The election of Michael Steele to the chairmanship of the Republican National Committee has raised new questions in the ongoing debateabout the future of the Republican party. Does the outspoken former lieutenant governor of Maryland have what it takes to inject new life into the ailing GOP and lead it in a new direction? And could his status as a minority provide a new face for a party that looks increasingly out of touch with a changing America?

But while Steele-watchers look for clues about what direction the party will take under his leadership, there is another Republican on the rise: Mike Pence, the recently-elected chairman of the Republican Conference and vanguard of the hardline, back-to-basics Reaganism of today’s Republican party.

Pence, a hitherto little-known congressman from Indiana, has emerged into the national spotlight as one of the most vocal critics of the Obama administration. He spearheaded the GOP’s opposition to Obama’s stimulus plan, promising “overwhelming” Republican opposition to – what he called – the president’s “dusty old wish list of liberal spending priorities”, and appeared on major US cable networks to defend the Republican party line. Such was his antagonism to Obama’s spending measures that Pence even found himself defending Rush Limbaugh, after the radio shock jock ludicrously declared that conservatives had been forced “to hope [Obama] succeeds … to bend over, grab the ankles, bend forward, backward, whichever … because this is the first black president.” (Perhaps it is telling that Pence once referred to himself as Rush Limbaugh on decaf)

Pandering to Limbaugh aside, Pence’s objections to Obama’s economic plan should come as no surprise: the congressman has made a name for himself as an outspoken critic of ‘big government’ attempts to rescue the economy, penning op-eds and appearing on national television to oppose both the financial and auto industry bailouts this fall. Last August, Pence even helped orchestrate a Republican sit-in on the floor of Congress after it had gone into recess, to protest the Dems’ refusal to overturn a moratorium on offshore oil drilling.

Pence’s conservative activism has paid off. Just two weeks after the election-day Götterdämmerung this November, he was chosen to chair the Republican Conference in Congress, making him the third-ranking House Republican and an influential agenda-setter for the country’s ‘loyal opposition’.

Pence’s rise in the party is noteworthy for at least two reasons. First, his recent activity in the House may be a prelude for a run for the Indiana governorship in 2012 or senate seat in 2010; victory in either of these races would set him up to be a strong contender for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination (although his name has already been thrown around as a possible candidate for 2012). He’s already aconservative favourite, and his thwarted attempt in 2006 to usurp John Boehner’s position as House Republican leader may have been an early effort to achieve the kind of national prominence necessary to jumpstart a presidential run. Competing for a governorship or Senate seat would mean waiting just a few more years to do so.

Second, Pence’s ascent within the Republican ranks points to one possible future for the party: that of an ideologically-driven, take-no-prisoners opposition movement – a transformation that the congressman is actively helping to coordinate. He is slated to speak at this month’s Conservative political action conference alongside 2012 hopefuls Mike Huckabee, Mitt Romney, and Newt Gingrich (at the 2008 session, Pence delivered a speech on the future of conservatism), and it was his office that arranged the annual Republican retreat held last week in Virginia, where GOP leaders met to decide what direction the party should take.

For Pence, it is abundantly clear what needs to be done to rejuvenate the party. In an op-ed entitled The Republican Future, published in the Washington Times last December, Pence argued that the GOP had “lost [its] way” because it had become insufficiently conservative – spending too much, expanding entitlements, and bailing out the financial institutions that should have been left to fail. This lack of ideological discipline, Pence wrote, had led voters to punish the party for its “departure from principles”. And the “way out of the wilderness”, he continued, would be to reject, once-and-for-all, Bush’s experiment in “big-government Republicanism”.

For now, it looks like his party is largely in agreement. ‘We’re more unified than I’ve seen in four or five years’, California congressman Kevin McCarthy recently said. And even the more moderate Steele had nothing but praise for the House Republicans‘ hard-line approach to the Democrats’ spending schemes: “The goose egg that you laid on the president’s desk,” he told them, “was just beautiful”.

While senate Republicans have proven more willing to negotiate on the future of the stimulus plan, it appears the debate over how to save the Republicans – whether to moderate and modernise or to hew more closely to old-fashioned party doctrine – has, for now, largely been resolved in favour of the latter. And Mike Pence couldn’t be happier: when queried last week about the GOP’s plans for its retreat, an upbeatPence told a reporter that the Republicans were again “feeling pretty relevant”.

