By Andrew Lee Butters/Damascus

Soldiers at the normally dour border crossing between Lebanon and Syria were dabka circle dancing and passing out candy. The streets of the Syrian capital were lined with tents stocked with tea and shawarma sandwiches. Billboards Proclaimed: We Believe in Freedom, We Believe in History, We Believe in You. Syrian state television blared old fashioned anthems of praise: “With unlimited love, people are waiting for their promised hero.”

Having worked itself up into millennial fervor, Syria voted today in a national referendum on whether or not President Bashar Al Assad should have a second seven year term as the unchallenged leader of this country. With the outcome of the referendum certain, the day was less of a popularity contest then a massive holiday in this security state’s true religion: the cult of personality.

Syrian is awash in Bashar posters of all shapes and sizes: Bashar the military man, Bashar the technocrat, Bashar the family man. Bashar covered T-shirts. Bashar covered cars. Bashar covered buildings. When the 41 year-old Bashar first came to power, he and his modern, Westernized wife were said to be uncomfortable with the Noble Leader-style adulation that surrounded his late father, Hafez Al Assad, the founder of the dynasty. Apparently the second generation is embarrassed no more.

For all the effort put into this referendum, you might actually think that something was at stake. But the only suspense is what the grandiose margin of victory will be. Last time in 2000, Bashar won by a whopping 97.3 percent. So will Bashar better his personal best? One hundred percent is a little too cute even for Syria. I’m betting on 99.9.

Needless to say, electoral oversight is overlooked in Syria. Anyone with any form of ID — not necessarily even Syrian — could vote early and often at any and every polling place. One eager young election worker obliged my curiosity by voting with her bloody fingerprint — a common practice among the true believers or the unlettered — for at least the second time that day. Though it may be shocking — shocking, you say — that a Middle East strongman might interpret the popular will so broadly, it’s best to think of today’s election not as, well, an election, but rather as a public performance, a display of the the regime’s bravado and defiance.

Accused by the United States of supporting terrorism in Iraq, Israel, and Lebanon, Assad’s regime has so far fought off the Bush Administrations attempt to isolate it. But the stakes are about to get higher. At the urging of the US and France, the UN Security Council will probably soon set up a tribunal to try suspects in the 2005 assassination of Lebanon former prime minister Rafik Hariri. Such a tribunal could have the power to force defendants and witness to appear in court. So far UN investigators have focused on leading members of the Assad regime.
Once the results of today’s referendum are announced, Bashar will probably behave like a king of old, declaring a week-long holiday, issuing pardons, reshuffling his ministers. And when that’s done, Syria will be as ready as it ever will– for war, for peace, for judgment.

By Andrew Lee Butters/Beirut

Are you having trouble understanding what’s going on in Lebanon? Last summer there was war with Israel. All winter and spring the country has been in a political crisis between the government and Hizballah. And now all of a sudden there is some mystery jihadi group staging an uprising in a Palestinian camp. What gives? What does it mean?

Well, if it makes you feel any better, most of us who are covering this incident are confused too. That’s in part because the battle for Nahr al-Bared conflates at least four different Middle Eastern conflicts. Perhaps it will help if I lay them out.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict: Lebanon has some 400,000 Palestinian refugees that originally came in two waves — 1948 and 1967. That was a long time ago though, and the younger generations have never seen their home country, and still don’t have citizenship in this one. Most of the residents of Nahr al-Bared hail from Nazareth in the Galilee.

The Lebanese-Palestinian conflict: The Palestinians brought a lot of trouble with them to Lebanon. Since most of them are Sunni Muslim, their arrival upset this country’s fragile sectarian balance, pushing Lebanon towards the civil war that raged from 1975 to 1990. Nor did it help that the PLO turned Lebanon into a base for terror operations against Israel, which led Israel to invade in 1982 (they finally left Southern Lebanon in 2000).

One of the legacies of that period is that Palestinian camps have remained outside the reach of the Lebanese government. As part of an agreement with the Arab League, the Palestinians take care of their own security in order to protect themselves from massacres like the ones in Sabra and Chatila, when Lebanese militiamen murdered Palestinian civilians. An unfortunate side effect of Palestinian self-policing is that armed Palestinian parties are often used as proxy pawns by foreign governments, and the camps are open to infiltration by radical foreign groups. Enter Fatah Al Islam.

