William Safire: Moon Bats & Wing Nuts

Time magazine, which advanced its publication day in order to compete with the Friday-night fights, carried an unusually combative Joe Klein column recently jabbing at “left-wing blognuts and conservative wingnuts.” He popped Eli Pariser, executive director of the liberal MoveOn.org, as “the nation’s blognut in chief” and Vice President Cheney as “the nation’s wingnut in chief.” Just before the bell, the newsmagazine pugilist in chief landed a right cross to “The Wall Street Journal’s quasi-wingnut editorial page” and strode to his corner with a Parthian cavil at “the chest thumping of the various blognut extremists.”

(Quasi, Latin for “as if,” when used as a prefix means “seemingly”; I presume the columnist used the qualifier in this case as a form of journalistic courtesy. However, “blognut extremists” will be derided by members of the Squad Squad as redundant.)

Earlier this year, the following etymological fishhook appeared in this space: “The prevailing put-down of right-wing bloggers is wingnuts; this has recently been countered by the vilification of left-wing partisans who use the Web as moonbats, the origin of which I currently seek.”

There was enough of an e-maelstrom about the coinage of moonbat to lead to the origin. This included the entry in Wikipedia, a free online cooperative encyclopedia that was recently the subject of a New Yorker article and is giving the professionally edited Britannica fits. (Curiously, Eric Raymond, described in the magazine as “the open-source pioneer,” is quoted accusing Wikipedia of being “infested with moonbats.”)

The online source reports that “the phrase was popularized in 2002 by Perry de Havilland of Samizdata.net, a libertarian blog. . .originally rendered as ‘Barking Moonbat,’ suggesting that certain issues seem to trigger a reflexive response from some people much like wolves howl at the moon.”

Reached at the blog he founded, de Havilland says he began using the term in 1999, during his “preblogging days.” He holds that it is nonideological: “Although the term has become beloved by conservatives to describe people on the left, and certainly I think the quintessential moonbat is Noam Chomsky, it is really quite an ‘ecumenical’ term of abuse for dogmatists of any ilk — left, right or libertarian.”

But coiners can’t be choosers; when it comes to political Americanisms, usage determines meaning, and the overwhelming use of moonbat is in derogation of what used to be called “the loony left.” Loony comes from luna, Latin for “moon,” root of lunatic, one supposedly influenced by the moon. Theodore Roosevelt said in 1913 that he had to “fight the silly reactionaries. . .and on the other hand to try to exercise some control over the lunatic fringe among the reformers.”

The association of the left with the moon was advanced by the Chicago Tribune columnist Mike Royko, who asked in 1979, “What about your Governor Moonbeam?” When the subject of his gibe, Jerry Brown, the former governor of California, considered a run for president in 1991, Royko confessed that it was no “unorthodox lifestyle” that had earned Brown that nickname, but it was “because a guy in Chicago was stringing some words together to earn his day’s pay and tossed in what he thought was an amusing phrase. And if he had it to do over again, he sure as hell wouldn’t.”

From the foregoing, the casual reader might assume that we have the origin of the word moonbat. But not from the Websightful alone, or from the blogging community exclusively, comes the data-mining of the Phrasedick Brigade. The above-mentioned fishhook here, in The Times Magazine, produced readers eager to share details beyond the ken of cyberspacesuits.

The e-maelstrom contained a tip that led to a talk with Lawrence Merritt, archivist for Boeing, whose specialty is the heritage of McDonnell aircraft. “The XP-67 bomber destroyer was an experimental fighter plane that had its first flights in February of 1944,” he informs me. “We wanted a nighttime fighter to attack German bombers if they were to attack New York or some other American target. By the time it was ready to go, it was obvious that the future of aviation was in jet planes, not propeller planes, so they never went into production.

“It was never officially named the Moonbat,” Merritt insists. “Airplane enthusiasts called me up all the time in the early 1970’s asking about the Moonbat, and I told them this is not the name of the plane. But in that community, it stuck. Some folks thought it looked like a bat and was supposed to fly at night, and that’s where they dreamed up moonbat.”

Is there a written citation somewhere? “The first use I have in our archives,” the aircraft historian says, “is from a December 1973 Wings magazine in an article about the XP-67 entitled ‘It Might Have Been Moonbat.”’ (That was a play on the lyric to the song “Moonglow.”)

So that was the coinage, right? Wait — a late entry comes in from Matt Rudary of the Heinlein Society, which has a concordance of the works of the pioneering sci-fi writer Robert Heinlein. In his 1947 short story “Space Jockey,” he named the third stage of a rocket to the moon the Moonbat, and in another story a year later, “The Black Pits of Luna,” one Heinlein character was the scoutmaster of the Moonbat Patrol.

Today’s linguistic space odyssey shows how mainstream readers can tangle with the weaving Web. A last word: Don’t knock yourself out looking for the origin of e-maelstrom, “a storm of electronic communications.” It was minted today, right here, and if it does not die in the nonce, a dispute will arise over capitalization. Merriam-Webster and American Heritage use lowercase maelstrom, but Webster’s New World, steeped in the Dutch etymology of “whirling stream” and the name of a specific, swirling tidal current off the west coast of Norway, both lowercases and capitalizes. I prefer the initial cap, but — as we see today — coiners can’t be choosers.

Send comments and suggestions to: safireonlanguage@nytimes.com.

September 3, 2006

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James Traub: The World According to China

In Late July, as the United Nations Security Council argued long into the night over the wording of a so-called presidential statement castigating Israel for the bombing attack that killed four U.N. observers in southern Lebanon, Wang Guangya, the Chinese ambassador, blew his stack. This was almost unprecedented: Wang, a veteran diplomat, typically comports himself with unnerving calm. But one of the four fatalities had been Chinese, and Wang had grown increasingly frustrated with the refusal of the United States to condemn Israel outright for the bombing. Worse still, the United States was represented not by Ambassador John Bolton but by a junior diplomat, a breach of etiquette that Wang apparently took to be a calculated insult.

Without naming any countries — he lost his temper, not his grip — Wang lashed out at “a tyranny of the minority in the council” and vowed that there would be “implications for future discussions” on other subjects. Once the meeting ended, Wang planted himself before the U.N. beat reporters and engaged in 10 minutes of robust public diplomacy, complaining that the presidential statement had been “watered down,” observing in several different formulations that “we have to take into account the concerns of other countries” and predicting that the “frustration” his country felt “will affect working relations somewhat.”

It was a delicately calibrated performance. In an earlier era, when the People’s Republic of China tended to conduct diplomacy by tantrum, this might have been the signal for a real breach. But China cares too much about the international order for such revolutionary shenanigans.

Actually, in an earlier era Chinese nationals would not have served in an observer mission in Lebanon, and the People’s Republic would have taken a pass on the whole subject. But China now aspires to play an active role on the global stage, which is why it sends skilled diplomats like Wang Guangya to the U.N. That’s the good news. The bad news is that China’s view of “the international order” is very different from that of the United States, or of the West, and has led it to frustrate much of the agenda that makes the U.N. worth caring about. The People’s Republic has used its position as a permanent, veto-bearing member of the Security Council to protect abusive regimes with which it is on friendly terms, including those of Sudan, Zimbabwe, Eritrea, Myanmar and North Korea. And in the showdown with Iran that is now consuming the Security Council, and indeed the West itself, China is prepared to play the role of spoiler, blocking attempts to levy sanctions against the intransigent regime in Tehran.

It’s a truism that the Security Council can function only insofar as the United States lets it. The adage may soon be applied to China as well.

It was only in 1971 that the People’s Republic of China supplanted Taiwan as the representative of China in the United Nations. During the remaining years of the cold war, the hermetic Communist regime was generally content to follow the lead of the Soviet Union. Little changed even after the fall of the Berlin Wall: China’s permanent representative in the early 90’s, Li Daoyu, was known around the U.N. as Ambassador Look Out the Window. The Chinese stirred to action only in order to block peacekeeping missions to countries that had been so foolish as to recognize Taiwan.

Beijing sleeps no longer. The astonishing growth of China’s economy has made it a global force, and the accompanying need for resources has pushed it to forge new ties throughout Asia, Africa and Latin America. The old revolutionary ardor is gone, and China surveys the world with increasing pragmatism and confidence. China is now a status quo power — “an exporter of good will and consumer durables instead of revolution and weapons,” as David Shambaugh, a China scholar at George Washington University, remarked in a recent essay. Unlike the United States and the West generally, China views the current global situation as fundamentally benign and malleable — a setting conducive to diplomacy.

China has chosen to enmesh itself in global bodies like the World Trade Organization, regional groupings like the six-member, security-oriented Shanghai Cooperation Organization and a vast range of bilateral partnerships. China has begun routinely signing arms-control agreements and antiterrorism conventions. And it has begun playing a more active role at the U.N., contributing troops — almost all of whom provide medical or engineering services rather than front-line patrolling — as well as policemen to U.N. peacekeeping operations.

Wang Guangya, at 56, is a senior member of a new generation of Chinese diplomats vastly more sophisticated and better educated than the party ideologues of old. His English is quite good, and he so relishes speaking to the U.N. press corps that he sometimes keeps answering questions even as he edges away from the pack while graciously thanking the reporters. Still, he doesn’t often attend diplomatic functions, and the occasional dinner in his Trump Tower apartment is normally limited to Asian diplomats. Earlier this summer, I became the first Western reporter to whom he agreed to speak at length.

Wang greeted me in a cheerless reception room in the Chinese mission and invited me to sit parallel to him, as though we were a pair of notables at a reviewing stand. (I took a corner chair instead.) The embassy spokesman and a political counselor seated themselves at a respectful distance across the room. At first the ambassador dutifully recited China’s history at the U.N. But once we got on subjects that exercised him, like Japan’s bid for Security Council membership, he dispensed with the abstractions and assumed the forthright and confident manner that seems natural to him. Throughout our conversation, Wang chain-smoked Chinese cigarettes — Zhonghuas — a habit that had turned his teeth slightly brown.

