A Region’s Unrest Scrambles U.S. Foreign Policy

WASHINGTON — As the Obama administration confronts the spectacle of angry protesters and baton-wielding riot police officers from Tunisia to Egypt to Lebanon, it is groping for a plan to deal with an always-vexing region that is now suddenly spinning in dangerous directions.

In Egypt, where a staunch ally, President Hosni Mubarak, faced the fiercest protests in years on Tuesday, and Lebanon, where a Hezbollah-backed government is taking shape, the administration is grappling with volatile, potentially hostile forces that have already realigned the region’s political landscape.

These were surprising turns. But even the administration’s signature project in the region — Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations — became even more intractable this week, with the publication of confidential documents detailing Palestinian concessions offered in talks with Israel. The disclosure makes it less likely that the Palestinians will agree to any further concessions.

In interviews in recent days, officials acknowledged that the United States had limited influence over many actors in the region, and that the upheaval in Egypt, in particular, could scramble its foreign-policy agenda.

So it is proceeding gingerly, balancing the democratic aspirations of young Arabs with cold-eyed strategic and commercial interests. That sometimes involves supporting autocratic and unpopular governments — which has turned many of those young people against the United States.

President Obama called Mr. Mubarak last week, after the uprising in Tunisia, to talk about joint projects like the Middle East peace process, even as he emphasized the need to meet the democratic aspirations of the Tunisian protesters.

Mr. Obama repeated this point during his State of the Union address on Tuesday, saying, “Tonight, let us be clear: the United States of America stands with the people of Tunisia, and supports the democratic aspirations of all people,” a reference, a White House official said, to the protesters in Egypt.

The White House warned Hezbollah against coercion and intimidation, and officials said the United States might go as far as pulling hundreds of millions of dollars of aid from Lebanon. The administration sent a senior diplomat, Jeffrey D. Feltman, to Tunisia to express support for pro-democracy forces as they prepared for elections after the ouster of President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali.

While there are important differences between North Africa and Lebanon, the two situations pose similar challenges.

Some analysts argue that the United States should seize on Tunisia to advance democracy across the Middle East — reprising the “freedom agenda” of the Bush administration and providing Mr. Obama a rare opportunity to deliver on pledges to build bridges to the Muslim world.

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton came closest to doing that in Qatar two weeks ago, when she bluntly criticized Arab leaders for their autocratic ways, a mere 24 hours before Mr. Ben Ali was driven from office. But Mrs. Clinton’s speech does not augur a return to the Bush approach, officials said.

For one thing, clamoring for democracy did not work so well for President George W. Bush, administration officials said. More important, a wave of upheaval could uproot valuable allies. An uprising in Tunisia, a peripheral player in the region, is not the same as one in Egypt, a linchpin. The Egyptian government is a crucial ally to Washington, but the population is very suspicious of American motives, and the potential for Islamic extremism lurks. “These countries are going to go at a different pace,” said Daniel B. Shapiro, a senior Middle East adviser on the National Security Council. “One couldn’t, or shouldn’t try, to come up with a cookie-cutter ideal of how to approach it.”

The administration has tried to balance its ties to Mr. Mubarak with expressions of concern about rigged elections and jailed dissidents in his country. But it may find it harder to avoid singling him out if the crowds keep building in Cairo, as separate statements of concern about the protests in Egypt, released by the White House and State Department late Tuesday, suggested.

“The challenge for the administration is to find the right balance between identifying the U.S. too closely with these changes, and thereby undermining them; and not finding ways to nurture them enough,” said Aaron David Miller, a public policy fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.

“They don’t yet know how to do that,” he said.

Some critics say the administration erred by putting the peace process at the center of its strategy for the region, overlooking a restive Arab population. “They put U.S.-Egyptian relations within the prism of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,” said Elliott Abrams, a Middle East adviser in the Bush administration. “But what happens in Egypt originates in Egypt.”

Mr. Obama came into office determined to play down the Bush administration’s Iraq-centered “freedom agenda,” the very public push for democratic change. In his speech to the Islamic world in Cairo in June 2009, Mr. Obama said each country should chart its own path to democracy and rejected military intervention as a way to accelerate the process.