Syria (and Iran) vs America: Syria (and its close ally Iran) are in a struggle with America for supremacy in the Middle East, and Lebanon is one of the main battle grounds. Syria wants to regain control of Lebanon which it lost in 2005, after the car bomb killing of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri galvanized international opinion against the Syrian occupation of Lebanon.

The American-supported Lebanese government is accusing Syria of backing Fatah al-Islam. The concern is that the Syrians will create instability in this country and then slowly work their way back into Lebanon in order to “protect” the Lebanese from themselves.

But like so much in these shadow conflicts, the connection between Syria and Fatah al Islam isn’t established fact. As Robert Baer points out in a TIME column, there’s no love lost between the secular Syrian regime and Sunni radicals like Fatah Al Islam. And Seymour Hersh, the New Yorker journalist who exposed torture at Abu Ghraib, is going around saying the the US and its allies in Saudi Arabia and the Lebanese government supported the Sunni radicals in Fatah al Islam as a counterweight to Hizballah — the Syrian suppported Lebanese Shi’ite militia and political party that is trying to topple the Lebanese government.

Al Qaeda jihad: Though the head of Fatah Al Islam is Palestinian, its fighters hail from all over the seething Arab world. They are united by their radical resistance to Western infidels and their Middle Eastern allies like the Lebanese government. The link to Al Qaeda too is murky, but Fatah Al Islam is one of the many groups springing up around the Middle East for whom Osama bin Laden is more of an inspiration than a leader.

So why have all these conflicts suddenly merged? And why now? One explanation is that the conflict between America and Syria over Lebanon is coming to head. The UN Security Council may soon vote on a resolution sponsored by the US to set up a tribunal to try suspects in the Hariri case. (The UN investigation implicated top Syrian officials.)

But another deeper explanation is that the war in Iraq is transforming the region, and linking up all kinds of local problems into meta-conflicts. Not only has the American catastrophe in Iraq emboldened Syria and Iran to challenge American power in Lebanon, but it is opening up pockets of chaos like the one in Nahr al-Bared. Whether or not they are supported by the Syrians or a sort-sighted Dick Cheney conspiracy, Fatah Al Islam is part of the Iraq phenomenon. Many of its fighters supposedly are veterans of that conflict.

Meta-conflicts become harder to solve than local problems. Thus the Lebanese army is wary of storming Nahr al-Bared not just because it has taken a beating from the jihadis already, but because doing so might open up old wounds with the Palestinains, especially if there are more civilian casualties. And though the Lebanese army will surely win this particualr fight, will it end up like the American army in Iraq, playing Wack A-Mole as it pacifies one camp only to see new struggles emerge in others? There are certainly no shortage of foreign fighters learning jihad in Iraq who might enjoy a Mediterranean vaction in Lebanon. If that’s the case, the battle for Nahr al-Bared could be a dress rehearsal for bigger battles to come.

On Friday night, I held a screening of All the Presidents Men — the Watergate movie starring Dustin Hoffman and Robert Redford — for a group of Syrian and Palestinian writers whom I’ve been training to be journalists here in Damascus. As expected, they all got a few giggles out of the impossibly ideal conditions under which the crusading reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein worked when they went up against Richard Nixon. The fact that there was a direct phone number to the White House switch board filled my students with awe. So did the fact that dialing 411 actually led to a directory inquiries operator who actually divulged a working phone number. And the whole idea that an investigative reporting team could topple the presidency seemed like a fairy tale. “If we tried that we would be in jail,” said one. Or worse.

I’m not so naive as to try and encourage them to follow the Woodward and Bernstein model of muckraking here in the Middle East. There’s no First Amendment and no Bill of Rights in Syria. Last year, the Committee to Protect Journalists rated Syria number nine on its top ten list of the most censored countries. And many in Lebanon (which was once occupied by Syria) blame Syria for the assassination of Lebanese journalists. Nevertheless, there is still a fledgling private press in Syria. And despite the fact that local journalists learn to steer clear of sensitive areas, there is still room to do a limited form of real journalism. Syria Today, the independent English-language magazine where I teach, has published articles calling for the reform of some of the basic parts of the Syrian government, including the court system. This isn’t North Korea. (Press Enemy No. 1 on CPJ’s list.)