Wang is bespectacled and slight and has little of the artful smoothness of the more Westernized Asian diplomats. He grew up in Shanghai, the son of a worker, he says, with a low-level position in the Communist Party. Wang graduated from high school in the midst of the Cultural Revolution and along with tens of millions of other Chinese was sent out to the countryside for “re-education.” But after President Richard Nixon’s visit to China in 1972, the leadership recognized that it needed trained officials to exploit the new opening to the West. Wang passed a test that gained him entry to one of the country’s 11 foreign-language schools. In 1974, he was selected as part of a group of 140 to go to England for further study, making him among the very first citizens of postrevolutionary China to receive a Western education. “You think it’s a good thing or a bad thing?” Wang asked me, with a disarming grin.

Apparently, it was a good thing. At the London School of Economics, Wang met Cong Jun, a student from the Beijing foreign-language school and the daughter of Chen Yi, one of Mao’s great comrades. They married soon thereafter. (Cong Jun now works as a minister counselor in the mission and has served as co-president, with the wife of the British ambassador, Emyr Jones Parry, of a discussion group called the Women’s International Forum.) In 1977 Wang was sent to New York as a junior diplomat and stayed for six years. He returned as a political counselor in 1988, remaining until 1992. He became director of international-organizations policy in the Foreign Ministry, ultimately rising to the position of vice foreign minister before returning to New York as ambassador in 2003. Wang is considered the favored candidate to replace China’s foreign minister, Li Zhaoxing, when he steps down a year from now.

Wang is one of the U.N.’s most adroit diplomats. Ambassador Jones Parry says that his Chinese colleague has a trick he’s never seen anyone else perform: “In the council, he speaks in Chinese, but at the same time he listens to the English translation. Sometimes he pauses, and then he’ll switch into English to say something similar to the translation but nuanced from it.” Wang operates by suggestion, by indirection — often by silence. “They play a very skillful game at the U.N.,” says Vanu Gopala Menon, the Singaporean ambassador. “They make their opinions felt without much talking. They never come in first and make a statement. They always listen first and then make a statement which captures the main thrust of what the developing world wants.”

But the game the Chinese play virtually ensures the U.N.’s regular failure in the face of humanitarian crisis. Indeed, the combination of Wang’s deft diplomacy and China’s willingness to defend nations it does business with from allegations of even the grossest abuse has made a mockery of all the pious exclamations of “never again” that came in the wake of the Security Council’s passive response to Rwanda’s genocide in 1994. The most notorious example of China’s new activism in this regard is Darfur. While none of the major powers, with the intermittent exception of the United States, have shown any appetite for robust action to protect the people of this Sudanese province from the atrocities visited upon them by the government and its proxy force, known as janjaweed, the Chinese, who buy much of the oil Sudan exports, have appointed themselves Khartoum’s chief protector.

China first worked to keep the issue of Darfur off the council agenda when both Kofi Annan and Jan Egeland, the U.N.’s humanitarian coordinator, tried to mount a publicity campaign in early 2004. When this failed and Egeland publicly described the horrors there, Wang — along with the ambassador of Pakistan, a regular ally — diluted the ensuing press statement so that the council simply called on “the parties concerned to fully cooperate in order to address the grave situation prevailing in the region.” In the summer, after Congress had declared the ruthless assault on unarmed villagers “genocide,” China vowed to veto an American resolution threatening (not even imposing) sanctions against Khartoum.

And yet, according to Munir Akram, the ambassador of Pakistan: “China was not nearly as active on Darfur as people think. The proposals came from us or from Algeria.” The Islamic countries then serving on the council, as well as several African nations, considered any interference in Sudan’s affairs a violation of its national sovereignty, even though the citizens being abused were Islamic and African. Wang was more circumspect. At moments of friction, according to a Western diplomat, he would quietly insist, “You cannot alienate the Sudan government; without them, the U.N. mission will fail.” Akram is the kind of bombastic figure who suits Chinese purposes to a tee. “Their national style is different from the style of other people, including India and Pakistan,” as Akram puts it. “We are an oral people; the Chinese are not. They make their position clear, and they stand by it.”

And then, when it no longer suits their purposes, they change their position. Several years ago, China joined India in principled repudiation of the chlorofluorocarbon reductions mandated by the Montreal Protocol. But when the international community offered to pay for the technology needed to reduce emissions, China decided that global regulation of pollution did not, in fact, constitute a violation of national sovereignty, leaving the Indians all alone in their principled opposition. On Darfur, as well, China has seen the virtue of bending before the wind, if ever so slightly. As the hopelessly overmatched troops of the African Union failed to stem atrocities throughout 2005, China (along with Russia) continued to block a resolution authorizing a U.N. peacekeeping force. Then this past May, the Sudanese regime and one of the rebel armies signed a cease-fire pact, increasing the pressure for U.N. intervention. China’s position was looking increasingly untenable. And so Beijing agreed to withhold its veto from — though not actually endorse — a resolution authorizing a U.N. military-planning mission.

The great issue that divides the U.N. is no longer Communism versus capitalism, as it once was; it is sovereignty. Ever since the catastrophes of Bosnia and Rwanda, and increasingly in recent years, the Security Council has been asked to defend individuals against an abusive state. When critics in the West deride the U.N. as a failed institution, they almost always mean that the Security Council cannot find the will to do so, whether through intervention, sanctions or merely opprobrium. But this failing is a Western preoccupation: most developing nations, with their history of colonial rule and often their wish to abuse their own citizens without interference, object to all such inroads on sovereign rights. And in China, where memory of “the century of humiliation” at the hands of Western imperialists runs deep — and where the state’s right to abuse its own citizens is not to be questioned — sovereignty has long been a fighting word. During the 90’s, the Chinese abstained on, or publicly criticized, key resolutions authorizing the use of force to dislodge Saddam Hussein from Kuwait and establishing or fortifying peacekeeping missions in Somalia, Bosnia, Rwanda and Haiti. China is now more flexible in practice, but the doctrine of absolute sovereign rights remains central to its foreign policy.

My conversations with Wang kept looping back to this fraught topic. “Each country has to provide the well-being of their own people,” Wang said to me. “In some countries there is a problem, where the protection of their own people is” — here the diplomatic diplomat searched for the right word — “neglected. The U.N. can come in a quiet way, providing help, providing advice. But the role to play is not to impose it when the government is functioning. Of course there are cases where you can say that the country is a failed country. But wherever there is a government, I think the best way to do it is by giving good advice wherever you can, tough way or soft way, to let the government pick up its main responsibility.”

China has, for example, engaged in some gentle prodding of Myanmar — the former Burma — whose authoritarian regime depends on Beijing for weapons and trade. But the generals who run the country have shown no signs of releasing their grip or of ending the house arrest of Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, the opposition leader and recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize. Nevertheless, Wang says that he has “firm” instructions to block a U.S. resolution, now circulating in draft form, that would condemn the regime and threaten sanctions. China does not feel that this issue belongs in the Security Council. “In our contact with the United States,” he says, “their argument is that of course they have the human rights problem, they have the problem of drugs, they have the problem of AIDS. And then may I ask: ‘The U.S. doesn’t have the problem of AIDS, doesn’t have the problem of human rights, doesn’t have the problem of drugs? Then you ask the Security Council to be involved?’ I don’t think that is the case.” I said that I didn’t think John Bolton would be much impressed by this claim of moral equivalency. Wang waved this away.

In another conversation, held a week later in the U.N.’s Delegates Lounge, where Wang blithely violated the no-smoking rules, the ambassador insisted that the right to exercise sovereignty free from outside interference was enshrined in international law. But, I asked, when the world’s heads of state, gathered at the U.N.’s 60th-anniversary summit last September, approved the principle of “the responsibility to protect,” didn’t this, too, become a matter of international law?

This was true, Wang conceded — even though China has strong reservations about the doctrine — “but you have to decide how to apply this.” And since this new obligation applied only to genocide or “massive systematic violations of human rights,” it had no bearing on Darfur. Wang had just returned from a Security Council visit to the region, where he had concluded that the situation was very complicated and that the government had been unfairly criticized. China still stood by Khartoum. After abstaining on the peacekeeping resolution, Wang had asked for the floor in order to reiterate China’s position that U.N. peacekeepers could deploy only with the government’s consent.

Unfortunately, I observed, President Omar Hassan el-Bashir of Sudan had just flatly rejected the proposed peacekeeping force.

The African Union “is doing a good job on the ground,” Wang insisted. “The U.N. force would be a good way to help them, but if in their judgment the Sudan government thinks the A.U. forces are enough, that is their decision.” And second, the Sudanese had agreed to disarm the janjaweed.

“And if they can’t?”

Wang ground a cigarette into his ashtray. “If you are not sure that it will not be successful, then why impose a solution on them before you prove that they will not be able to do it?”

China has become so influential a country, such an object of imitation, respect and fear, that you can no longer talk about an “international community” that does not include it. The West has a profound interest in China’s development as a global power and its acceptance, however gradual and grudging, of the rules by which the West has defined global citizenship. As Mark Malloch Brown, the deputy secretary general of the U.N., puts it, “How much less intractable so many issues would be if China was as fully engaged in the management and leadership of the United Nations as so many Western nations are.” Malloch Brown takes the optimistic, or perhaps wishful, view that China will find itself inevitably adopting Western rules as it seeks to join the global club, arguing that “as soon as you start grappling with global issues, you find that things like human rights and development and legitimate government are things you come to care about as vital to international stability.”

You can see why a high-ranking U.N. official would wish for such a denouement. If, alternatively, China continues to insist that the Enlightenment principles enshrined in the U.N. Declaration of Human Rights are little more than a Western hobbyhorse, then the great issues will remain intractable, and they will be resolved elsewhere than the U.N. In recent years, both liberal interventionists and conservative unilateralists have begun to call for some new body, or new mechanism, that will not sit idly by during the next Darfur (or more problematically, the next Iraq). This new entity would not include obstructive nations like China and Russia. But excluding China from the world’s foremost decision-making body could have very grave consequences, since it might well rekindle the Middle Kingdom’s old sense of encirclement and exclusion. You’d have to save a great many lives to compensate for that kind of damage.

China plainly wishes to join the international community on its own terms. The People’s Republic is a singular entity, a world-class power almost wholly preoccupied with harnessing its internal energies and preventing domestic conflict. Unlike Russia, for example, China has little wish to use the power at its disposal, save to establish a harmonious environment for its “peaceful rise.” And in any case, China has progressed so rapidly from an insular and impoverished state to a confident and immensely influential one that it has not had time to figure out what to do with its power, or even fully to acknowledge it. China thus cares a very great deal about matters of little concern in the West — “territorial integrity,” for example — and very little about the burning issues in Washington, London and Paris. China has, for example, played almost no affirmative role in the reform debate that has exercised the U.N. over the last year. China is a member of the bloc of developing nations known as the Group of 77 — the group’s formal name is “the G77 plus China,” even though the 77 have grown to 131 — and it shares the organization’s view that the U.N. should pay more attention to economic and social issues and less to matters of peace and security. But even on these questions, according to Ambassador Menon of Singapore, “They were basically just going with the tide.”