But if last November is any indication – when the American public turned out en masse to reject the divisive, backwards-looking policies of Republicans like Pence – the congressman’s obstructionist vision for his party will only put it further out of line with the American mainstream. And if this is the party’s strategy to remain relevant during a time of economic emergency, then the Democrats may keep celebrating at the polls for some time to come.

The New Republic 9 June 2008

It will be interesting to see how–and if–the candidates adapt their policies on Iraq to take into account Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s announcement this week that his government will work towards a negotiated timetable for the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq. McCain, for one–despite his attempts yesterday to do dismiss the relevance of Maliki’s statements to his Iraq policy–may have a big problem on his hands: As the folks over at Democracy Arsenal point out, the Arizona senator stated unequivocally in a 2004 Q&A session at the Council on Foreign Relations that the U.S. would be obligated to pull its troops from Iraq if requested to do so by a democratically elected Iraqi government:

[Peter] Peterson: Let me give you a hypothetical, senator. What would or should we do if, in the post-June 30th period, a so-called sovereign Iraqi government asks us to leave, even if we are unhappy about the security situation there? I understand it’s a hypothetical, but it’s at least possible.

McCAIN: Well, if that scenario evolves, then I think it’s obvious that we would have to leave because if it was an elected government of Iraq and we’ve been asked to leave other places in the world. If it were an extremist government, then I think we would have other challenges, but I don’t see how we could stay when our whole emphasis and policy has been based on turning the Iraqi government over to the Iraqi people.

In light of these earlier statements on his full commitment to Iraqi sovereignty on this issue, how can McCain now declare–without appearing to be a flip-flopper–that a U.S. pull-out will not occur “according to a set timetable,” even if the Iraqi government requests otherwise? And we thought Obama’s recent reconsiderations on Iraq wouldland him in flip-flop territory… 
]]> http://jamesrmartin.wordpress.com/2008/07/10/mccains-iraq-flip-flop/feed/ 0 jrobertmartin http://jamesrmartin.wordpress.com/2008/07/08/the-next-iraq/ http://jamesrmartin.wordpress.com/2008/07/08/the-next-iraq/#comments Tue, 08 Jul 2008 19:37:43 +0000 jrobertmartin http://jamesrmartin.wordpress.com/?p=25 ]]> The New Republic 8 July 2008

While a recent deal in Lebanon between Hezbollah and the Western-backed government of Fouad Siniora may have averted the outbreak of all-out, Iraq-style sectarian conflict in the tiny Arab state, an article today on the Lebanese news-service Now Lebanon makes it clear how, in many ways, the current political conditions of Lebanon are disconcertingly similar to those of Iraq circa 2006: Its government is fractured and dysfunctional, simmering Sunni-Shia tensions threaten to boil over into widespread violence, and al-Qaeda-linked terrorist groups operate freely within the country’s lawless zones (such as the massive Ain al-Hilweh refugee camp in southern Lebanon). To make matters worse, the article points out, the newly-emboldened Hezbollah may be gearing up for a show-down with the country’s Sunni Jihadist groups in Ain al-Hilweh, in a move that would bring Lebanon even closer to its boiling point:

“Hezbollah is seriously thinking about [the Ain al-Hilweh] camp as an entity that jeopardizes its influence…. They call it the Sunni army,” [says Al Hayat columnist Hazem al-Amin]. Such speculation, in addition to various developments throughout the country … has perpetuated fears that future tensions involving Hezbollah could descend into a violent Sunni-Shia conflict far more devastating than the clashes in May.

Given the amount of media attention paid to Iran and its infamous president in recent weeks, we would do well to keep in mind that Ahmadinejad might not be in power for much longer: Around this time next year, the Islamic Republic will be holding presidential elections, and–according to some–the incumbent Ahmadinejad could suffer a loss at the polls. Who might step in to fill his shoes? According to an article this week from the Tehran Times, former president and reformist Mohammad Khatami is considering entering the race, and has started to garner domestic support for his campaign:

Mohammad Khatami who was president from 1997 to 2004 has sent mixed signals about his willingness to run for the next year’s presidential election. In a short interview with reporters he said “I have retired”. However, in a recent visit to Oslo, Norway, he told reporters, “Unfortunately, in the political sphere there is no retirement … When we can be active, we will be active.”