So my reason for showing All The President’s Men was less ideological than tactical. I wanted my students to see what a working newsroom looked like — even one with 1970’s office furniture. And the movie offers plenty of little lessons for fledgling journalists. For example, how Woodstein made their reputation pursuing a story that no one else wanted. How necessary and how risky it is to use unnamed sources. And the many different ways of asking the same question.

Woodward: “When you handed out the money, how did that work exactly?”
Nixon Campaign Treasurer: “Badly.”
Bernstein: “I think what Bob means is that ordinarily, what was the proceedure?”

I’m not sure how much of this sunk in with my students. One of their main concerns was that Woodward and Bernstein rarely stopped to eat. (My guys couldn’t even sit through the whole film without a cigarette break.) But I was surprised by how they intuitively understood the political background behind the Watergate investigation. Not that they’d all heard of Watergate, or knew about the Nixon tapes, or what the Attorney General does. But they understood what was going on: the President of the United States used the FBI and the CIA — the secret police, if you will — to spy on the opposition and stay in power.

I was even more surprised by their response. “Excuse me, but this is normal,” said one student. All governments in the Middle East use state security against opposition groups, he said. What if the opposition is planning a coup? Or infiltrated with terrorists, or Israeli spies?

These aren’t abstract scenarios. The Assad regime came to power in Syria after the country had been paralyzed by years of coups and plots. An Islamic opposition group, the Muslim Brotherhood, launched a terrorist war against the Syrian state in the 1980’s. And Syria is still at war with Israel, which occupies Syrian land and almost certainly has spies operating here. As the saying goes, sometimes even the paranoid have enemies.

Now we could have discussed how the Syrian government helped create these conditions — by funding groups that wage a proxy terror war against Israel — and how closing legitimate forms of opposition may push opponents to extremes. (A lesson the Israel lobby in the US could learn too, by the way.) But another student left me struggling for words when she pressed the case: “Don’t tell us the United States doesn’t do the exact same thing.” After all the revelations about abuses of power that have occurred in the name of the War on Terror — kidnappings, torture and illegal wiretapping — it has become harder and harder to convince people in the Middle East otherwise. Even would-be Woodward and Bersteins don’t believe we live up to Woodward and Bernstein standards anymore.

Last week in Damascus, I accompanied a teenage Iraqi friend — the sister-in-law of a former translator of mine — as she enrolled in a private school for girls in the Old City. The occasion should have been cause for celebration. Zamzam and her family are refugees from Baghdad, where for over a year it’s been too dangerous for her to attend school. And because they’d arrived in Syria about three weeks before, they’d missed the beginning of term. But the school we visited that day made an exception for her case, and now she might dare to think again about studying medicine and becoming a doctor. Not only that, but under Syrian law, families with a child enrolled in school are legally entitled to live in the country. So theoretically they won’t have to worry about being deported.

But the day was an excruciating one for Zamzam, a 17 year-old, a refugee, a New Girl. She bristled when the headmaster lectured her from behind his grand desk in an ornate turn-of-the-century Ottoman reception room. “This is a good school,” he said. “You have to do what your told.” Later, I stood with her in the school courtyard filled with a busy swirl of girls wearing gray smock-like uniforms and playing games under a mural of the Pink Panther and a portrait of Syrian President Bashar Al Assad. I had hoped that what little glamor I have as a tall foreign journalist might rub off on Zamzam and make her adjustment to the new school a little easier. But an unsympathetic crone, clearly the school disciplinarian, practically cackled, “No make-up and no jewelry,” as she pointed at Zamzam’s simple gold necklace and her bit of blush. Once we had left the building, Zamzam blurted out: “I’m a smart girl, why should I have to beg to go to school? If they are mean to me I’ll just bomb them.”

When I told Zamzam never to say that again, she explained that all her friends in Baghdad talk that way now. Apparently, American teen-speak standards such as “Whatever!” or “Talk to the hand!” translate into Iraqi as “Shut up or I’ll cut your head off!”

