U.S. Embrace Can Be Fatal to Arabs

U.S. Embrace Can Be Fatal to Arabs: "That outpouring of support has left Jumblatt and other opposition leaders scrambling to woo Hezbollah � something that hardly pleases the American government, which views the guerrilla movement and political party as a terrorist organization. The counterdemonstration also backed the Americans into a corner and led the Bush administration recently to signal that it would not oppose Hezbollah's continued participation in Lebanese parliamentary politics, even as it unconvincingly insisted that its position hadn't changed. As with Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani in Iraq, the American government was forced to soften its opposition to Islamist participation � to bend to Arab reality.

In the days after the Hezbollah demonstration, yet another rally was held � a counter-counterdemonstration of sorts, organized by the opposition � in which the Lebanese people bravely restated their desire for full sovereignty. It drew even more people than the Hezbollah rally had, and even some Shiites participated.

But what the Lebanese example reveals is not, as Wolfowitz would have you think, the influence of American hard power, but rather its destructive effect on American soft power. It was Rafik Hariri's assassination, not the Iraq war, that gave the Lebanese the courage to say 'enough is enough' to the Syrians. The excessive use of American military force has not only eroded our tarnished reputation in the Arab and Muslim world, it has made our support even more of a liability for groups like the Lebanese opposition seeking an end to Syrian domination.

As a result, the groups most likely to benefit from democratization, especially if it is pursued precipitously, are those that are the best organized and with the strongest claims to 'authenticity.' In a world where the "