For those who like their analysis apocalyptic, Amir Taheri will usually oblige. Here the London Times provides a home for his vision of rapture.

THIS IS JUST THE START OF A SHOWDOWN BETWEEN THE WEST AND THE REST
by Amir Taheri
The Times, London
August 2, 2006

MANY IN THE WEST see the mini-war between Israel and Hezbollah, now in its fourth week, as another episode in a tedious saga of an Arab-Jewish conflict that began with the creation of the state of Israel in 1948, a political version of the "original sin". The conventional wisdom in the West is that the whole tale would end if Israel were to return the occupied territories to the Palestinians, allowing them to create a state of their own.

But that analysis does not reflect the Middle East's new realities. All the wars in that region of the past century, including the one between Iran and Iraq in the 1980s, revolved around secular issues — border disputes, the control of territory and water resources, security and diplomatic relations. Although fought in the name of nationalism or pan-Arab aspirations, none had a messianic dimension.

The first two wars of the new century in the Middle East, however, were ideological ones. The United States toppled the Taleban in Afghanistan and the Saddamites in Iraq not in pursuit of territory but in the name of an idea: democracy.

Since 2001 the region has been turned into an ideological battleground between two rival camps with global ambitions. One camp, led by the United States, claims to represent the modern global system of open markets, free elections, religious freedoms and sexual equality. The other camp is represented by radical Islam, which regards the Western model as not only decadent but dangerous for the future of mankind. It hopes to unite the world under the banner of Islam, which it holds to be " The Only True Faith".

In the Lebanese conflict, Israel and Hezbollah are the junior proxies for the rival camps. Israel is not fighting to hold or win more land; nor is Hezbollah. But both realize that they cannot live in security and prosper as long as the other is in a position to threaten their existence. A Middle East dominated by Islamism could, in time, spell the death of Israel as a nation-state. A westernized, democratic Lebanon, on the other hand, could become the graveyard of Hezbollah and its messianic ideology. And if the US succeeds in fulfilling George W. Bush's promise of a "new Middle East" there will be no place for regimes such as the Islamic Republic in Iran and Syria's Baathist dictatorship.

The present rupture in Lebanon has much to do with who will lead the fightback against the West. For almost a quarter of a century there has been intense competition within the Islamist camp over who could claim leadership. For much of that period Sunni Salafist movements, backed by oil money, were in the ascendancy. They began to decline after the 9/11 attacks that deprived them of much of the support they received from Arab governments and charities. In the past five years Tehran has tried to seize the opportunity to advance its own leadership claims. The problem, however, is that Iran is a Shia power and thus regarded by Sunni Salafists as "heretical". To compensate for that weakness, Iran's President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has made the destruction of Israel a priority for his regime. The war triggered by Hezbollah is in part designed to show that President Ahmadinejad is not bluffing when he promises to wipe Israel off the map as the first step towards defeating the "infidel" West.

The broader aspects of the Lebanon crisis are better understood in the Middle East than in the West. For the first time, Israel is under attack from Islamist and Arab secular radicals as "an American proxy". Writing in Asharq Alawsat, a pan-Arab daily, a Syrian Cabinet minister, makes it clear that the war in Lebanon today is between "the forces of Islam and America, with Israel acting as an American proxy".

Iran's "supreme guide", Ali Khamenei, expressed a similar view this week during an audience he granted in Tehran to Hugo Chavez, the Venezuelan President. "What we see in Lebanon today represents the revolt of Muslim nations against America," he said. "Hezbollah is backed (by Iran and others) because it is fighting America." President Chavez endorsed that analysis by calling on Muslims and non-Muslim revolutionaries to unite to "save the human race by finishing the US Empire". Iran's state-controlled media has said that Lebanon would become "the graveyard of the Bush plan for a new Middle East".

Tehran believes that a victory for Hezbollah in Lebanon will strengthen President Ahmadinejad's bid for the leadership of radical Islam. A number of recent events have made his attempt to wrest control more likely. This week several leading Sunni theologians at the Al-Azhar seminary in Cairo issued fatwas that allow Sunnis to fight alongside and under the command of Shia Muslims. The fatwas came in response to a Saudi fatwa that had declared any association with and support for Hezbollah to be haram (forbidden).

More significant was a message from Ayman al-Zawahiri, al-Qaeda's number two. The Salafist radical tried to get hold of Hezbollah's tailcoats in the hope of winning a share of the expected spoils of victory. He endorsed the idea of a global campaign against the "infidel", thus abandoning his previous strategy of focusing the jihad on countries such as Afghanistan, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Iraq. More significantly, he dropped the al-Qaeda claim of fighting a defensive war against the infidel by designating a vast area of jihad from Spain to India.

All that is good news for President Ahmadinejad, who claims that Sunni radicalism has reached the limits of its capabilities in the fight against the global system led by the US and that it is now the turn of the Shia, led by Iran, to be in the driving seat.

"Hezbollah has fought Israel longer than all the major Arab armies combined ever did," President Ahmadinejad told a crowd in Tehran this week. He also promised that Muslims would soon hear "very good news" about the jihad against the United States.

The idea of Shia leadership for the jihad was further boosted this year when Iran took Hamas under its wings. As a branch of the global Muslim Brotherhood movement, a Sunni outfit, Hamas has exerted its influence to win wider support for Iranian leadership at least as a tactical choice.

Many in the Middle East are alarmed by these shifts of power and dread the prospect of the region entering a new dark age under radical Islamist regimes. For this reason, there seems to be much less hostility towards Israel in the wider Arab world than we might expect in the West. There may be no sympathy for Israel as such but many Arabs realize that the current war is over something bigger than a Jewish state with a tiny territory of 10,000 square miles, less than 1 per cent of Saudi Arabia's land mass.

