Gwynne Dyer

By Gwynne Dyer

Does the US invasion of Iraq have a silver lining? Is democracy about to spread through the Middle East, toppling one regime after another? And will they be replaced by moderate, peace-loving, America-loving governments? Paula Dobriansky thinks so, and she claims that the nonviolent demonstrations in Beirut and the resignation on March 1 of the pro-Syrian Lebanese government proves her case.

Dobriansky, a core neoconservative, is undersecretary of state for global affairs in the Bush administration. On Feb. 28, she greeted the demonstrations in Beirut with the following claim: "As the president noted in Bratislava just last week, there was a rose revolution in Georgia, an orange revolution in Ukraine, and most recently, a purple revolution in Iraq. In Lebanon, we see growing momentum for a `cedar revolution' that is unifying the citizens of that nation to the cause of true democracy and freedom from foreign influence."

The "purple revolution" is a phrase invented by Bush administration flacks to link the January elections in Iraq, conducted under foreign military occupation and largely boycotted by the country's Sunni Arabs, with the spontaneous nonviolent uprisings that have brought democracy to several dozen other countries, from the Philippines to Ukraine, over the past two decades. Whatever else it may be, Iraq is not a case of spontaneous nonviolent revolution against tyranny. On the other hand, the Lebanese protesters who are demanding the withdrawal of Syrian troops from their country do fit that general pattern: there seems to be a case to answer here.

by Gwynne Dyer

What would we do without Richard Perle, everybody's favourite neoconservative? It was he who came up some years ago with the notion that we must "de-contextualise terrorism"; that is, we must stop trying to understand the reasons that some groups turn to terrorism, and simply condemn and kill them. No grievance, no injury, no cause is great enough to justify the use of terrorism.

This would be an excellent principle if only we could apply it to all uses of violence for political ends - including the violence that is carried out by legal governments using far more lethal weapons than terrorists have access to, causing far more deaths. I'd be quite happy, for instance, to "de-contextualise" nuclear weapons, agreeing that there are no circumstances that could possibly justify their use, and if you want to start de-contextualising things like cluster bombs and napalm, that would be all right with me, too. But that was not what Perle meant at all.

Perle was speaking specifically about Palestinian terrorist attacks against Israel, and the point of "de-contextualising" them was to make it unacceptable for people to point out that there is a connection between Palestinian terrorism and the fact that the Palestinians have lived under Israeli military occupation for the past 37 years and lost almost half their land to Jewish settlements.