Instead, the administration has worked with pro-democracy groups to advocate for freer media and assembly. It has pushed for outside monitors to scrutinize elections in Jordan and Egypt. And it has encouraged social networks like Twitter and Facebook to spread the word about pro-democracy movements — the very networks that helped spread word of demonstrations in Tunisia and Egypt.

“In giving us guidance as we develop our policies in the region, the president was adamant that we take stock of the brittleness and hidden risks of the status quo,” said Samantha Power, a senior director at the National Security Council who handles human rights issues.

But critics say bottom-up efforts have failed to open up political space in Arab countries. Despite the push for monitors in Egypt, its recent parliamentary elections were judged less honest than elections in 2005. Steven Heydemann, a vice president at the United States Institute of Peace, argued in a blog post this week that the time had come for the United States to confront Arab leaders more forcefully, demanding that they repeal emergency laws and scrap state security courts, which they use to exercise arbitrary power.

Administration officials said they pressed Mr. Mubarak repeatedly not to reinstate Egypt’s emergency law, which has been in place since 1981. He did so anyway, but officials said he released virtually all the political prisoners that were on a list compiled by Human Rights Watch. In his call with Mr. Mubarak, Mr. Obama also linked the bombing of a Coptic Christian church to the rights of religious minorities.

Still, critics say the pressure has been mostly in private, which does little to build support among impatient young Arabs. Some analysts say the big question is whether the administration should seize on Tunisia as a lever to push for change elsewhere.

“If Tunisia works out, that could be much more of an inspiration to Arab countries than Iraq ever was,” said Steven A. Cook, a senior fellow for Middle East studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. “It is an unexpected windfall. That’s why they should be making the most of it

Ousted Lebanese Leader Swallows Rivals’ Bitter Pill

BEIRUT, Lebanon — There is a hint of Shakespeare in it all, if Lebanese politics did not feel like the pulp fiction of Raymond Chandler, where the loftiest principles soon get mired in the muck of corruption, prevarication and opportunism cast in the sincerest of words.

But on Tuesday, the day that was his last as prime minister here, Saad Hariri faced one of the bitterest realities of his brief but tumultuous political career. By virtue of what he calls his principles as a man — and what his foes and a few friends call his failures as a politician — his country was delivered, at least symbolically, to the very movement that stands accused of killing his father on the Beirut seafront in 2005.

Betrayed, he called himself after the choice of Hezbollah, Najib Miqati, was named as the prime minister designate on Tuesday. A victim of his own lies, say his foes, who engineered his ouster by bringing down his government this month. Perhaps it was both, in a place one politician called “a chemical equation, not a country.”

“Whoever killed Rafik Hariri in 2005 doesn’t want Saad Hariri to be in power,” he said at his palatial home, a short way from the government’s headquarters. “What’s happening today is that they are trying to achieve what they wanted to achieve in 2005.”

Tuesday was a climax of sorts in a crisis that began with the collapse of Mr. Hariri’s 14-month-old national unity government but really has its origins in his father’s assassination, which cemented the country’s division along questions of ideology, sect and class. Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, preached reconciliation on Tuesday, while accusing his foes in Lebanon of stabbing the party in the back. As thuggish as they were angry, Mr. Hariri’s supporters took to the streets, where they burned a van belonging to journalists, pulled up the curb to throw rocks at cars and set barricades on fire to block streets.

The center of the crisis, though, remains Mr. Hariri, just 40, who despite his defeat may still prove to be the intangible that brings a more lasting end to a crisis over an international tribunal expected to name members of Hezbollah in his father’s murder.

“In political terms, certainly they need Saad,” said Tariq Mitri, a former minister in Mr. Hariri’s cabinet. “Any compromise solution on the tribunal needs Saad Hariri.”

Like his father, a shrewd politician hailed as generous and criticized as corrupt, Mr. Hariri prompts strong emotions. To the rank and file among Sunni Muslims, one of the country’s largest sects, he is the zaim, a leader of near feudal authority they address as Sheik Saad. As heir to his father, he manages to incarnate the ambitions and, more important, insecurities of the community, which have seen its power diminish as that of Shiites, represented by Hezbollah, grows.