This war is one of many battles to be fought between those who wish to join the modern world, warts and all, and those who think they have an alternative. This is a war between the West and what one might describe as "The Rest", this time represented by radical Islamism. All the talk of a ceasefire, all the diplomatic gesticulations may ultimately mean little in what is an existential conflict.
http://www.nypost.com/postopinion/opedcolu...amir_taheri.htm

A DIPLOMATIC DUD -- PROBLEMS WITH A CEASE-FIRE

August 2, 2006 -- AS the conflict in Lebanon continues, the catchy word "cease-fire" has become a substitute for the policies needed to rid the Middle East of the root causes of violence and stabilize its state structures.

The major powers and others involved in this fight have used this fig leaf before. Ten years ago, after another tragedy in the village of Qana, the wheels of diplomacy went in motion to obtain a cease-fire - ending the first Israeli attempt at uprooting Hezbollah. That cease-fire lasted almost a decade, during which Israel felt secure enough from Hezbollah attacks to withdraw from territory it had held in Lebanon for almost two decades.

Yet, as we now know, that cease-fire didn't address the problem's root cause - the protagonists' inability to accept each other's existence. Hezbollah wants Israel wiped off the map. Israel repays the compliment by seeking the elimination of Hezbollah as a military organization. Thus, this fight is prompted by existential threats, not territorial disputes that diplomacy can sort out.

Yet many would still seek a cease-fire now as a least-bad option, which might offer a respite to organize humanitarian relief. The trouble is, they don't appear to have thought out the problems involved. Contacts with the United Nations, the European Union and the French government (all of whom are promoting the cease-fire idea) have failed to provide any answers to the key questions.

The first question is: Who will be the parties to the cease-fire?

The obvious answer is: Israel and Hezbollah. But such a deal would require Israel to recognize Hezbollah - which it regards as a terrorist organization - as a substitute for the Lebanese state.

One solution would be to have the cease-fire signed by the Lebanese government. But that option, too, entails major problems. That government's rival branches have contradictory different attitudes on the conflict. In a French TV interview last week, President Emile Lahoud made it clear that, as far as he was concerned, Hezbollah - not the government of Prime Minister Fouad Siniora - represents Lebanon in this conflict. But the speaker of the Lebanese Parliament, Nabih Berri, wants to reduce the role of Hezbollah, though without giving the Siniora government a boost. The Siniora government itself, meanwhile, wants a cease-fire but is not prepared to guarantee its enforcement unless and until the Lebanese army takes control of southern Lebanon - something that Hezbollah has vowed never to allow.

There is also talk of the European Union and the United States guaranteeing a cease-fire. Yet that would require them to abrogate their laws, which classify Hezbollah as a terrorist organization.

Meanwhile, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert appears to have bought the idea of his generals that Hezbollah has been mortally wounded and, given another two weeks, would be ready for a coup de grace. So far, however, there is little evidence to back that analysis.

Hezbollah has seen considerable success from its tactic of preserving armed militants by hiding them among civilians. Consider: Three weeks into the fighting, Hezbollah admits the loss of 10 fighters, against some 800 civilians killed. At that rate, to "eliminate" Hezbollah's estimated 8,000 fighters, Israel would have to kill almost a quarter of the Lebanese population. Hezbollah's losses in weapons? Easily and speedily replaced by Iran - as indicated by Adm. Ali Shamkhani, head of the newly created Defense Policy Board in Tehran.

Those who hope for a meaningful cease-fire will look to the example of Herv? de Charette, then France's foreign minister, who brokered the 1996 cease-fire after the first massacre at Qana.

De Charette faced the same question as today: Who controls territory in southern Lebanon deep enough to provide Israel with a credible shield? He immediately realized two things. First, there was no Lebanese government strong enough to control the south and enforce the cease-fire. Second, it was naive to expect Israel and Hezbollah to abandon their mutual hatred and guarantee a cease-fire.

His solution was to bring in Iran and Syria on one side and the United States on another as guarantors of an Israel-Hezbollah cease-fire. (For diplomatic cover, he also involved the U.N. Security Council.) De Charette and his Iranian counterpart at the time, Ali-Akbar Velayati, became de facto chairmen of the ministerial committee that guaranteed the cease-fire.

By all accounts, that was a brilliant tactical success for diplomacy. It provided almost 10 years of calm on the frontier. Four years into that period, Prime Minister Ehud Barak decided to evacuate the area Israel had controlled in southern Lebanon for nearly two decades.

De Charette's initiative showed that, given time and calm, the Lebanese could obtain what they had failed to do through years of violence. Can the same formula work again? The risk is that, if history repeats itself, it would do so (as Marx once observed) as a farce.

The world is not what it was in 1996. Both Israel and Hezbollah have more powerful weapons and have perfected their tactics for dealing with one another. Israeli military planners are adamant that they can do away with Hezbollah once and for all. Hezbollah leaders for their part are equally adamant that, by simply not losing, they can win this round against Israel, thanks to international support (especially from Europe and the global antiwar movement). Syria is bitter toward the West and in no mood to revive the late President Hafez al-Assad's policy of keeping Washington sweet under all circumstances.

More important, perhaps, is that Iran appears to be in no mood for diplomatic finessing of issues. Its new leader, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is convinced that the West is in retreat and that, once President Bush is no longer in the White House, the Americans will run away, leaving the Islamic Republic and its allies to reshape the Middle East.

If a cease-fire emerges this time, it is likely to be a temporary stalemate in the bigger struggle to set the agenda for the region, not a prelude to a decade of tense calm on a remote border between two tiny states.

Iranian author and journalist Amir Taheri is a member of Benador Associates.