Even with its negative agenda — the reforms it wanted to prevent — Ambassador Wang was happy to remain in the shadows. China had spent more than a decade fighting off resolutions introduced in the U.N.’s Human Rights Commission, and it implacably opposed Kofi Annan’s proposal to replace the toothless commission with a much tougher body. But in the crucial final days last September, it was Munir Akram, not Wang, who produced a vague plan supposedly designed to break the deadlock. Western diplomats theorized that China allowed Pakistan to show good faith, intending all the while to block any substantive reforms. Akram, not surprisingly, denies this and says that he does not generally coordinate tactics with Wang. In the end, the General Assembly established a new Human Rights Council with membership standards sufficiently lax that Iran, Cuba, Russia and, of course, China were elected members.

The one issue that roused China to fury was Japan’s bid for permanent membership on the Security Council. China’s all-hands-on-deck mobilization was a reminder that propriety goes out the window on matters China deems to be of national interest, just as had been the case a decade earlier when it openly tried to kill peacekeeping missions in Guatemala, Haiti and Macedonia to punish those countries for their dealings with Taiwan. The merits were plainly not on China’s side. No other country so self-evidently belongs on the council as Japan, which pays 19 percent of the U.N.’s budget, slightly below the U.S. assessment. (China pays 2 percent, and Russia 1 percent.) But Japan is China’s chief competitor in Asia, as well as America’s staunchest ally in the region.

Even more important, though, is China’s deep sense of historical grievance over Japan’s notorious invasion of Nanking in 1937 and its aggression in World War II. Wang explained to me that Japan’s wealth and generosity could not erase this blot: “The current five has been selected not because of their economic power but because of the role they played during the Second World War. China played an important role, and also we didn’t occupy other people’s territory” — unlike you-know-who. (It seemed too niggling to point out that the regime that had fought with the Allies now held sway in Taipei, not Beijing.) China’s bitterness at Japan’s alleged lack of repentance has only been sharpened by the annual visits of Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi to the Yasukuni shrine, popularly seen to be a symbol of militarism. “For the last couple of years,” as Wang expressed this in his oblique manner, “the signal from Tokyo is not that positive.”

In April 2005, soon after Japan, Germany, India and Brazil formalized their candidacy for an expanded Security Council, anti-Japanese demonstrations sprang up in China. Japanese missions and businesses were trashed. The Japanese were shocked both by the virulence of the demonstrations and by the obvious signs of high-level toleration, if not approval. Meanwhile, Wang and several of his lieutenants worked on the ambassadors of wavering countries. Prince Zeid Ra’ad Zeid al-Hussein, the permanent representative of Jordan, which was considering becoming a co-sponsor of the resolution expanding the council’s permanent membership, says that he was called to a caucus room at the Security Council to meet with a Chinese diplomat. “The guy was apoplectic,” Prince Zeid recalls. “He said, ‘How can a great power refuse to accept essential, fundamental truths and yet take pride in the good works it does across the globe?’ ” He later sent Prince Zeid a copy of a book titled “The Rape of Nanking: An Undeniable History in Photographs.” Jordan continued to support the resolution but declined to become a sponsor.

China failed to persuade African countries to reject Security Council expansion as such, yet it still delivered the coup de grâce at a meeting of the African Union in Libya in early August, where heads of state met to choose two nations that would join the other four in seeking permanent membership. Several weeks earlier, China was the host of a lavish state visit for Robert Mugabe, the increasingly tyrannical and eccentric Zimbabwean strongman and a longtime Chinese client. Soon after returning, Mugabe declared that African countries must insist not only on permanent representation in the Security Council but also on the veto. This demand was obviously self-defeating, since neither China nor the four other permanent members would agree to dilute the value of their veto. Nevertheless, vast shoals of Chinese diplomats roamed the halls in Tripoli, appealing to African pride, to the imperative of global parity and so on. The demand for an African veto carried the day, and with that, Security Council expansion died. The corpse bore no sign of Chinese fingerprints.

Last month, the U.N. began the process of selecting a successor to Secretary General Kofi Annan. Asian countries feel that it is their “turn” for the job, and China has promised to deliver an Asian. Any potential successor must survive both American and Chinese scrutiny. The Americans will reject too open an advocate for the third world agenda; China will reject an aspirant from too close an ally of Washington. Other difficulties will arise. China may be happy to firm up its ties with India by backing Shashi Tharoor, a career U.N. official who is India’s candidate, but Pakistan, a close ally, may object strenuously. China may, for once, have to disappoint or even anger some fraternal members of the G77 — a situation it tries very hard to avoid.

The Chinese are much too subtle to throw their support behind a single candidate, but it is widely assumed that they want a technocrat who will put aside Annan’s (admittedly tarnished) mantle of moral authority. Wang, of course, disclaims any such ambition, but he does express the hope that Annan’s successor “might bring some perspective from Asia.” By this, he explained, he meant “patience over rush” and an emphasis on collective rights — those of the state — rather than individual ones. If China succeeds in this regard, the U.S. might find the U.N. an even less hospitable place than it is now.

China and the United States are the twin bêtes noires of the U.N.: the U.S. insists on enlisting the organization in its crusades, while China refuses to let any crusade get in the way of national interest. Washington is all blustering moralism; Beijing, all circumspect mercantilism. Both can afford to defy the consensus view. The emissaries of the two capitals are united by a wary mutual regard and understanding. Bolton and Wang met as midlevel diplomats in the early 90’s and worked together on nonproliferation issues in 2001 and 2002. In their first meeting in this latter capacity, according to an American diplomat, who agreed to talk with me only if he remained unnamed, as he was not authorized to speak publicly, Bolton and Wang talked for four and a half hours without finding much common ground. As the discussion drew to a close, the time came for the inevitable speech on China’s inalienable claims to Taiwan. Wang, who knew Bolton to be impervious to all such oratory, simply said, “Taiwan.” And Bolton nodded and said, “And Taiwan.”

Relations between the two are strictly professional. But Bolton, who declined to be interviewed for this article, is said to appreciate his counterpart’s pragmatism and lack of polemics. China and Russia take the same view on issues involving sovereignty, but whereas Russia, with a home audience to play to, likes to snap Uncle Sam’s suspenders, China, with no wish to harm its relations with Washington, looks for common ground. While Russia openly threatened to veto any resolution authorizing war in Iraq, for example, China stated its opposition as undemonstratively as possible. More recently, both Russia and China have resisted any Security Council condemnation of Iran’s nuclear program, but China has proved far more accommodating of White House concerns. “The Russians spent 45 minutes arguing over the meaning of consult,” the American diplomat recalls. “Wang finally said, ‘Consult is fine.’ ” Wang also earned points when he and the “director” of Taiwan’s unofficial mission to the U.N. happened to arrive simultaneously at the Saudi mission to sign the condolence book after the death of King Fahd; Wang walked over and shook the hand of his diplomatic nemesis.

Wang talked with me about Bolton, and about America diplomacy generally, with the faint irony and mellow wisdom of an antique culture. “I can talk to many people,” he said equably, “those who wish to have nice discussion or those who wish to quarrel.” Wang is, of course, a partisan of the nice discussion. “I do not want to give advice to my good friend,” he went on to say, delicately, “but I believe that sometimes the way that you work, especially the way that your work is respected by others as showing due respect for others, is where common ground can be found.” But what exactly does Wang mean by “common ground”? The consensus that China has sought on Darfur looks like a formula for paralysis. And China’s insistence on showing “due respect” for Iran seems designed less to persuade Tehran to end its nuclear program than to preclude any of the punitive actions currently being contemplated by the West.

Wang told me he believed that blunderbuss diplomacy is the American way “because America is a superpower, so America has a big say.” China would appear to have a big say of its own, but that’s not Wang’s view. At the end of our second conversation, he returned to a favorite theme. “The Americans have muscle and exercise this muscle,” he said. “China has no muscle and has no intention of exercising this muscle.”

I said that, in fact, China had a great deal of muscle but punched below its weight. Wang smiled at the expression and said, “It’s not good?” Well, I said, that depends. And then Wang said something quite startling: “China always regards itself as a weak, small, less powerful country. My feeling is that for the next 30 years, China will remain like this. China likes to punch underweight, as you put it.”

Why was that? Why did China want to punch underweight? Wang spoke of China’s peaceful rise, of the need to reassure all who fear its growing clout. “We don’t,” he said, “want to make anyone feel uncomfortable.”

James Traub is a contributing writer. His book about the United Nations, “The Best Intentions,” will be published in November.

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William Safire: Mumbai Not Bombay

“Istanbul was Constantinople,” went the Kennedy-Simon song for which the Four Lads were awarded a gold record in 1953, reminding audiences, “now it’s Istanbul, not Constantinople.. . .” Traditionalists in that beautiful city on the Bosporus could not really object to the change of name, made by the Turkish government in 1930, because the city’s original name of Byzantium was changed to Constantinople in the year 330 in honor of the emperor Constantine.

Name changing is catching on. Russia changed St. Petersburg to Petrograd to Leningrad and back to St. Petersburg again after Lenin was discredited; Volgograd regained its name after a period as Stalingrad (but some may be thinking of Putingrad). Burma’s military rulers — determined to break with the colonial past — renamed their country Myanmar, a 12th-century name, in 1989. In the same way, the western African nation of Upper Volta rejected its colonial name to assert itself in 1984 as Burkina Faso, which is a composite of local languages and is roughly translated as “the land of incorruptible men.”

The practice of name changing to reflect local roots — and the varying speeds of worldwide media adoption of new national and local monikers — was brought home recently by the dispatch about a terrorist attack datelined “Mumbai, India,” in The New York Times. It reported, “A string of powerful bombs ripped through a vital spine of Mumbai’s commuter train system. . .killing nearly 200 people, bringing India’s financial capital to a standstill.. . .” Two paragraphs later, the article helped its readers locate the scene with “more than six million people ride the trains in Mumbai, formerly Bombay.. . .”