While doubts about the wisdom of hiring a group of rag-tag Sunni militias–the so-called “Iraqi Awakening” or “Sons of Iraq“–to do our dirty work in combating al-Qaida in Iraq have long been common fare of skeptics of the surge, a new report just released by the Government Accountability Office (GAO), “Securing, Stabilizing, and Rebuilding Iraq,” gives official weight to these concerns. One of the first governmental reports to express ambivalence about the long-term commitment of these Sunni militias to U.S. goals in Iraq, it emphasizes normalization of the groups into mainstream Iraqi political and security bodies is proceeding at a snail’s-pace. Jobless, disenfranchised, and armed to the teeth, the “Awakening” militias could quickly become a nightmare for the Maliki government–and for our hopes to stabilize Iraq–if steps towards their incorporation into the Iraqi state are not promptly taken. Indeed, while critics have long worried that these groups could turn against coalition and Iraqi forces, the report suggests that this could already be happening:

Despite their relative success and growing numbers, during early 2008 some tribal security forces temporarily withdrew their support of [coalition forces] and the Iraqi security forces in Diyala and Babil provinces. Fraying relations between these groups and the Iraqi government in Anbar province caused a spike in violence in this area.

Even more worrisome, the GAO points out that our current “New Way Forward” strategy lacks a “cohesive plan” for how to forestall this meltdown. Until we come up with a blueprint for how to facilitate the transition of these groups from vigilante militias into committed partners in the Iraqi state, the report soberly suggests, our recent progress on security in Iraq–which has been afforded in great part by their cooperation–may be only short-lived.

Walking past the AFL-CIO building on the way to work yesterday, I couldn’t help but notice a gaggle of union-supporters and other passers-by crowded around a massive tour bus plastered with pictures of President Bush. Organized by Americans United for Change (AUC), the “Bush Legacy Bus” turned out to be an enormous bio-fuel-powered mobile museum set to tour the country for the next several months and showcase an exhibit on the missteps and abuses of the Bush administration. The 45-foot, 28-ton glorified rock n’ roll tour-bus, I was told by press-secretary Julie Blust, would be road-tripping to 150 cities throughout the country, setting up shop mostly outside of Republican congressional offices, in order to remind Americans just how far the administration has taken the country off course (as if, with the president’s approval rating at 29 percent, this were necessary).

I was encouraged by a pimply teenage supporter to hop on the bus and take an “interactive tour” through the administration’s worst moments. At the back of the vehicle, a faux gasoline pump emblazoned with the emblem “G.O.P.–Grand Oil Party” stood nearby a glass display-case containing the Gortex boots and dog-tags of slain soldier Patrick McCaffrey. On the opposing wall, “The 3 R’s of No Child Left Behind: Rhetoric, Retreat, Renege” was scrawled in remedial handwriting. From another side, maudlin piano music (clashing mightily with the bus’s arena-rock aesthetic) wafted from a video-screen showing harrowed Katrina survivors in the Superdome.

According to AUC President Brad Woodhouse, the “Bush Bus” was actually the AUC’s best idea for how to ensure that the administration would not quietly fade into history in its twilight months. Among other projects considered were a “Worst President Ever” statue in Crawford, Texas, a “Bush is a Bust” museum in Houston, and a miniature golf-course in Waco dedicated to the administration’s fiascos. (The landmarks would have made a nice complement to plans for the George W. Bush Sewage Plant in San Francisco.)

Why did the “Bush Bus” ultimately win? According to Blust, the museum-on-wheels would be seen by many more than a stationary exhibit and, as she put it, would prove quite the spectacle. Can’t argue with that: Perhaps only the Oscar Mayer Wienermobile could strike a larger profile cruising down the highway than the red-white-and-blue caravan, its exterior plastered with colossal images of Bush and a list of his greatest offences in large letters–”foreclosures, record gas prices, global warming, eavesdropping…”

I asked Blust if the “Legacy Tour” project was intended to emulate the great rock n’ roll bus odysseys of yore (perhaps pegged to the Grateful Dead’s recent endorsement of Obama). “It’s not really a rock n’ roll tour,” she said, a bit flustered. “[But] we’ll try to do as many drugs as possible. Wreck some hotel rooms.”