If this sounds as horrible to you as it does to me, think about what other options you have when are young and defenseless and Iraqi and when militias regularly dump headless bodies into your street. What else can you do but turn death and dismemberment into a sick joke? What other options do you have than to take semantic control of the situation and say “I’m going to bomb you!” or “I’m going to cut your head off!” when in fact the reality is that you are the one whose days are numbered?

Clearly Baghdad humor is going to be lost on most of us, but perhaps it is we who are tone deaf not Iraqis like Zamzam. There is an humanitarian crisis on our hands that we’ve done much to create and little to solve. A couple million displaced inside Iraq. A million in Syria. A million more in Jordan. More on the way every day. So what’s more dangerous, raw truth or polite conversation and denial?

I’d like to think that life is going to get better for Zamzam and her family now that they’ve left Iraq, now that they’ve rented an apartment in Damascus, now that she’s in school. But Zamzam’s doubtful. “It’s going to happen here too,” she said. “Just wait.”

US Ambassador Feltman with with Lebanese-American Evacuees Last Summer

I went up to the American embassy yesterday to add more pages to my passport, and absent-minded as I am, was surprised to find it closed for Washington’s Birthday. Of course, it’s appropriate that State Department facilities abroad honor our first president, but all these holidays make it hard to do work. The embassy also shuts down on major events related to Lebanon’s Muslim and Christian sects, and there are a lot of them. If Lebanon had many Jews, the embassy would probably never open.

Still, I don’t envy the members of the foreign service who are posted to Lebanon or begrudge them their days off. What should be a dream assignment — arguably the most beautiful and most westernized Arab country in the Middle East — must at times feel like a white-collar prison sentence thanks to the strict security measures that govern embassy operations. While the rest of us paint Beirut red, they live and work in glorified trailer park conditions in a heavily fortified hilltop compound in a sleepy Christian suburb north of the city, which they can’t leave without advanced notice and armed bodyguards.

The reason for such precaution is Hizballah, the Lebanese Shia Muslim political party which until September 11 had killed more Americans than any other non-state actor. A suicide car bomber linked to a Hizballah faction blew up the old American embassy in West Beirut back in 1983. And though the organization has matured since then, and though many American journalists and aid workers and average citizens regularly visit Hizballah territory and meet with Hizballah members without incident, officials at the American embassy say that the Party of God is actively planning to do them harm, and would if they could.

But all that security must have an effect on the embassy’s ability to promote American interests and formulate policy in Lebanon. Not only is the embassy legally barred from talking to Hizballah — perhaps the most important player in Lebanese politics — one wonders what other parts of society they can’t easily reach while they are stuck in their Green Zone Lite. The net result is that American diplomats in Lebanon, as the most visible representatives of the US, bear the blame for policies that they have less and less of a role in developing (especially under this administration.)

This was clear when the American embassy began evacuating American citizens in last summer’s war with Israel, and the American press was hounding US Ambassador Jeffrey Feltman about why the State Department tried to make evacuees sign a promissory note for the cost of transportation. While it did seem strange that the American government wanted to charge money for an evacuation from a country it was helping to bomb (the US was speed delivering smart munitions to Israel at the time) the mess was hardly Feltman’s fault. All the shots were being phoned in from Washington.

Today when I returned to the embassy to take care of my paperwork, I found myself again feeling sympathetic towards the embassy staff. They have been busy of late with passport applications and consular services for all the Lebanese who have or want American citizenship and who are trying to get themselves out of the country during this time of political crisis. There are about 20,000 people in the country with American citizenship, many of whom have minimal connection to any of the 50 states, who may not own or rent property or pay taxes. One suspects that there are some who’ve never even been to America.

If I were Lebanese, I too would be doing anything possible to get my family out of here. But as I waited in line at American Citizen Serivices, the behavior of one family irked me, that of a father who was getting passports for his three teenage children but who hadn’t renewed his own since 1993. The kids were being kids, smart-aleky and self-consciously cool, the son wearing blue jeans hanging past his ass and a big smirk. I wanted to tell him to pull up his pants and take this process a little more seriously. I thought for the moment of Iraq, and of all the Iraqis who’d worked for the American Army and the American government as translators or advisors or drivers and who now faced all manner of threats and violence but who have been still been denied asylum by our government. They deserve a US passport a thousand times more than this pip-squeak, and for that matter, a thousand times more than me.