The Washington Post, in its coverage, referred repeatedly to the familiar Bombay. So did most U.S. newspapers and electronic media: “At the Associated Press we say Bombay,” its librarian, David Goodfriend, informs me, “and all of our datelines from the city say Bombay. But usually about 9 or 10 graphs in, we’ll say that the city is also called Mumbai.”

In 2004, The Times decided to go along with the decision made nearly a decade before by local and national Indian authorities. The paper’s updated style manual decreed: “Mumbai, formerly Bombay. Gracefully remind readers of the former name of the Indian city when necessary.” Craig Whitney, The Times’s standards editor (to whom the wise and honest writers can repair), says: “In 2004, we decided to call it what it was calling itself. If you’ve tried to fly to Bombay on any airline over the past six years, you would find yourself looking up fares and schedules to Mumbai. Clearly, we waited long enough to see if it was sticking.”

Whitney adds: “In general, after a decent interval we call places what they call themselves — Ho Chi Minh City instead of Saigon, Myanmar instead of Burma, Frankfurt instead of Frankfort, etc., though on those first two (and perhaps on Mumbai as well) there are people who object for political reasons.”

Now let’s hear from Mark Rockmore, a top toponomist, or place-name expert, who keeps the official U.S. foreign-names database for the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. (You never heard of the N.G.-I.A.? Have I blown a whole agency’s cover? Will the next On Language be written from jail?) “Bombay was an Anglicization of the Portuguese name for the city, but on our maps now the official use is Mumbai, commonly with Bombay in parenthesis.”

India leads the name-changing and respelling campaign. That colorful Madras shirt you’re wearing will soon be a Chennai shirt, because that’s the new name of the city, drawn from the Tamil language. And if you’re a tourist planning a visit to the famed Black Hole of Calcutta, you need to know that the name of India’s former capital city is now spelled Kolkata, a closer approximation of the Bengali name. “If I had to hazard a guess,” says the man from N.G.-I.A., “I’d say that within a year or so, Bangalore will likely change its name to the local Bengaluru, from the Kannada language. This is all an effort to shed the colonial British names and reassert local, indigenous names.”

The potential for commercial fallout exists. Will Bollywood become Mumblywood? Will the global acceptance of Mumbai — from the Marathi name of the goddess Mumbadevi — by media standard-bearers affect the Bombay Company, a U.S. outfit that sells furniture? Or to Bombay Sapphire gin? (I recommend “Mumbai Safire gin.”) Spokesmen for both companies refuse to speak for the record, but I take it that neither company is thinking of a name change, because they don’t want to confuse customers. The name of a place may be subject to transformation by its residents, but a brand is a brand.

Americans can identify with Indians, Burmese and other anticolonial namers. “The biggest renaming issue in the U.S. right now is to do with Mount McKinley in Alaska,” says Mark Monmonier, professor of geography at Syracuse University. North America’s tallest peak was known to locals by its Athabaskan name, Denali, but a gold prospector who liked Representative William McKinley’s stand on silver claimed to have discovered the mountain and named it after the presidential candidate; after his assassination, the memorial name stuck.

In Alaska, the state officially calls the mountain Denali; the U.S. applies that name to the surrounding national park, but still designates the mountain McKinley. That’s because Representative Ralph Regula of Ohio is from the district that McKinley represented, and every two years introduces a bill to reaffirm that name. “It never goes to a vote but is always on the table,” Professor Monmonier notes. “And the U.S. Board on Geographic Names has a policy that if a name is up before Congress, it won’t rule on a name change.” President McKinley, from his celestial front porch, is smiling while Alaskans fume.

Names have political power. I say one way to put the heat on Iran today is to threaten to change the name of the Persian Gulf to the Arabian Gulf.

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David Rieff: The Beginning of the End of the Adventure

Until the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah broke out on July 12, the foreign policy pursued by the Bush administration in its second term was a source of increasing consternation to those who had most fervently supported its aspirations to rid the world of evildoers — that is, the thinkers and policy analysts identified with muscular neoconservatism. Writing in The Weekly Standard, William Kristol, the magazine’s editor, accused the administration of pursuing policies that had allowed North Korea to test missiles with impunity and that had left the regime in Tehran “sitting pretty” — in short, of pursuing a “Clintonian” foreign policy, which is about as severe a condemnation as any upstanding neoconservative can deploy. For her part, Danielle Pletka, a Middle East expert at the American Enterprise Institute, recently told an interviewer, “I don’t have a friend in the administration, on Capitol Hill or in any part of the conservative foreign-policy establishment who is not beside themselves with fury at the administration.”

But Hezbollah’s decision to break the de facto truce that it had maintained since Israel’s withdrawal from southern Lebanon, and the subsequent Israeli onslaught, seems to have halted, at least for now, this maelstrom of criticism from the conservative advocates of a transformational foreign policy. Instead, it appears as if the analysts and pundits grouped around magazines like The Weekly Standard, and on such increasingly influential blogs as Power Line, are doing everything in their rhetorical power to urge the White House to return to the verities of regime change it espoused in the aftermath of 9/11 and settle accounts with the regimes in Syria and Iran that not only are backing Hezbollah, but, in the minds of neoconservatives at least, are also at the root of the problem in Iraq as well. Kristol summarized this position well when he wrote that “while Syria and Iran are enemies of Israel, they are also enemies of the United States.. . .This is our war, too.” He added, controversially, that it was time to strike at Iran’s nuclear facilities. “Why wait?” he demanded.

The idea that America has a special responsibility to combat tyranny around the globe has been a bipartisan assumption at least since the Truman administration. But in recent years, conservatives have been the most ardent proponents of aggressive regime change — witness their support for aiding the Nicaraguan contras and Jonas Savimbi’s Angolan guerrillas in the 1980’s. Today many conservative thinkers regard the Bush doctrine as the reiteration of the Reagan doctrine and take it as their sacred responsibility to promulgate such holy writ. But will their bellicose hopes be dashed in the coming weeks — as, historically, the hopes of the American right in Republican presidents so often have been (consider the Eisenhower administration’s indifference to the Hungarian revolution in 1956, or the right-to-life movement’s disenchantment with Ronald Reagan)?

There is a better-than-even chance that they will be. After all, despite what some of its spokesmen said at the start of the conflict, Israel is looking less and less willing to expend the blood and treasure necessary to deal a mortal blow to Hezbollah. The costs are just too high. America’s U.N. ambassador, John Bolton, may insist publicly that there can be no negotiating with a terrorist organization like Hezbollah, but his boss, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, sent the opposite message when, during her lightning visit to Beirut in late July, she met with Nabih Berri, the Shiite speaker of the Lebanese Parliament and Hezbollah’s unofficial interlocutor with Western governments. It is one thing for President Bush to present Israel’s campaign against Hezbollah as part of the wider global war on terrorism and quite another to open another front in that war when the fate of Iraq hangs in the balance and American commanders are faced with the necessity of committing more troops to what even the U.S. military is now beginning to characterize, rather desperately, as the battle for Baghdad.

Neoconservatives still speak confidently of the moral clarity of America’s agenda in the Middle East, but after more than three years of war in Iraq, this moral clarity is all but gone as far as the American people are concerned: according to a recent New York Times/CBS poll, half of the public thinks that whether we stay in Iraq a few more years makes “no difference” to America’s security. It is highly unlikely that this same public could be persuaded of the urgency of another war in the Middle East, another war on evil that will transform the region for the better. The president’s own party may need persuading as well: anyone doubting this need only look at how many Republican officeholders are putting as much distance as possible between themselves and the war in Iraq as they seek re-election in the fall. Airstrikes against Syria and Iran may be contemplated by both American and Israeli war planners, but a boots-on-the-ground war is a nonstarter for both Jerusalem and Washington, and bombing alone cannot produce regime change.

By allowing Israel to continue its harsh bombing campaign in Lebanon for weeks, the administration could have things both ways: practice a policy of restraint and lend its support to an ambitious scheme for regional transformation. But sooner or later, the U.S. is likely to put its weight behind some sort of compromise and cease-fire. Hawks within the administration may be calling for boldness, but Iraq gave boldness a bad name. That war has exhausted all of us, the Bush administration and the American public alike, and exhaustion breeds caution. There are worse ways to look at the world.

David Rieff is a contributing writer for the magazine.

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Michael Young: Hezbollah's Other War

One evening earlier this summer, Lebanon’s most popular satire show, ‘‘Bas Mat Watan,’’ broadcast a sketch showing an ‘‘interview’’ with Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah’s leader and secretary general. ‘‘Nasrallah’’ was asked whether his party would surrender its weapons. He answered that it would, but first several conditions had to be met: there was that woman in Australia, whose land was being encroached upon by Jewish neighbors; then there was the baker in the United States, whose bakery the Jews wanted to take over. The joke was obvious: there were an infinite number of reasons why Hezbollah would never agree to lay down its weapons and become one political party among others.

But it was the rapid reaction to the satiric sketch that sent the more disquieting message. That very night, angry supporters of Hezbollah closed the airport road with burning tires — a warning that they could block at will the main access point in and out of the country — and marched on mainly Sunni, Druse and Christian quarters in Beirut. In a Christian neighborhood, they clashed with the son of a former president and his comrades, and several youths were taken to hospital.

The leaders of Hezbollah defended these actions, explaining that they were the spontaneous emotional response to the mocking of a cleric. It is just as likely that they were a coordinated effort to intimidate critics. In any case, to me the event seemed an essential one, since it symbolized the duality that has defined Lebanon ever since its civil war came to an end in 1990. The duality was once neatly encapsulated by Walid Jumblatt, the leader of Lebanon’s Druse sect, when he asked, Would Lebanon choose to be Hanoi, circa 1970, or Hong Kong? That is, would it seek to become an international symbol of militancy and armed struggle, particularly against Israel, as represented by Hezbollah, or would it opt for the path laid out by Rafik Hariri, Lebanon’s late prime minister and billionaire developer, who sought to transform his country into a business entrepôt for the region, a bastion of liberal capitalism and ecumenical permissiveness?

In seeking to silence critics of their leader, in momentarily shutting down the airport, Hezbollah struck a blow against Lebanon’s tolerant, if always paradoxical, openness. Once again, it seemed, the Lebanese were suffering the consequences of failing to agree on a common destiny. At the time, the consequences seemed bearable. With the outbreak of the current conflict with Israel, they don’t seem bearable at all.

