choose your own adventure:

You have been given the opportunity to broker a peace agreement! Your work will impact a region of the world for decades, perhaps centuries to come! You get to decide what framework will shape the agreement. Will you choose a dare-we-say racist framework, in which you assume that people from similar ethnic groups will get along with each other no matter what and that people from different ethnic groups will always fight each other, or will you choose the framework of international law, which bears a striking resemblance to some of our own dearly beloved values and laws here in the U.S.A.?

Ready? Go!

Path 1: RACISM
Path 2: INTERNATIONAL LAW


The sad thing is, I wasn't even thinking about Iraq when I started writing this. Anyway, here's my favorite part of my paper on Lebanon's 1990 Ta'if Accord, the text of which made me absolutely furious. This paragraph is actually going to be a footnote since it doesn't really fit in with our analytical framework for the paper, but it HAS to be said:

I am highly critical of Ta’if’s differing treatment of the Syrian and Israeli occupations, which I believe reflect deep problems in regional politics. The accord treats Israel as an occupier to which Lebanon may respond with force, but advocates for an incremental withdrawal of Syrian troops predicated on a peaceful relationship, extolling Lebanon and Syria’s ancient “brotherhood” and Arab commonality. This is nonsensical, as their “brotherhood” had clearly not kept them from conflict in the past (nor had it kept Lebanese militias from fighting one another) and insulting, as it implies that the borders of Arab states are porous and that people who share an ethnic or cultural background with their occupiers do not deserve self-determination. Furthermore, the devastating insinuation is that Lebanon and Syria cannot expect to find such commonality or make peace with Israel, a state of mostly Jews of European descent. I was, perhaps naively, shocked to discover that this racism influenced Ta’if’s provisions as strongly as did international law, but not surprised to learn that the U.S. has had a hand, once again, in institutionalizing ethnic division and conflict, despite its protests that it cannot understand the “ancient hatreds” of the divided nations in the Middle East.