–Andrew Lee Butters/Beirut

Photo by Newsha Tavakolian

The only Valentine I received yesterday from a member of the female persuasion was a telephone call from a 13 year-old Shia girl from south Beirut named Fatima.

I’d met Fatima and her family last summer during the war with Israel when they were living as refugees with some twenty other people in a public school classroom not far from where I live. The family — besides her parents she also has a younger brother — had impressed me by being religious but totally apolitical. Young Fatima in particular seemed endowed with an old soul. “We don’t believe in politics and we don’t believe in war,” she told me. “We pray and we fast and we believe in God.”

So today, I stopped by their home in an apartment block with intermittent town electricity. The father rents a mini-bus which he uses to make some money ferrying school kids and commuters around the working-class suburbs. It’s about as much he can hope for these days. Fatima, who is the best student in her school, wants to be a lawyer and write poetry.

And it turns out she had written a poem for me, which she read by the light of a florescent storm lantern.

“Is there anything more beautiful than the name ‘Andrew the American’?
It is straight like an arrow that shoots though bodies.
It exists in all religions as a golden symbol that shakes the ages.
Have sympathy on me and my poems,
Maybe you’ll see me as a human being,
And look at me as a sister.”

–Andrew Lee Butters/Beirut

Here’s at least one good thing that happened in the midst of yesterday’s sectarian madness in Beirut. The Lebanese army got involved. When the quarrel between Sunni students and Shia students that broke out at Beirut Arab University turned into full-scale street fighting, the Lebanese army began sealing off surrounding neighborhoods. They made arrests. They disarmed many of the gangs moving in to join battle. And for the first time since 1996 (when Israel bombed the country in Operation Grapes of Wrath) they declared a curfew.
That was in marked contract to Tuesday’s general strike when the army stood and watched as the Hizballah-led opposition set up barricades to shut down Beirut. The concern was that if they were seen to be taking sides in the country’s political crisis, they would risk splitting the army along sectarian lines, as happened during the 1975-1990 Civil War. But by doing nothing on Tuesday, they opened the door for pro-government gangs to take the law into their own hands.
So there’s still hope that Lebanon will avoid more mass unrest, especially if yesterday’s riot pushes the rival sides in the political crisis back to the bargaining table. The country is so deeply — and so evenly — divided in their support of or their antagonism towards Prime Minster Fouad Siniora’s Westernized government that for weeks many observers have been saying that it will take some tragedy or explosion to bring the country’s leaders to their senses.
This could be that opportunity. Because the violence didn’t occur as a result of a planned opposition protest, Hizballah-leader Hassan Nasrallah has enough face-saving room to return to talks without accepting responsibility for the chaos. He could play the statesman in order to avoid more of the same.
But the opposition in general and Nasrallah in particular will be ultimately responsible for any violence that occurs if the opposition continues its street campaign to topple the government. Their claims of democratic legitimacy, and it’s use of the term “civil disobedience” to describe their actions, became void the day they prevented people from driving on the roads of their own country.
The concern now is Ashura, the Muslim holiday held especially dear by Shia, as it marks the day their ancestors were massacred by the armies of the Sunni Caliph in Karbala in Iraq in the seventh century. Tempers tend to flare on Ashura — which is celebrated among Lebanon’s young Shia men by ritually beating and cutting themselves. Earlier in the week, opposition leaders had said that the next stage of the street protests will take place sometime before Ashura, which is on Monday. If they stick to that schedule, it could be 1975 all over again in Lebanon.

By Andrew Lee Butters/Beirut

For the moment there’s lots of ink being spilled in local newspapers about the possibility that Iran and Saudi Arabia might be able to broker some kind of deal between Lebanon’s government and opposition. More power to them. Though it’s unlikely that Lebanon’s internal problems can be settled for good without a full scale regional diplomatic agreement, anything that lowers the temperature in Beirut’s streets — even temporarily — is for the better as far as Lebanon is concerned, and from a shallow and self-centered perspective, as far as journalists like myself are concerned.