Lebanon today lies ravaged, its inhabitants suffering the consequences of Hezbollah’s hubris and Israel’s terrible, wanton retribution. Since July 12, when party militants abducted two Israeli soldiers and killed three on the Israeli side of the border, Lebanon has been under a virtually complete Israeli blockade. At the time of writing, nearly 1,000 people have been killed, mostly civilians. Predominantly Shiite areas in the south, Beirut’s southern suburbs and the northern Bekaa Valley have been turned into wastelands; Beirut seems empty. Businesses, when they do open, close early; store owners have cleared out their showrooms. The mood is one of ambient disintegration. Tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of refugees have moved into the capital, even as many of its residents have headed for the mountains. The economy, already precarious before the conflict started, lies in shambles, as does public confidence in the country’s future.

As attention focuses on Israel’s air war and troop movements, there has been less emphasis on the social impact of hundreds of thousands of traumatized Shiites moving into mainly non-Shiite areas. A month into the war, there have been laudable acts of cross-sectarian assistance, with Christian, Sunni and Druse organizations and parties helping refugees in schools and other facilities around the country. Yet there are signs of strain. In an effort to avoid conflicts between Shiite refugees and his own Druse supporters, Walid Jumblatt has allowed the refugees to put up Hezbollah flags and photographs of Nasrallah. The longer the fighting continues, however, the more likely it is that altercations will take place. Israel may have hoped to unite the Lebanese people against Hezbollah and force its government to extend its authority throughout the country. But such unity and such authority are hard to see on the horizon. As recriminations over the war spread, the delivery of aid across group lines will become more difficult, frustration will mount and the sectarian and political divide, already exacerbated by anxiety over Hezbollah's actions and intentions, will only grow.

How long it seems (and yet it is only a year) since the Lebanese were celebrating the Cedar Revolution — or what they always more revealingly called the Independence Intifada. Following the killing of Rafik Hariri in February 2005, it seemed that the Lebanese people were coming together to demand the end of Syrian dominance and the resurrection of their nation’s democracy. In that not so distant past, I had high hopes for the development of a liberal, even libertarian, Lebanon; after all, I reasoned, coexistence, freedom and entrepreneurial drive had been the natural state of the country between independence in 1943 and the start of the civil war in 1975 and even beyond. Maybe I was biased in this regard. My late father was an American, my mother is a Maronite Christian and I spent the first decade of the war living in predominantly Muslim West Beirut, where I came to embrace multiple identities and distrust the exclusivist certitudes of many Lebanese. When I returned to Lebanon in 1992, after several years in the United States, my enduring memories from that earlier time were of a remarkably diverse society that could rebound from its worst calamities, seemingly effortlessly. Many of the clichés were true: a neighborhood firefight might break out between militias in the morning, but by the end of the day people would be repairing their damaged properties. The Lebanese could be infuriatingly anarchic, stupidly selfish, but they were also determined to take initiatives and embrace new departures. This I saw as the essence of the liberal ideal. When the Syrian Army left, I believed, that ideal could at last be fulfilled.

My understanding was a valid one, but in retrospect an incomplete one. The ideals of the Independence Intifada were largely the ideals of an urban middle class — politicians, professionals, journalists and students; mostly Christians and Sunnis but also some Druse — fed up with a vulgar, vampirical Syrian hegemony. But what about that sizable part of Lebanon that had no inclination to see Syria gone?

From the moment of Hariri’s assassination on Feb. 14, 2005, it was clear that the Shiite political parties, particularly Hezbollah, did not share in the national distress surrounding the former prime minister’s death. Certainly, party officials paid their respects to the Hariri family and condemned the crime, but when tens of thousands of Lebanese descended on Martyrs Square in Beirut to bury Hariri, the most obvious question was, Where are the Shiites? Given that Shiites represent perhaps 35 to 40 percent of the Lebanese population, this was no idle question.

Of course, there were Shiites — as individuals. But over the years, Hezbollah had gradually won over a large majority of the community, particularly poorer Shiites, and the party had no wish to assist in Hariri’s elevation from politician to national martyr. It probably sensed as well what many others did at the time — namely that the assassination, blamed by the late prime minister’s allies on the regime of President Bashar al-Assad of Syria, could be used to end Syria’s presence in Lebanon and curb the influence of Syria’s close ally, Hezbollah itself. While other Lebanese saw the prospect of true independence, Hezbollah saw a threat — and this split vision would have grave consequences. Ultimately, a combination of traditional sectarian tensions, audacious political opportunism and the sheer unmovable force of Hezbollah’s state within a state would contribute to defeating the hopes of the Independence Intifada.

Hezbollah’s dependence on Syria and dominance of local Shiite politics were long in the making. In the early 1980’s, the ‘‘Party of God’’ was a loose collection of shady militant groups organized and trained by Iran’s Revolutionary Guard and dedicated to fighting Israel. After vanquishing its Shiite rival, the Amal movement, in fierce street fights, Hezbollah established its headquarters in the southern suburbs of Beirut. When the civil war ended in 1990, with Syria in effective control of the country, it was virtually the only armed group allowed to retain its weapons. The official rationale was that it needed those weapons to continue fighting Israel’s occupation of the south. But Syria had its own reasons to keep Hezbollah armed: as it negotiated with Israel for the return of the Golan Heights, the Assad regime wanted all the military leverage it could get.

Under Syrian tutelage, Hezbollah began to play a role in Lebanon’s political affairs as well. In 1992, Lebanon held its first postwar election, and when Nasrallah chose to participate, the decision created friction within the party, ostensibly because it implied abandoning the goal of creating an Islamic state in Lebanon but also, and more prosaically, because of personal leadership rivalries. Yet the party won an impressive 12 seats, and while it did not enter the government at the time, it firmly anchored itself in Parliament. Making use of the expanded patronage powers at its disposal, it began filling the civil service with supporters, which was a great boon to its often impoverished constituents. The integration of an Islamic militia into the state attracted considerable attention at the time; optimists saw it as a model of how an Islamist party might be ‘‘moderated.’’ In reality, Hezbollah manipulated this process to safeguard its autonomy, even as it expanded its military capabilities under Syria’s approving eye.

Throughout much of the 1990’s, Rafik Hariri, the Sunni billionaire, built up a glittering new Beirut and attracted investors and plaudits from abroad. The Syrians grew wary of Hariri, however, worrying that he moved far too comfortably in the world’s capitals and would one day try to remove Lebanon from their orbit. Hezbollah, the Syrians understood, could serve as a valuable counterweight to Hariri’s ambitions. More cynically, the Syrians realized that Hezbollah’s pariah status in the world community could work to their advantage, for who but Syria could ever hope to bring the violent party under control? To remain relevant in Lebanon and throughout the Middle East, the Syrians helped create a problem that only they could resolve.

But there was more to the Syrian-Shiite alliance than that. Many Shiites were genuinely grateful to Syria for helping them overcome decades of marginalization. The community’s economic and political ascent, and its resistance against Israel, were all encouraged by Syria. You could argue, with some irony, that the Syrians had graciously allowed the Shiites to be their cannon fodder, but for Shiites these events were vital steps in their journey from the periphery of Lebanese political and social life to its very center.

Hezbollah’s crowning moment came in May 2000, when Israeli forces withdrew from Lebanon after a 22-year presence. Refusing to accept the U.N.’s judgment that the withdrawal was complete, Hezbollah vowed to continue its ‘‘resistance.’’ While Hezbollah never quite made clear whether its resistance was ‘‘Lebanese’’ or ‘‘Islamic’’ in spirit (both terms were used interchangeably), this ambiguity went to the heart of the matter. Hezbollah simultaneously represented radical religious militancy and a peculiar sort of Lebanese patriotism, based on an existential struggle against Israel and the convenient ignoring of Syrian domination.

With Hariri’s killing, two Lebanons entered into confrontation. They were distinguished, in large part, by their different visions of the past. One recalled the glories of a cosmopolitan, multiconfessional prewar Lebanon and admired Hariri for seeking to revive those glories. The other one, mainly Shiite, had little such nostalgia: it recalled a prewar, sophisticated, free-market Lebanon that had left them with little worth remembering.

In fact, both of these perceptions were flawed: the pre-1975 country was only partly a Mediterranean pleasure palace; its liveliness and prosperity were centered on a Beirut surrounded by rings of poverty, where the excluded were many. And Shiite misery, while very real, had been recognized in the late 1950’s and early 1960’s, when the state extended its services to the south. It was further alleviated in the 1980’s, and later after Hariri took office in 1992, as Shiite leaders were granted an ample share of the national pie. Any drive around Shiite areas in the last decade would have shown the mark of returning emigrant money in the proliferation of villas, businesses and interests linking Lebanon to communities in Africa, the United States and South America.

Lebanon is a country of simultaneous complex identities, and Hezbollah’s world deftly incorporated paradoxes no less than Hariri’s. The image of a Shiite Lebanon awash in turbans, chadors and prayer beads is a caricature. Secularism and religiousness, wealth and poverty, tradition and modernity, militancy and laid-backedness, Hanoi and Hong Kong — all are present among Shiites, as among other Lebanese communities. Hezbollah’s genius has been to draw from this diversity even as it also seeks to stifle it. It has done so by virtually monopolizing the provision of basic services and patronage jobs to Shiites throughout the country and by convincing its co-religionists that if the party loses political ground, all Shiites lose.

In March 2005, Hezbollah and the rest of Lebanese society faced off in the climactic events of the Independence Intifada. On March 8, as Syrian troops began preparing to leave the country, Hezbollah organized a demonstration in downtown Beirut to ‘‘thank’’ Syria for all its help to Lebanon. Hassan Nasrallah spoke to the assembled masses, followed by an array of lesser pro-Syrian clients.

The Hezbollah-led demonstration was of particular symbolic importance. It was held in Beirut’s rebuilt downtown area, Hariri’s jewel and hitherto the setting for weekly anti-Syrian rallies. In his choice of locale, Nasrallah declared that the downtown area belonged to Shiites as much as to Sunni Muslims, Christians or Druse — the communities leading the opposition to Syria. His supporters pointedly marched under the national flag, reminding their countrymen that Shiites were as Lebanese as anybody else. It was an impressive gathering, with between 200,000 and 400,000 people in attendance.