Perhaps the most damning conclusion of the committee’s report on prewar intelligence is that the Bush administration failed to take into account CIA and DIA suggestions that post-invasion Iraq would require a significant long-term U.S. troop presence to quell violent Baathist attempts to return to power, al-Qaida-related terrorist activity, and inter-ethnic/tribal violence. Though this is not the first time such ineptitude has been reported, the committee provides a particularly searing indictment of the administration’s post-invasion planning.

On this score, the committee’s findings are largely a reiteration of the conclusions of its 2007 report dedicated exclusively to exploring the discrepancies between the administration’s postwar pipe dreams and the realistic assessments of the country’s intelligence agencies. According to both reports, “Statements by President Bush and Vice President Cheney regarding the postwar situation in Iraq, in terms of political, security, and economic, did not reflect the concerns and uncertainties expressed in the intelligence products.”

Exhibit A: While Cheney in 2002 explicitly agreed with “Middle East expert Professor Fouad Ajami” that “after liberation, the streets in Basra and Baghdad are ‘sure to erupt in joy,’” contemporaneous DIA intelligence estimates held that most Iraqis would treat the “liberators” with “ambivalence,” and that “significant force protection threats will emerge from the Baathists, the Jihadists and Arab nationalists who oppose any US occupation of Iraq.”

Exhibit B: While Bush preached that Iraq’s people would soon be able to “share in the progress and prosperity of our time,” a 2002 CIA study suggested that “Iraq currently appears to lack both the socio-economic and politico-cultural prerequisites that political scientists generally regard as necessary to nurture democracy.” Furthermore, as the report details, the possibility of establishing a stable Iraqi democracy in the aftermath of invasion was predicted by the intelligence community “to be a long, difficult and probably turbulent challenge.”

Unfortunately, the report does not take into account the “many other sources of information available to policymakers that would inform their views about post-war Iraq”–i.e., the Ajamis and Chalabis whose utopian post-invasion visions had captured the ear of the administration. The report does seem to imply, however, that it was the concerns of these “other sources,” and not those of sober and nuanced intelligence estimates, that ultimately dictated how the administration envisioned the future of Iraq.

In glancing through the 170 pages of the report “Whether Public Statements Regarding Iraq by U.S. Government Officials Were Substantiated by Intelligence Information,” one cannot help but be struck by a certain mad logic to the administration’s interpretations of prewar intelligence findings. Without conclusive evidence that Iraq had restarted nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons programs, and that it had the wherewithal to deliver these weapons to the U.S. or to distribute them to al-Qaida and its fellow-travelers, the administration focused on certain minute, dubious details of intelligence findings that would simultaneously give evidence of major Iraqi WMD programs and explain why the existence of these programs had been so difficult to establish with certainty in the first place.

For instance, the report makes clear just how crucial the existence of the supposed “mobile biological weapons laboratories” was to proving that Iraq had restarted its biological weapons program since the conclusion of the First Gulf War. The fact that these mobile bio-weapons labs could be easily moved throughout the country and hidden within “palm and date tree groves” provided the perfect explanation why there had been little direct observation of the supposed bio-weapons program since 1991. Of course, our knowledge of these mythical mobile-labs was tenuous at best, provided by only a handful of informants (one of whom was the famous “Curveball”), and post-war investigations proved that they had, in fact, never existed.

The same was true of the case for Iraq’s supposed chemical weapons program: Since intelligence could not determine conclusively whether Iraq had restarted such a program in earnest since 1991, the Bush administration based its case on scattered reports that Saddam had surreptitiously embedded his chemical weapons program into civilian chemical industries. Again, absent the existence of these dual-use chemical plants whose activities would evade outside detection, conclusively proving that Iraq had restarted a serious chemical weapons program would have been significantly more difficult. And again, the intelligence was proven wrong.