That’s because the pattern of these streets fights foreshadows a conflict that’s going to be pretty tough to cover. Beirut is a beguiling city, and Western journalists who cover the Middle East from their home-base here wouldn’t be the first foreign invaders to have been lulled into a false sense of security by the balmy Mediterranean lifestyle. Unlike Iraq or Afghanistan, one lives in Lebanon with ones’ guard down. On Thursday, I was eating a fancy turkey sandwich at a business lunch in a California-style restaurant. Thirty minutes later I was trapped in a firefight, without a flack-jacked or helmet, without my notebook, and when the city’s mobile phone network went down with the surge of phone calls, I also found myself pining for a satellite telephone.

Another problem is that no one wants coverage of their side causing trouble, no one wants to be blamed for starting a civil war, and everyone wants to play the victim. Your average Beirut street fighter (who may well be a finance or marketing MBA student) is pretty media savvy. He knows that he is going to have a tough time explaining why there’s a picture of him on Time.com with a Molotov cocktail when he goes for his next job interview at the Price Waterhouse Coopers Dubai office. So when I trained my camera on some Sunni guys throwing rocks on Tuesday, one of them decked me. Not long afterwards he apologized (which was nice) but his buddies then tried to get me to take pictures of their Shia opponents making mischief on the other side of the street. “I can’t believe you don’t have a telephoto lens!” one of them practically screamed at me. “Are you sure you’re a journalist?”

It was also hard to miss how many of the rioters on Tuesday and Thursday were so clearly enjoying themselves. Over and over again, I’ve heard how people in Lebanon don’t want to go back to the bad old days, and that only outsiders agitators are the ones responsible for causing trouble. But there’s a subsection of bored and underemployed young men who want to bring it on. Why else were they pouring into the neighborhood around Beirut Arab University from all over town to join a fight between students they didn’t even know? I was hiding from gunfire behind a soda machine a couple of streets down from BAU on Thursday, when some alpha male street fighter with a submachine gun ran around the corner followed by a wannabe entourage of about seven cronies, one of them carrying an extra ammunition clip, like teenagers trying to get a turn on their rich friend’s new toy. It was a scene from high school with small arms.

Obviously, the tragedy of what may happen here won’t be its effect on the foreign press. And of course we’ll figure out a new set of do’s and don’ts to keep working. And it’s true that anytime something bad happens in Lebanon, there’s a lot of breathless stories about a new civil war being on its way. (I just wrote one myself.) But defending for a second a profession that is often accused of wanting disaster to happen to other people so that they can write about it, I just want to say right now that I’d much rather Lebanon stays as it is, with its ski slopes, and beaches, and lifestyle that appears to be as superficial as I am.

–Andrew Lee Butters/Beirut

The one-day general strike enforced today by Lebanon’s Hizballah-led opposition turned out to be much more aggressive and effective than expected. Not that the majority of Lebanese necessarily wanted to stay away from work. They just didn’t have a choice. Opposition activists cut the country’s major highways and the main roads into Beirut with an array of rubble ramparts and burning barricades that covered the paralyzed capital in a blanket of black smoke.

Starting last night, Lebanese security forces fanned out to major intersections with the stated aim of keeping the country open for business and protecting would-be strike breakers. But by dawn today, gangs took over the the streets with little resistance from the army and police. In central Beirut, soldiers stood idly by as black-clad Hizballah supporters torched tires and at least one car.

Without the mass participation of average Lebanese, today’s demonstrations were no longer the family-friendly events that they’ve been in the past. Angry young men of no clear party affiliation tried to storm a government finance building, only to be stopped by Hizballah regulars. Lebanese television showed pictures of an angry confrontation between a Christian opposition party that had shut the north-bound road from Beirut, and a rival Christian loyalist group that wanted the road open.

But the most troubling aspect of the day’s events was the sectarian amimostity — ever a concern in Lebanon since the country waged a bloody civil war from 1975 to 1990 — coursing through Beirut’s neighborhoods. In one area in the city’s southern district, crowds of Shi’ite and Sunni young men fought a two-hour skirmish, throwing stones and building tiles at each other across a street that separated their two neighborhoods. Fighting only ended when the Lebanese army drove armored personnel carriers between them.