But Nasrallah had miscalculated. Though there was a smattering of non-Shiites in the crowd, the rally was widely regarded as a sectarian Shiite challenge to the Lebanese independence movement — and this created widespread alarm. One week later, on March 14, the independence movement responded by holding a counterrally. There appeared to be at least three times as many people present on March 14 as on March 8 — Sunnis, Christians and Druse, but also some Shiites, all from the farthest reaches of Lebanon — probably some one million people, with tens of thousands more languishing on blocked access roads to Beirut. In a country of only four million, it was an extraordinarily large gathering. The ‘‘March 14 coalition,’’ as it would come to be known, embodied the idea of coexistence and promised a new beginning.

Or did it? While the March 14 rally was interpreted by many as the defining moment of a new, multisectarian Lebanon, while it was an unforgettable experience for those who attended — and I was there — it also emerged from the viscera of Lebanese sectarianism. Anger against Syria, sorrow over Hariri’s murder and the hope for a free Lebanon all contributed to March 14, but so, too, did revulsion at the image of hundreds of thousands of poor Shiites descending on Beirut’s pot of gold, its downtown area, that receptacle of mainly urban Sunni and Christian achievement. The hinterland had laid claim to the wealth of the capital, and it had done so in the name of a Syrian regime that was also a product of the hinterland. The reflex of Lebanon’s elites and middle class — those who prided themselves on their openness — was to close the door.

Hezbollah, for its part, had much the same reflex. The Lebanese majority, you might think, had spoken. But that night, Hezbollah’s television station, Al Manar, presented the demonstration in the narrowest of sectarian terms: as a resurrection of the right-wing Christian politics of the civil-war era. Viewers were shown images from the march suggesting that a onetime Christian militia, the Lebanese Forces, was staging a comeback. The implication was that collaborators with Israel were at the forefront of the movement. It was pure demagoguery, since the Lebanese Forces had much earlier broken with Israel. But the station’s intent was to sound a persistent Hezbollah trope: those who opposed Syria were really acting on behalf of the United States and Israel — and this was no time for subtlety.

There was something inherently unstable in this situation. On the one hand, the Christians, Sunnis and Druse who (rightly or wrongly) regarded themselves as defenders of Lebanese tolerance and liberalism were animated in part by their own prejudices. On the other hand, the Shiite community was expressing its form of Lebanese patriotism through an implicit reaffirmation of autocratic Syrian rule. Who could untwine such contradictions? The great Lebanese journalist George Naccache once observed that ‘‘two negations do not make a nation’’; he was describing how Lebanon’s Christians and Sunnis had built the newly independent Lebanese state in 1943 on a strange compromise: the Christians would not look to join the West, and the Muslims would not seek to become part of a wider Arab nation. His words remained relevant: if March 8 and March 14 were both founded on negations, the prospects for a united Lebanon were dim.

It was widely hoped that the elections scheduled for May and June 2005 would put Lebanon’s new freedom on a more stable footing. But political maneuverings leading up to the vote soon dashed this hope. Lebanon’s famously complex political system is founded on sectarianism: in an effort to guarantee a voice to every religious group, political offices and parliamentary seats have been apportioned to different sects, depending on their size, ever since independence. The result is a system that requires consensus — even as it also hardens social divisions and encourages bizarre alliances and deals among bitter foes. It should be little surprise, then, that the very elections that were supposed to confirm the end of Syrian rule by handing political power over to the majority of March 14 also ended up tearing that majority apart.

The March 14 coalition was made up of a disparate array of parties, led by the largely Sunni Future Movement of Saad Hariri, the son and political heir of the late prime minister. It also included Walid Jumblatt’s Druse-Christian bloc and a collection of Christian and secular parties. Aligned against the coalition were Hezbollah and the other pro-Syrian Shiite party, Amal, and a flotilla of smaller pro-Syrian groups. For a time, at least, it appeared that the pro- and anti-Syrian factions would face off against each other in a clear contest.

But in Lebanon things are rarely that simple. When Gen. Michel Aoun, a Christian populist and former prime minister, returned from exile in France in May 2005, the March 14 coalition was wary of his intentions: Did he wish to join the movement or take it over — or perhaps wreck it? Aoun was popular in Lebanon’s Christian strongholds and had impeccable anti-Syrian credentials: he had battled the Syrian Army in the final days of the civil war. But his sweeping denunciations of the country’s elites and his apparent willingness to hasten his return by making deals with pro-Syrian politicians, and probably the Syrian regime itself, gave the March 14 leaders pause.

At this point, the volatility of Lebanon’s politicians and the complexity of its political system gave Hezbollah a crucial opportunity. Walid Jumblatt, the Druse leader, was concerned that Aoun’s candidates would take seats away from him in one of two districts the Druse leader considers his reserved constituencies. A cunning, contrapuntal politician, Jumblatt has always advanced his interests through triangulation — working both sides of an issue until one emerges stronger and he can capitalize on it. That is why it was jarring, but not surprising, to see him reach out to Hezbollah and Amal in late March 2005. Jumblatt needed Hezbollah’s votes to overcome the Aounist challenge, and to make sure he got them, he engineered a deal. A new electoral law would protect Hezbollah’s representation in Parliament. In return, Hezbollah would instruct its constituents to vote for Jumblatt’s candidates. The Druse leader forced the inexperienced Hariri to go along with an effort designed to marginalize Aoun and create three large blocs in Parliament: a Jumblatt bloc, a Hariri bloc and a joint Hezbollah and Amal bloc.

I later asked Jumblatt why he had conducted this maneuver. He answered that he hoped to bring Hezbollah into the national consensus in a post-Syria Lebanon and to bargain with it from a position of strength. That was disingenuous. The fractured Lebanese system invites expediency, but also destructiveness. Through his efforts, the Druse leader infuriated the Maronite Christians, notably their patriarch, Nasrallah Boutros Sfeir, Syria's most stalwart and courageous opponent. The community felt betrayed. It had endured the most political isolation during the Syrian years, and it had taken to the streets after Hariri’s death more actively than the initially timorous Sunnis. What it got was a Parliament that made most Christian candidates effectively dependent for their seats on the whims of Hariri, Jumblatt and the Shiite parties. Many Maronites saw this as a denial of their place in Lebanon’s new equation.

In the end, Jumblatt’s maneuver worked: he, Hariri and their Christian allies were able to assemble a parliamentary majority true to the spirit of the March 14 movement and, by consequence, a cabinet majority. But Hezbollah and Amal also had a large bloc, and following Lebanon’s customs of consensus-based governance, they were invited to join the cabinet. The opposition was led by Aoun; in a masterful electoral swerve of his own, the onetime anti-Syrian firebrand had allied himself with various pro-Syrian politicians and acquired their votes. Thus, in only a matter of weeks, the dizzying duplicity of Lebanese politics had swept all concord away, and the idealists of the Independence Intifada either found themselves standing against their former comrades or too disgusted to trust the political class.

It was to the credit of the new prime minister, Fouad Siniora, one of Rafik Hariri’s closest collaborators, that he tried to chart a way through this wilderness of mirrors. Siniora’s job was not an easy one. His first priority was to help the United Nations begin its investigation of Hariri’s assassination. Given the high probability of Syrian involvement, he knew Lebanon would face a reaction from the worried men in Damascus and also from their Hezbollah allies in Lebanon. As anti-Syrian politicians and journalists were marked for assassination throughout the year and a series of bomb explosions tore through Christian areas, these fears seemed justified.

Meanwhile, Siniora also had to handle relations with Hezbollah. Five of the ministers in his cabinet were Shiites, either members of Hezbollah and Amal or named by them. Members of the parliamentary majority affirmed their desire to see Hezbollah integrated into the armed forces and to see the state regain control over all the national territory — meaning Hezbollah must no longer rule over the border with Israel. But desiring Hezbollah’s disarmament was one thing; achieving it, another. When it came to such matters, the parliamentary majority was reluctant to act like a majority. Hariri was especially diffident, probably because his Saudi sponsors advised him to avoid precipitating any Sunni-Shiite showdown that might boomerang in the kingdom. But the chief obstacle, of course, was Hezbollah itself. The militia realized that without its weapons, it would lose its reason to exist as a militant movement, lose its élan and lose its value to Syria — as well as its ties to its main financier and advocate, Iran.

It did not take very long before the rift between Hezbollah’s supporters and detractors was reflected in the cabinet. The most divisive episode came late last year, when the government majority sought to approve a mixed Lebanese-international court to try the suspects in the Hariri assassination. The Shiite ministers refused to go along, arguing that the move was premature. The majority saw this as a ploy to protect Syria at a time when Nasrallah was publicly reaffirming his alliance with the Assad regime. On Dec. 12, in the tense hours following the assassination of the prominent anti-Syrian journalist Gebran Tueni, the government broke the deadlock by voting to approve a mixed tribunal. This was constitutionally defensible, but the Shiite ministers claimed it broke the rule that all important decisions must be made by consensus. They walked out of the government but did not resign. Hezbollah was not about to lose the convenient cover of legitimacy provided by participation in the cabinet, but it had every intention of gumming up the system so that the cabinet majority would not act as a majority again.

For all its efforts, Siniora’s government became less and less able to govern. Early this year, Nabih Berri, the speaker of Parliament, proposed a ‘‘national dialogue’’ of leading politicians to address the most divisive issues — like the fate of Hezbollah’s weapons. But little came of this. In the dialogue, Nasrallah would make concessions and then invariably step back from implementing them. The final straw was the July 12 abduction of the Israelis. For most of the ministers in the government, the operation was nothing less than a coup, a brazen effort to show that the majority had no control over so basic a matter as a declaration of war.

Several months ago, I began participating in a series of informal discussions with orphans of this wretched state of affairs. Our group is heavy on southern Lebanese, both Shiites and Christians, and its very modest ambition is to create a forum for exchanges between individuals unable to identify with any of the major blocs in Parliament. For the Shiites in the group, there is a pressing desire to loosen Hezbollah’s grip on their community. Several come from the 1970’s left, but that is by no means the rule. The organizer of the group is a journalist who was close to Hezbollah a decade ago, having been the host of a program on Al Manar, the Hezbollah television channel, while another, also a journalist, hails from a prominent southern religious family.