The most maddening instance of this selective interpretation of intelligence came in the administration’s attempts to argue that Iraq had both the capability and intent to use its WMDs against targets in the continental United States. Given very little evidence that this was true, the White House focused on limited and contradictory intelligence suggesting that Iraq was outfitting unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) with equipment for a chemical or biological attack. And when it was discovered that Iraq had attempted to purchase navigational equipment for its UAVs that contained maps of the 50 American states, it was reported that Hussein could be planning a major attack. According to prewar Air Force and DIA assessments, however, the UAVs were likely intended only for reconnaissance and the navigational software for “generic mapping” purposes. But again, when consideration of the full-range of evidence did not reveal any conclusive facts about Iraqi capabilities and intentions, the mere possibility of the existence of these retrofitted UAVs–as with the supposed mobile bio-weapons labs and dual-use chemical factories–was taken as indication that Iraq did, in fact, pose a clear and present danger.

While perhaps the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report does not reveal any shockingly new conclusions about the Bush administration’s manipulation of prewar Iraq intelligence, at the very least it affords one the opportunity to revisit these tragicomic intelligence debates, and to consider again how tenuous the administration’s interpretations of the available evidence on Iraqi weapons technology truly was.

The Senate intelligence committee released its two-part report this month exploring pre-war intelligence on Iraq and its use by the Bush administration. We asked James Martin, a Paul Mellon fellow at Cambridge University who writes on international security issues, to wade through the 172-page report for us. He’ll be guest-posting his findings here over the next few days.

Released only three days after the publication earlier this month of Scott McClellan’s damning indictment of the Bush administration, What Happened, new reports by the Senate Intelligence Committee on prewar Iraq intelligence seem to confirm the conclusions of the former press-secretary’s mea culpa: that the administration misused and misrepresented the findings of the intelligence community in the run-up to the war.

The findings of the first report, aptly named “Whether Public Statements Regarding Iraq by U.S. Government Officials Were Substantiated by Intelligence Information,” strikes one now as rather anti-climatic–its conclusions having long since become common knowledge: “In the push to rally public support for the invasion of Iraq,” writes committee chairman Jay Rockefeller (D-WV), “Administration officials often failed to accurately portray what was known, what was not known, and what was suspected about Iraq and the threat it represented to our national security.”

But while its conclusions are perhaps not breaking-news, the committee’s report is arguably the clearest and most direct presentation to date of the disconnect between what was known by the intelligence community in the run-up to the war and what was claimed to be true by the administration. On the question of Iraq’s nuclear weapons capability, for example, the report analyzes in detail the White House’s willful disregard of the conclusions of the Department of Energy and the Department of State’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research that the aluminum tubes claimed by the CIA to be part of Iraq’s supposed uranium enrichment apparatus were in fact being used for the purposes of a conventional rocket program–a point that was confirmed by the postwar findings of the Iraq Survey Group. And when confronted with CIA and DIA assessments that a purported meeting between Mohammad Atta and Iraqi intelligence officials in 2001 could not be confirmed, the administration continued to insist that such a meeting had taken place and that it proved high-level cooperation between Iraq and al-Qaida.

On the other hand, the report describes numerous instances of agreement between the intelligence community and the White House on the status of Iraq’s WMD program and Saddam’s ties to terrorism. On the question of Iraq’s biological weapons programs, for instance, the report argues that the administration’s public declarations were “substantiated” by available intelligence information. And, the report claims, the White House was on sure-footing in arguing for official Iraqi tolerance of the presence of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and other al-Qaida-related terrorists within Iraq prior to the invasion.

The impassioned minority views of some of the committee’s dissenting Republican members–Senators Kit Bond, Saxby Chambliss, Orrin Hatch, and Richard Burr–focus on these areas of agreement, and argue that charges of dissimulation on the part of the administration are weakened by the fact that prominent Democratic members of Congress relied upon the same intelligence information in drumming up support for the war. If the White House was lying, they claim, then what were Kerry, Edwards, and Clinton doing?

But as Dan Froomkin at the WashPost points out, the fact that Congress “bought the administration line” does not necessarily mean that the two were operating on a level playing field: “It takes a lot of chutzpah to defend yourself against charges that you’ve engaged in a propaganda campaign,” he writes, “by noting that it worked.”