Each side blamed the other for starting the melee, but what became startlingly clear was the extent to which Beirut’s Sunni Muslims have been seething over the almost two-month long campaign by Hizballah — the pro-Syrian Shi’te political party led by Hassan Nasrallah — and its allies to bring down the pro-American government of Fouad Siniora, a Sunni. “We look at Iraq and see how they are slaughtering Sunni, and we know that Hassan Nasrallah is the same as Muqtada Al-Sadr,” said Mahmoud Hashem, 32, a Sunni security guard who had been in the scrum. “Narsallah is on America’s big terrorist list. Why don’t they do something about him?”

The Sunni residents of Tariq Al Jedidah said that the fighting started when Shi’te protesters came into their neighborhood and tried to set up blockades and threatened to burn down stores that stayed open in defiance of the general strike. Malek Mahdi, a 29 year-old laser and sound engineer said he came out to fight after a gang beat up his younger brother to prevent him from going to school. “They are a militia and we have nothing but rocks,” he said. When soldiers shot tear gas grenades into the Sunni crowd, housewives and children in the upper floors of nearby apartment buildings began throwing onions — a home-remedy for tear gas fumes — to the young men stricken below.

Elsewhere, there seemed to be a concerted effort between the army and the opposition to avoid confrontation. At one point, Hizballah activists bulldozed their own barricades to allow an army troop convey to pass through towards the airport. A few Hizballah members applauded the army, then quickly replaced the barriers.

The opposition had meant for today’s strike to highlight its populist economic resentment towards what they see as a corrupt government that has sunk the country deep in debt. One of the most common signs read: “Strike for one day so the country won’t be out of work forever.”

But the strategy could be backfiring. The country is feeling a deep economic burn not only from the past summer’s war with Israel, but also from the ongoing political crisis that has played havoc with the the country’s tourism economy. After seeing pictures of mobs cutting of the airport road, tourists aren’t likely to return any time soon. And today’s display of coercive force by the opposition is likely to have scared many Lebanese as well.

By Andrew Lee Butters/Beirut

Dear Friends,

So I’ve spent more than a month in Northern Iraq, during which time I’ve had nothing published. One of the more historic events I’ve ever witnessed — the Iraqi elections — has come and gone and I don’t have a printed word to show for it. Time magazine takes my stories, edits them, fact checks them, and dumps them when pressed for space. Suddenly they sent me to Sulymania to get an interview with Jalal Talabani, the head of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, and probably the next president of Iraq. But it seems that I’m not the only one come to pay court. The hotels in town are booked solid, and my driver and I are moving from one flophouse to another in search of a room with a seated toilet.

In the meantime, I’m trying to get a sense of what kind of leader Mam (“Uncle”) Jalal would be if he won the post, and if the presidency had anything more than symbolic power. So far the signs are promising. If Sulymania is the future of Iraq, then the future’s in mini-skirts. And go-go boots. Yes, boots and skirts and sturdy pair of stockings is the look that’s taken Suly by storm this mud season. True, this isn’t swinging sixties London, but the Kurdish Twiggy costume is better than anything the winning Islamist Shia coalition is planning for Iraqi women. (Black: the New Black.) Yesterday, in the lobby of the Palace Hotel, one young woman dressed just so actually made eye-contact with me, and for a giddy moment such as I hadn’t felt since Election Day, anything seemed possible in the new Iraq.

Back home in Beirut this week, the former Prime Minister of Lebanon was blown up by a massive bomb outside a hotel where I often go swimming. Besides being a sign of bad things to come for the people of Lebanon, it was the biggest piece of news to come out of that country in the last five years, and I wasn’t there to cover it. On the bright side, my parents may be coming to terms with my unusual lifestyle choice. My mother sent me a note on Valentine’s Day: “Sorry you missed the assassination, Andrew.” It was my only Valentine.

If I don’t get the interview with Talabani, and if Time doesn’t throw me a bone, I’m afraid that you, my loyal friends and readers, may have to wait until mid-March before you see another Andrew Lee Butters byline. A new environmental lifestyle glossy called “Plenty” will then publish an account of my visit to a sexism re-education camp run by radical Kurdish feminist guerillas in the mountains of northern Iraq near the Iranian border. While you’ll be glad to know that the story has nothing to do with environmentalism, I must say it was interesting working for such a do-gooder publication. When it suddenly became clear to the editor of my piece that we had different ideas about the nature of the editor/writer relationship, she called me “an arrogant little fuck.”

Rest assured, I am YOUR arrogant little fuck.

Andrew