Endeavors like these are worthy because their starting point is the assumption that Lebanon really must be governed through mutual concessions and dialogue. Amid the general sectarianism, this may sound absurd. The ideal of Lebanon as a mosaic of separate but collaborating communities has been shattered so many times that it is difficult even to know what collaboration might mean. But it is also true that grounds for hope exist. Over the past half-century, the once-marginalized Shiites have steadily integrated themselves into Lebanese politics and society. While Shiites today largely accept Hezbollah’s claim to be their representative and protector, in the future new forms of Shiite politics and expression may emerge — must emerge.

And yet the current war is pushing the country in precisely the opposite direction. The great fear expressed by many Lebanese is that the country can absorb neither a Hezbollah victory against Israel nor a Hezbollah defeat. If Hezbollah merely survives as both a political and military organization, it can claim victory. The result may be the expansion of the party’s authority over the political system, thanks to its weaponry and its considerable sway over the Lebanese Army, which has a substantial Shiite base. This, in turn, might lead to a solidification of Iranian influence and the restoration of Syrian influence. A Hezbollah defeat, in turn, would be felt by Shiites as a defeat for their community in general, significantly destabilizing the system.

As the violence continues, retribution is in the air. Israel has focused its attacks on Shiites, leaving Sunni, Christian and Druse areas (though not their long-term welfare) relatively intact. Amid all the destruction, many a representative of the March 14 movement has denounced Hezbollah’s ‘‘adventurism,’’ provoking Shiite resentment. As one Hezbollah combatant recently told The Guardian: ‘‘The real battle is after the end of this war. We will have to settle score with the Lebanese politicians. We also have the best security and intelligence apparatus in this country, and we can reach any of those people who are speaking against us now. Let’s finish with the Israelis, and then we will settle scores later.’’

This essentially repeated what Hassan Nasrallah told Al Jazeera in an interview broadcast a week after the conflict began: ‘‘If we succeed in achieving the victory . . . we will never forget all those who supported us at this stage. . . . As for those who sinned against us . . . those who made mistakes, those who let us down and those who conspired against us . . . this will be left for a day to settle accounts. We might be tolerant with them, and we might not.’’

Meanwhile, the country has sunk into deep depression, and countless Lebanese with the means to emigrate are thinking of doing so. The offspring of March 8 and March 14 are in the same boat, and yet still remain very much apart. The fault lines from the days of the Independence Intifada have hardened under Israel’s bombs. Given the present balance of forces, it is difficult to conceive of a resolution to the present fighting that would both satisfy the majority’s desire to disarm Hezbollah and satisfy Hezbollah’s resolve to defend Shiite gains and remain in the vanguard of the struggle against Israel. Something must give, and until the parliamentary majority and Hezbollah can reach a common vision of what Lebanon must become, the rot will set in further.

In his Al Jazeera comments, Nasrallah made it clear that the imperatives of ‘‘resistance’’ still trumped those of conciliation. But he sounded a little more conciliatory in a subsequent speech on Al Manar, when he emphasized that Hezbollah was struggling on behalf of all Lebanese. With hundreds of thousands of his brethren displaced from their homes, with Lebanon already facing an estimated $2.5 billion in direct losses, with Hezbollah having alienated many of its countrymen, even as it has fired off its prize weapons in a war of little benefit, maybe Nasrallah saw something he hadn't earlier: that his party may not always be the only party to hold the weapons. Faced with his intransigence, unable to peacefully settle their differences with Hezbollah, Lebanon’s other communities will likely rearm. The result may be a return to civil war. And if that happens, nothing will put Lebanon — let alone liberal Lebanon — back together again.

Michael Young is the opinion editor of The Daily Star, an English-language newspaper published in Beirut, and a contributing editor at Reason magazine.

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Marion McKeone: Learning American

Some time ago, my sister spent several months working as an au pair for a wealthy family in Denver. When introducing her to their friends and relatives, the family would pointedly refer to her as “our Irish nanny.” My sister assumed that her nationality was a point of pride; a genealogy snake-oil salesman had just sold them an Irish ancestor for the price of a small country.

As it transpired, it was more of a red flag signaling that verbal roadworks were in progress — she hadn’t yet learned to speak American.

Her first lesson came on Christmas morning. The grandmother and family matriarch handed her an envelope, observing that rather than intervene with her own Midwestern fashion sensibility, it was better to enable my sister’s weird European taste. My sister, who was making the standard $50-a-week au pair’s pittance, opened the envelope and found it thick with $20 bills. Fifty of them, to be precise. “Oh, no,” she protested. “I can’t accept this. No. No, really. It’s far too generous.”

Grandma looked at her quizzically. “If you say so,” she responded. Without further ado, she repossessed the envelope, removed a single $20 bill and handed it to her instead. “Is this about right?” she asked.

Helene swallowed her bile, bit her tongue and nodded mutely as she uttered silent curses. She had been speaking Irish, and Grandma had been speaking American. My sister’s refusal of the money was meant to convey her gratitude and acceptance of the gift. You might think a simple “Thank you” would have done the job a lot more efficiently.

But we Irish just can’t say yes. Or no. It’s not in our genes. In Irish Gaelic, our native tongue, we don’t even have a word for them. The closest is “Is ea,” which means “It is so.” And “Ni hea,” which means “It is not so.” There are, however, about 50 different approximations that indicate various degrees of equivocation.

Our genetic inability to call a spade a spade and our compulsion to say no when we mean yes, and vice versa, are but surface manifestations of a deeply ingrained reflex to subvert, invert and pervert the English language at every opportunity.

In Ireland, the words must fit the rhythm, often at the expense of logic or clarity. Irish Gaelic has its roots in the ancient Goidelic of the Celts. English comes from the Germanic. We may be geographic neighbors, but when it comes to linguistic traits, we’re poles apart.

The great voices of Irish literature possess a unique ability to adapt to the uncomfortable imposition of the Queen’s English on the Irish rhythm while remaining faithful to the ancient traditions of narrative and storytelling. When J.M. Synge was asked about the source for “The Playboy of the Western World,” he is said to have replied, “I never bother whether my plots are typical Irish or not, but my methods are typical.”

This remains true of contemporary Irish writers. Colum McCann, a New York-based Irish novelist, is a case in point. His novel “Dancer” is a fictionalized biography of Rudolf Nureyev. The plot is one that couldn’t have taken place in an Irish context — an Irishman on a dance floor resembles nothing so much as an epileptic sack of suet — but McCann’s narrative is firmly rooted in the Irish storytelling tradition. “The Irish language is convoluted in its grammar, evasive in statement and relies much more on sound, rhythm and onomatopoeia than English does,” he says. “It ducks and swerves. The forced marriage of English to Irish, resulting in what some people call Hiberno-English, has resulted in a great deal of wonderful literature but also a lot of head-scratching.”

For Americans, the shortest distance between two points is a straight line. The idea is to get the point across, not fashion it into a pair of earrings. But we Irish are more interested in the journey than the destination, and every exchange presents an opportunity to dawdle, double back and doublespeak.

The liberal, and frequently illogical, peppering of conversations with swearwords by Irish writers is more a method of retaining a rhythmic pattern of speech than an expression of hostility. Shane MacGowan, founder and frontman of the Pogues and arguably the finest songwriter of his generation, colors his lyrics blue because it reflects the Irish way of speaking, of emphasis and underscoring a point. And besides, he says, “they plug the rhythmic gaps.” Nothing like a volley of expletives to ensure that the beat goes on. If you need any further illustration of this point, see “The Lieutenant of Inishmore” or any other play by Martin McDonagh.

MacGowan says that this Irish adaptation of English to its own ends stems as much from an innate rebelliousness as our inability to shake off the persistent rhythms of Irish Gaelic. We resisted the usurping of our native language and its replacement with English by confounding our oppressor with a form of linguistic jujitsu, he says, citing James Joyce’s “Finnegans Wake” as an example: “Joyce was simply taking the inner Irish rhythm to the limit and imposing it on the English language. There were all these mad English language rules that don’t work anyway. The entire book is about pointing out the absurdity of the English language.”

Having grown up in a culture of ambivalence and allusion, I was initially astounded by the staccato, rapid-fire directness of American English. During my first visit to New York, I underwent the standard crash course in learning American. For weeks I navigated the potentially treacherous linguistic minefields. And there were plenty. Hasty clarifications — like “craic,” an Irish term for fun, but not of the variety you buy on a street corner — became less frequent. I thought I had cracked the American language.

Until I made a routine attempt to jaywalk across Fifth Avenue. I was frozen into a state of temporary paralysis by a New York cop who, having blocked my path with a beefy forearm, bellowed, inches from my face: “Whassamatterwitchya? Ya wanna be road pizza, ya [expletive] MORON?” Having achieved his laudable aim of saving my hide, he broke into an enormous grin. “I’m Irish-American,” he said, by way of explanation for the explosive consequences that occur when Irish riddlespeak collides head-on with American directness.

Marion McKeone is an Irish journalist based in New York.

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Noah Fdelman: Ballots and Bullets

When Hamas and then Hezbollah kidnapped Israeli soldiers a few weeks ago, the Israeli government could have held its fire and avoided a major confrontation in which dozens of Israelis — and many more Palestinians and Lebanese — have died. There might have been a strategic rationale for such a policy, since starving kidnappers of attention may be the best way to deter them. But Israel's leaders could not consider this option: they are responsible to an electorate that will tolerate war deaths but will not tolerate the neglect of kidnapped soldiers.

In the past, Israel was the only democracy in the region, and its enemies, whether autocratic states or free-floating terrorist groups, were not similarly accountable to a voting public. This time, however, things are different. With the Iraq war, the United States introduced to the Middle East a bold new policy of democratization by destabilization. That policy encouraged elections in Lebanon and Palestine, opening the door to entities like Hezbollah and Hamas that are now experimenting with a potent cocktail of electoral politics, radical Islamist ideology and violence. Destabilizing the old order really has changed the rules of the game. We are now witnessing the most serious regional test so far to the wisdom of starting down this uncertain path.

The most important new feature of the present situation is the strange hybrid character shared by Hamas and Hezbollah: both are simultaneously militias and democratically elected political parties participating in government. In the case of Hamas, which won the Palestinian elections in January, the political wing may not be able to control the military wing, yet the party maintains a basic unity of purpose. Hezbollah, for its part, does not hold a majority in the Lebanese Parliament, but its elected leaders participate in the Lebanese government, whose democratic credentials have been cited by the Bush administration as a sign of progress in that troubled country.

