church who don’t follow all of its strictures. “We blend a couple of different cultures in this family,” he says.  

You’d never hear a phrase like that from Romney, who has raised his sons as Mormons and sent them on missions. Nor would you see Tagg, Matt, Josh, Ben, or Craig Romney in a hotel bar, sipping a glass of wine, as you might see one of Huntsman’s adult children. The difference in attitudes between the two Mormon candidates is encapsulated in the football rivalry between Brigham Young, where Romney went to college, and the University of Utah, where Huntsman went (before transferring to the University of Pennsylvania). BYU is an institution grounded in Mormon theocracy. The University of Utah is a state school that happens to have a lot of LDS students. 

Even if, like me, you find the ‘spirit’ of the racist, misogynistic and all-round lunatic cult of Joseph Smith to be no more attractive than the ‘letter’, you will, I hope, take real comfort from the bacchic indulgences of the junior Huntsmans, as contrasted with teetotalling ‘Tagg’ and the Romney gang (indeed, the old question of which candidate the voters would rather ‘have a beer with’ appears in this case to have only one possible answer). 

Which brings us to the greater question of why so few voters seem to want anything at all to do with Huntsman (approximately 1% of Republicans support his candidacy at the time of writing). Is it his tenure as ambassador to China under the despised Obama administration? His unequivocal acceptance of (I decline to say ‘belief in’) evolution and man-made global warming? Distrust of Mormonism amongst an intractably sectarian Protestant base? Or is it that his eloquence and equanimity fail to excite a crowd more accustomed to crass sloganeering and pulpit-thumping populism? Whatever the answer, it’s to be lamented that the GOP has snubbed the closest thing they had to a sane contender, not only because of the unthinkable implications should Obama lose next year, but for the extra work he might have been compelled to put in for his own party had Huntsman been given the chance to confront him. Instead, we non-Americans will continue to wait in vain alongside our American counterparts for our ‘change’.

Sarah Paling: The freaks of today's Republican party make the Alaskan look respectable

It was a truly amazing (f. OE amasian: to astonish; confuse) day in 2008 when the Republican presidential nominee John McCain decided that, after eight years of George W. Bush, what the American voting public wanted most was an increased presence of the religious right in the White House, and selected the ostentatious Christian fundamentalist Sarah Palin to be his running mate. A virtual unknown at the time, it scarcely took twenty four hours for Palin’s fantastic ignorance to come to light and by now it is already, just three years on, the stuff of imperishable legend. Here was a woman who didn’t just despise the intellectual in general and the scientific in particular; ridiculing the established facts of evolution and climate change and noisily advocating the teaching of Genesis as truth in schools. She didn’t just wear her astounding incuriosity about the world outside of America – having only received her first passport a year previously - with pride. No, here was an authentic, five-star fruitcake, who for two decades belonged to a church whose attendees had a habit of speaking in tongues, and who believed that when the universe was created by God – a mere 6,000 years ago – Adam and Eve walked side by side with the dinosaurs. Alarming comments were dug up of her referring to the invasion of Iraq as a “task that is from God”, and only this week the Guardian revealed that during her tenure as Governor of Alaska she once literally asked for the Lord’s help in drafting the state budget.

Yet for those of us who found the will to keep up with the American right after this dispiriting low, the even more amazing spectacle has been the speed with which each successive emerging Republican figure has managed to outshine Palin in stupidity, demagogy and theocratic crackpottery. 

First there was Christine O’Donnell, a woman of such breathtaking political ignorance that she didn’t know – and refused to believe, when told – that the Constitution mandated a separation between church and state (a highly instructive glimpse of what an America under her stewardship would look like), and who made the career-finishing decision to unironically proclaim on national television that she was “not a witch”. Then came Michele Bachmann, the confirmed 2012 contender who despite being billed as a ‘Palin With Brains’ (whatever the point of that would be) nevertheless shares all of the ex-Governor’s convictions about Darwin and the environment, and has managed to add further statements of flabbergasting historical inaccuracy of her own, such as her claim that the founding fathers “worked tirelessly” to end slavery (abolished in 1865, eighty-nine years after the Declaration of Independence). She also speaks without embarrassment about her frequent contact with the Creator, having acted on His considered advice not only in marrying her husband but also in running for Congress in the first place – thus making the modest assertion that she, like the Pope, is God’s personal pick for the job. And by the time we were given Donald Trump, I began to seriously wonder if the whole charade weren’t an elaborate Democrat conspiracy.

But the most damning evidence of how radically removed the Republicans have become from reality is surely that the candidate currently leading the race to 2012 is a man who believes that when the Messiah returns – an event we can expect any day now – it will be to preside over the galaxies from the state of Missouri. His name is Mitt Romney, and if reports from Monday night’s assembly of Republican heavyweights are anything to go by, he will be the man nominated to contest the Democrats in next year’s election. 

Naturally, a religious extremist of even the most benign kind in the White House would be cause enough for consternation. But a strong case can be made that Romney’s Mormonism poses additional threats unique to the cult. The most obvious is that the Mormon Church already has a President of its own, regarded as a quasi-divine “prophet, seer and revelator”, and Romney’s statement in 2007 that “no authority of my church [...] will ever exert influence on presidential decisions” seems hard to swallow in light of, say, his fanatical homophobia (on the podium Monday he boasted warmly of his opposition to the repealing of “Don’t ask, don’t tell”). 

Another consideration, raised by - inter alia - Christopher Hitchens in the run-up to the ‘08 election, is that until 1978, the Mormon Church was “an officially racist organisation”. At the time he pointed to the story in the Book of Mormon of “the ancient battle of Cumorah” (upstate New York), in which

[T]he Nephites, described as fair-skinned and "handsome," fought against the outcast Lamanites, whose punishment for turning away from God was to be afflicted with dark skin. Later, in antebellum Missouri and preaching against abolition, [Joseph Smith, the founder of the Church] and his cronies announced that there had been a third group in heaven during the battle between God and Lucifer. This group had made the mistake of trying to remain neutral but, following Lucifer's defeat, had been forced into the world and compelled to "take bodies in the accursed lineage of Canaan; and hence the negro or African race.

As he went on:

Until 1978, no black American was permitted to hold even the lowly position of deacon in the Mormon Church, and nor were any (not that there were many applicants) admitted to the sacred rites of the temple. The Mormon elders then had a "revelation" and changed the rules, thus more or less belatedly coming into compliance with the dominant civil rights statutes. The timing (as with the revelation abandoning polygamy, which occurred just in time to prevent Utah from being denied membership of the Union) permits one to be cynical about its sincerity.

Witness, then, the double standard: while you can bet your house that if even a moderate Muslim were to announce his entrance into the presidential contest, the Tea Party zealots would howl themselves hoarse about anti-Semitic passages in the Qur’an and hadith, a man who makes no secret of his belonging to a mildly decaffeinated version of the Ku Klux Klan can stand tall in front of those very same people as the grinning crowd favourite. And this from the party of Abraham Lincoln...

There is of course a temptation to rejoice in it all, on the grounds that it makes an Obama re-election a near certainty. But then one remembers what a flaccid disappointment that character has turned out to be. I think most Americans, and indeed most Democrats would have liked to see the Republicans put forward at least a half-serious contender, if only to make Obama work that much harder for their votes. Instead, the GOP has decided to implode spectacularly in its own irrationality. For the next four years then, welcome to the paucity of hope.