“They have the power, and we don’t have anything,” said Rida Qabbani, 24, who joined scores of marauding youths trying to close a thoroughfare in the capital with trash bins. “We’re fighting with bottles, tires and garbage.”

To Mr. Hariri’s foes, he suffers when compared with the men around him. Some hold him up against President Bashar al-Assad, the son of another Arab leader who has emerged forcefully as his own strongman in Syria. More often, he is measured by the standards of his father, whom Mr. Hariri mentioned 11 times in the speech last week when declaring his intention to run again for prime minister. His father’s picture hangs everywhere, showcasing the skeptical leer of someone looking for leverage in a deal he knows he can close. Mr. Hariri is somnolent, famous in political circles for saying few words.

It was almost a refrain that his father would have never let events unfold as they did in this confrontation. A friend turned adversary, Walid Jumblatt, the Druse politician whose votes proved crucial in electing Mr. Miqati, said Mr. Hariri had failed “to see the realities on the ground.”

Asked if his father would have made the same choices in this crisis, Mr. Hariri replied: “It’s a very difficult question to answer. I went very far with what I wanted to achieve for this country, in this deal, and unfortunately I wasn’t met halfway.”

That deal is at the crux of his demise. He and Hezbollah, along with their allies, were negotiating a compromise on the tribunal, whose indictments are expected to be issued within two months. Hezbollah has denounced the tribunal as a tool of the United States and Israel and demanded that the Lebanese government end its cooperation.

Mr. Jumblatt said Mr. Hariri had agreed to do so, days before the indictments were handed to a judge in The Hague. “I told him, ‘What should I say to the president, to Bashar?’ He said, ‘Yes, I do accept.’ ” In the end, though, he said, Mr. Hariri did not.

“They will never trust Saad again,” said Sarkis Naoum, a columnist here.

Mr. Hariri said that he thought he had agreed to their demands as long as four months ago, but that they had expected him to act first. His colleagues say that would have amounted to political suicide — ending cooperation with a tribunal investigating his father’s death, with nothing in return. He suggested that Hezbollah negotiated in bad faith.

Asked if he was in a no-win situation, Mr. Hariri answered, “You tell me.”

Only a week ago, Mr. Hariri’s supporters believed they had enough votes in Parliament to bring him back to power. Then his support began to crumble. Mr. Jumblatt, who said he chose “stability at the expense of justice,” delivered enough of his bloc’s votes to Hezbollah and its allies. Then two crucial lawmakers flipped, including Mr. Miqati.

Mr. Hariri was forced to apologize to men he considered friends for mentioning them in off-color testimony to the tribunal that somehow managed to find its way on to a Lebanese television station. (He did not apologize to some others, whom he called prostitutes, tools and stooges.) He fought a war of words with politicians described by one of their own “as men who were political animals when their mothers were still nursing them.”

“Feeling this kind of backstabbing is quite harsh,” Mr. Hariri admitted.

“But,” he added, “that’s politics.”

Those very politics may spell his return. “I have popular support,” he said in the interview and, by all accounts, he is right. His standing as the leader of Sunni Muslims means he remains a player in politics rigidly divided among the country’s sects. As his father’s son, he and the position he takes will remain deeply resonant in whatever deal is worked out over the tribunal. And even in defeat, he suggested there might still be negotiations ahead on some quintessentially Levantine deal that would bring him into Mr. Miqati’s government.

“I have to sit with allies and decide what is the final decision,” he said.

Or, in the verdict delivered by Hassan Khalil, the publisher of Al Akhbar, a leftist newspaper that aligns itself with Mr. Hariri’s foes: “In Lebanon, it’s never over for anyone. You cannot write off anyone or anything in this country

Hezbollah Chooses Lebanon’s Next Prime Minister

Lebanon — A prime minister chosen by Hezbollah and its allies was poised Monday to form Lebanon’s next government, unleashing angry protests, realigning politics here and in parts of the Mideast and culminating the generation-long ascent of the Shiite Muslim movement from shadowy militant group to the country’s pre-eminent political and military force.