The dual political and military structures of Hamas and Hezbollah are not unique. In Iraq, both the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq and Moktada al-Sadr's movement play major roles in the elected government while maintaining counterpart militias that they have been unwilling to disband. The model of Islamist organizations that combine electoral politics with paramilitary tactics is fast becoming the calling card of the new wave of Arab democratization.

The fact that Hamas and Hezbollah pursue democratic legitimacy within the state while also employing violence on their own marks a watershed in Middle Eastern politics. For one thing, the boundary between state and nonstate violence has essentially been erased. Has the Palestinian government demanded an exchange of prisoners with Israel, or has the Hamas militia? Israel has been acting as if it were at war with Lebanon — its targets have included a Lebanese Air Force base and Beirut's international airport - but Hezbollah began the hostilities, not the Lebanese government.

More important still, the fact that Hamas and Hezbollah owe much of their present standing to elections calls into question the viability of Middle Eastern democracy as a peaceful practice. In choosing these Islamists, Palestinians and Lebanese Shiites were in effect endorsing not only their political aims but also their commitment to violence, which was never hidden during their campaigns. (The same is true, to a lesser degree, of voters in Iraq who opted for the Shiite alliance.) It was possible that once in power, the politicians at the helm of Hamas and Hezbollah would distance themselves from violence or at least refrain from initiating it. That would have been a reasonable strategy if they wanted to persuade the voters that they could actually govern and use the resources of the state to improve their constituents' lives. We now know definitively that the leaders have rejected this path.
II.

How will the constituencies that support Hamas and Hezbollah react, over time, to kidnappings and rocket attacks that were calculated, it would seem, to provoke Israeli military reprisals? The elected Islamists are gambling that popular anger at Israel, apparent in the streets of Gaza and southern Lebanon in the first weeks of battle, will translate into redoubled enthusiasm for Islamist intransigence and rejectionism. This has sometimes worked for both Hamas and Hezbollah in the past. Both groups came to power in part because they were perceived as the only local actors willing to fight Israel head-on.

For its part, Israel is gambling that the right strategy is to make the people who elected Hamas and a government that includes Hezbollah reckon the costs of their representatives' recklessness. That is why Israel has targeted not only Hezbollah leaders and strongholds but has also bombed infrastructure that sustains daily life for everybody in Lebanon. From Israel's standpoint, this is no longer a fight with nonstate terrorists who are holding their fellow citizens hostage to their tactics. It is, rather, war between Israel and countries that are pursuing (or tolerating) violent policies endorsed (or at least accepted) by their electorates.

Israel withdrew from southern Lebanon in 2000 and from Gaza last year on the theory that disengagement would lead to fewer attacks on it, not more. Right-wing Israelis argued that withdrawal rewarded Islamist violence and that rockets would soon be fired into Israel from the very areas being vacated. Now those critics claim to have been vindicated. The reply of the centrist Israeli government — elected on the promise that it would unilaterally withdraw from the West Bank too — is to insist that in the long run Hamas and Hezbollah can be deterred like Israel's other Arab enemies. The route to deterrence, claims the government, is to degrade the capabilities of Hamas and Hezbollah and in the process inflict on Gaza and Lebanon the punishment of defeat in war — the same approach that eventually led the major Arab powers to stop attacking Israel a generation ago.

The catch for Israel is that, taken too far, the strategy of making all Palestinians and all Lebanese pay for the actions of Hamas and Hezbollah may well backfire. Destroying the economic prosperity that had begun to return to Lebanon is likely to generate fresh hatred of Israel, and Palestinians under the gun have in recent years tended to become more radicalized, not less. Provided that democratic institutions in Palestine and Lebanon remain intact, the long-term success of Israel's campaign will probably depend on how the Palestinian and Lebanese electorates evaluate all that has happened. They will be doing so against the backdrop of deeply conflicted feelings: Hamas and Hezbollah may have sparked this round of fighting, but the bombs raining down on their cities and the soldiers in their bases still come from Israel, and no one likes to be bombed.

Democracy means that you cannot blame someone else for troubles caused by your own government. That is a comparatively new lesson in the region, and whether it is learned or not will determine the prospects for democracy itself there. But dodging missiles and running from tanks is not the ideal circumstance for rational reflection on the nature of self-rule. As in Iraq, what is especially risky and worrisome about democratization through destabilization is that it comes accompanied not by peace but by the sword. In this dangerous environment, the costs of democracy — the weakness of government, the uncertainty, the violence — can be felt everywhere. The benefits of democracy, though, are barely palpable.
III.

Although elections in Lebanon and the Palestinian territories owe much to America's democracy agenda, the Bush administration has, from the start, generally taken a hands-off approach to the region once known as the Levant. This is in part a function of limited capacity. Officials who have been focused since 9/11 on Afghanistan, and then on Iraq, cannot spare the time or attention to supervise the ins and outs of Israel's dealings with the Palestinians or with Lebanon. It also reflects the fact that the Bush administration — mindful of President Clinton's ultimate failure at Camp David — is wary of squandering its credibility on an ever-elusive peace deal. But it results, too, from a shift in perspective created by the Iraq-driven nature of the democratization policy itself. This has led the administration to see developments outside the Persian Gulf as democratic aftershocks of Saddam Hussein's removal — and to believe it best to stand aside and let destabilization and the democratic spirit do their slow work.

Lebanon, in particular, has been treated by the Bush administration as a success of democratization. In a sense it has been one. Mass demonstrations, largely free of violence (including several organized by Hezbollah), set the tone for domestic Lebanese politics in the wake of last year's assassination of Rafiq Hariri, the former prime minister. These protests would have been hard to imagine without the American commitment to democratization in Iraq. For once acting with European allies, the Bush administration was able to respond by pressuring Syria to reduce its involvement in the country. The only difficulty was that once elections were held, Hezbollah took on a substantial role in the governance of the country while retaining its close ties to Syria and Iran. Until this latest crisis, the American attitude toward this problem was to leave it alone.

In Israel and the Palestinian territories, a hands-off strategy appeared to be working. Successful elections following the death of Yasir Arafat, coupled with the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, made it seem that the permissive approach was the right one. Until Hamas's election victory this January, it even seemed conceivable that democratization might eventually create a Palestinian government capable of saying yes to Israeli peace overtures and delivering Palestinian popular support for an eventual deal.

The sudden explosion of Israel's fronts with Gaza and Lebanon represents a major challenge to the Bush administration's detachment. Leaders and political observers in the region instinctively expect the Bush administration to respond to the crisis the way earlier administrations dealt with previous crises — namely, by becoming deeply involved and trying not merely to halt the violence temporarily but also to guide the parties toward a comprehensive solution. Among some in the region, you can almost sense a nostalgic yearning to become once again the center of attention for American foreign policy.

How the United States responds to this latest crisis will therefore set an important historical precedent: has Iraq once and for all displaced Israel and its neighbors as the focal point of American interest and attention in the broader Middle East? Should the Bush administration limit its involvement to stanching the bloodshed in the short term and then disengage from serious negotiations, it would be a sign that we really have shifted the focus of our regional policy away from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict — a shift that may last a quarter-century. (It could take at least that long for the United States to come to terms with its involvement in Iraq — win, lose or draw.)

Letting relations between Israel and its neighbors develop on their own, without our stage management, would suggest that the Bush administration is taking seriously its own argument that democratization is a messy, long-term business that must run its course, unimpeded. According to this claim, the regional destabilization that followed the Iraq invasion is just the cost of democracy. The new wave of violence is one storm center in that destabilized atmospheric system. If the strategy of democratization remains in place, other storms will form — and they, too, will have to be weathered.
IV.

Of course, even if President Bush did take on the task of negotiating something more than a stopgap to the bombing, American diplomats would face a more difficult challenge than their predecessors ever did. In the past, crises involving Israel were addressed by dealing with the regional Arab powers, Syria, Saudi Arabia and Egypt, all of which exerted influence of different kinds on the actors. Today, however, Iran has become the predominant external influence on Hezbollah, and perhaps even on Hamas. And American leverage over Iran, never very significant since the Iranian revolution, is today at its lowest ebb in years in the wake of the U.S. involvement in Iraq and the election of the populist anti-American Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

The point is not that Iran necessarily gave a direct order to either Hamas or Hezbollah to initiate a new round of hostilities by kidnapping Israeli soldiers. No direct evidence of any such order has been made public, and the complex internal workings of Hamas — which moved first — are not particularly susceptible to such a chain of command. Rather, Iran clearly gains by the mess that has emerged, and both Hamas and Hezbollah know that serving Iranian interests is sure to result in continued, active support from Tehran.

The main issue for Iran is, of course, the threat of American intervention against its growing nuclear capacity. Iran's primary foreign-policy goal is therefore to deter the United States through the threat of repercussions. One potential arena is Iraq, where U.S. troops can barely handle the Sunni-led insurgency and would face the danger of being overwhelmed if there were serious attacks on them from either Shiite militias financed by Iran or Iranian irregulars. But Iran has more tricks up its sleeve. The attacks on Israel not only harm America's closest regional ally, but, by generating an expanding circle of violence, also substantially destabilize the region. It is as if the Iranians were saying to the United States, ''You have your strategy of creative destabilization, and we have ours.''

Iran's support for Hamas and Hezbollah is already being cited as evidence by those who want the United States to intervene directly against Iran. If their argument prevails, then Israel's little wars with Hamas and Hezbollah will turn out to have been a pair of proxy wars leading to the big one right around the corner. In Lebanon in the 1980's, Israel and Syria fought such a proxy war on behalf of the United States and the Soviet Union respectively. That it remained a proxy war is something for which we can be grateful.

But the cold-war days of balanced powers are behind us now. Faced with the threat of terror, the remaining superpower chose to unleash at once the forces of freedom and instability. From Baghdad to Beirut, Gaza City, Haifa and beyond, the consequences are beginning to be realized. We are in the world of asymmetry, of democratically legitimated militias and armed bands that fight wars with powerful states. Democracy can no longer be seen as an end in itself, and the fate of peoples lies in their own hands.

Noah Feldman, a contributing writer for the magazine, is a law professor at New York University and adjunct senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.

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