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StumbleUponA Reluctant Undertaking
3. Loosen ties to Egypt's regimeIf America is committed to modernism and democracy in the Arab world, it can no longer afford a tight relationship with an authoritarian regime that stays in power by playing up anti-Americanism and anti-Zionism.
Mubarak's regime is the second-largest recipient of U.S. foreign aid. America's treasures have kept the Egyptian Officers Corps pacified and acquiescent. It's a financial bargain with Egypt's military rulers that has rested on the hope that they would spare the world the furies of Islamism and religious radicalism.
The bargain did not work. In no small part, the running war between the Islamists and the Egyptian regime gave rise to the horrors of 9/11. More recently, Egypt's rulers watched with anxiety the toppling of Saddam Hussein's statue. The fall of his regime, with its sycophants and clan rule, is a crystal ball in which Egyptians can gaze at their own future.
Back in the 1920s and 1930s, Egypt knew modernism, a multiparty political life, open debate, secular culture. This can come to pass again. But until it does, America should not be subsidizing the leadership of Egypt, which tolerates the anti-Americanism that infects the media and universities. In the battle for Egypt, Mubarak should not claim that he has the great liberal power at his side.
4. Push for Lebanon's independence
Through its military occupation of large parts of Lebanon, Syria has all but obliterated that nation's independence. It took stealth and brutality for the late Syrian dictator Hafez Al-Assad to make his regime the ultimate power in Lebanon's affairs. It needn't take armed conflict to release that grip.
In 1990-91, Assad lent rhetorical support to the American-led war against his nemesis, Saddam Hussein. It was then, with America averting its gaze, that the Syrians completed their conquest of Lebanon. Now circumstances have changed. Syria itself is in our cross hairs, and the country has a young, untried president (the dictator's son, Bashar Al-Assad). The time is ripe for us to lead an international effort to evict Syria from Lebanon.
The stakes in Lebanon are of no small consequence. The country has deep traditions of pluralism and tolerance. In its better days, Lebanon had been a base for American educational and religious missions.
There is no easy return to some splendid age for Lebanon. But there is a vibrant civil society there, a people at one with the modern world and eager to be rid of the tyranny of a retrogressive Syrian regime.
Syria, meanwhile, is a troubled society, with a despotic regime and a faltering economy. It has held on in Lebanon because it has not been costly to do so. A clear message could be sent to Syria's rulers: The price for their diplomatic and political rehabilitation is a prompt withdrawal across the international border with Lebanon.
These are no sure remedies for the anti-Americanism so deeply rooted now in Muslim lands. It is a hatred that feeds on itself, ascribing to America the most sordid of motives.
But the hope must be entertained that substantial numbers of Arabs are keen to rehabilitate their own world. If so, then they may come to see the American intervention in their lives for what it is: a reluctant undertaking by a country whose imperial reach into Islamic lands was forced on it by terrors that blew its way on a clear September morning.
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