A practical impact may be the realignment of Lebanon away from the United States, which treated the government of Saad Hariri as an ally. Hezbollah and its own allies now have the votes to back as prime minister Najib Miqati, a billionaire and former prime minister. The government he forms may in the end look much like past cabinets in this small Mediterranean country and, indeed, Mr. Miqati struck a conciliatory tone, calling himself a consensus candidate.

But the symbolism of Hezbollah choosing the country’s prime minister was vast, potentially serving as the beginning of a new era for a combustible country whose conflicts have long entangled the United States, Iran, Syria and virtually every country in the region.

By nightfall, angry opponents of Hezbollah took to the streets in Beirut, Tripoli and other cities, burning tires, shouting slogans and offering at least an image of what many feared that Hezbollah’s victory might unleash: strife among communities in a country almost evenly divided over questions of foreign patrons, posture to Israel and the relative power of Lebanon’s Shiite Muslims, represented by Hezbollah, and its Sunni opponents.

Smoke billowed into a nighttime sky, as burning tires blocked some roads into Beirut. Hezbollah’s foes called for “a day of anger in all of Lebanon” on Tuesday.

“Down with Hezbollah! Down with Miqati!” young men shouted.

Like so many crises in Lebanon, this one is maddeningly complex. It revolves around a United Nations-backed tribunal set up in 2007 to investigate the assassination of a former prime minister, Rafik Hariri, who was killed with 22 others in a spectacular bombing along Beirut’s seafront in February 2005. Hezbollah has denied any role in the killing, but by its own admission, its members were named in indictments handed to a judge last week, though not yet made public. It demanded the government of Mr. Hariri’s son, Saad, end its cooperation with the court. When he refused, Hezbollah and its allies withdrew, forcing its collapse after a 14-month tenure that brought some calm here.

The country is almost evenly split in its attitudes toward the court. Hezbollah’s supporters believe it is hopelessly compromised, amounting to little more than an American-Israeli tool to bludgeon the movement. Mr. Hariri’s supporters believe the vehemence of Hezbollah’s reaction only underlines their guilt in the assassination.

To form a new government, one that would denounce the tribunal’s indictments and end Lebanon’s cooperation, Hezbollah needed at least 65 of the 128 parliament members. Diplomats and politicians say they now have that number, though voting will not end until Tuesday. Mr. Hariri, who effectively leads the Sunni Muslim community, has insisted he will not join the new government, meaning that a cabinet that is supposed to be built on consensus will lack representation of one of the country’s main communities.

“It will not be easy for them to control Lebanon alone,” warned Antoine Zahra, a Christian lawmaker allied with Mr. Hariri’s bloc. “They will turn it into an isolated country, ostracized by the Arab world and the international community.”

He called Miqati’s victory “a constitutional coup.”

In a tense city, everyone seemed to have an opinion on what the new government represented. Its symbolism was perhaps most relevant. With Mr. Miqati’s elevation, the Shiite Muslim community that Hezbollah represents has formalized a reality that has been clear since 2008, when Hezbollah and its allies seized parts of Beirut. The movement and, by default, the Shiites, are the pre-eminent players in a country still beholden to rules laid down by its Christian and Sunni Muslim communities.

The new equation was best illustrated by Walid Jumblatt, a mercurial politician who went from an ally of Hezbollah to one of its most outspoken foes to ally again. “No victor, no vanquished,” goes the formula that Lebanon has long touted as the key to stability in a country inclined to crisis. On Monday, Jumblatt dismissed its validity.

“In Lebanon, there is always a loser,” he said before voting for Mr. Miqati.

The Obama administration was expected to urge the new government not to work against the tribunal, which Hezbollah contends is being used as an American tool to put pressure on it, along with its allies Iran and Syria. The United States has said the tribunal itself could serve as a way to end a long tradition of assassination serving as just another weapon in crises here.

“Our expectation is that any new government would continue to live up to its international obligations to support the activities of the Special Tribunal for Lebanon,” a senior U.S. diplomat said. “Any government that is truly representative of all of Lebanon would not abandon the effort to end the era of impunity for assassinations in the country