It’s likely that the administration had access to more intelligence on Iraq than Congress, as Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) has recently argued, although the extent of its knowledge remains unclear. Unfortunately, the Senate committee report takes into account only a handful of official intelligence estimates and excludes from consideration “less formal communications” between the White House and the intelligence community that undoubtedly contained even more details on the status (or non-status) of Iraq’s WMD programs. A more comprehensive investigation into these other intelligence channels would help clarify what information exactly was available to the White House and what to Congress, and the extent to which we can rightfully accuse the former of having lied to the public about the reasons for going to war.

As experts long warned, Islamic militants steeped in urban warfare against U.S. troops in Iraq have expanded their violent campaign beyond Iraq’s borders.

[credit: James Martin]

On the outskirts of Tripoli in northern Lebanon, the jagged ruins of Nahr el-Bared rise over the Mediterranean Sea. Once one of Lebanon’s largest Palestinian refugee camps and an urban center of more than 30,000 people, Nahr el-Bared today recalls images of Berlin or Dresden from 1945 — its buildings blasted to rubble from endless mortar and machine-gun fire and its main thoroughfare reduced to a graveyard of hollowed-out foundations and burnt wreckage. Since its founding 60 years ago in the aftermath of the first Arab-Israeli war, when hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fled the nascent state of Israel to neighboring countries, Nahr el-Bared had grown into a modest-size city that boasted one of northern Lebanon’s most popular markets. Today, its muddy roads are choked with the skeletons of automobiles, its few scattered residents living in ramshackle garages and shanties, or in the crumbling debris of what were once apartment buildings lining its streets.

Nahr el-Bared’s destruction owes much to the spread of militant jihad to and from U.S.-occupied Iraq.

Back in early 2005, Porter Goss, then head of the CIA, warned Congress that the war would spawn a new breed of Islamic militants who would “leave Iraq experienced in and focused on acts of urban terrorism.” Middle East experts have long warned that U.S. actions in Iraq would stir up a deadly hornets’ nest, with consequences potentially spreading throughout the region. On a trip into ravaged Nahr el-Bared this January, what I saw and heard there confirmed those dark predictions.

Nahr el-Bared, whose name in Arabic means “cold river,” was destroyed in the summer of 2007 in heavy fighting between the Lebanese army and the previously little-known Fatah al-Islam — an al-Qaida-linked group of international Sunni extremists that emerged in Lebanon’s Palestinian camps in the aftermath of Lebanon’s 2006 war with Israel. The fighting began in May 2007, when Fatah al-Islam militants slaughtered Lebanese soldiers on the outskirts of Nahr el-Bared, prompting a massive military retaliation. In the battle that ensued, the heavily armed and well-funded extremists — many of whom had come from fighting U.S. forces in Iraq — managed to hold back the Lebanese military for three months, using tactics they had learned in the urban war zones of Iraq.

“Fatah al-Islam was part of a group that was with Zarqawi in Iraq,” says Ahmad Moussalli, an expert in Islamist movements and a professor at the American University in Beirut, referring to the erstwhile head of al-Qaida in Iraq killed by U.S. forces in June 2006. “By virtue of fighting in Iraq, they learned many techniques for fighting a regular army. They were very well trained in urban warfare.”

What’s worse, adds Hilal Khashan, a colleague of Moussalli’s at the American University in Beirut, Fatah al-Islam’s fighters may be the first of a new generation of extremists to expand their fight beyond Iraq. Their suicidal stand at Nahr el-Bared could signify the beginning of a new era of international Islamist violence, Khashan says, brought about by an exodus of battle-hardened militants from places like Baghdad, Fallujah and Mosul.

When I traveled to Nahr el-Bared in January, gaining access to the camp was not easy. Since defeating the militants last September, the Lebanese military has proved reluctant to allow any media into Nahr el-Bared, wary of allowing the outside world to witness the extent of the camp’s destruction. I had to be sneaked in with a faux Palestinian I.D., and once inside, I was constantly warned that my note taking and photo snapping could lead to my arrest by the military.

With Lebanese soldiers stationed throughout its crumbling ruins, Nahr al-Bared is unique among Lebanon’s Palestinian refugee camps; according to a 1969 law, the U.N.-administered camps, established in the wake of the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, are officially beyond the jurisdiction of the Lebanese government. Essentially autonomous, they are controlled by their own indigenous armed factions and are almost completely closed-off from the greater Lebanese society. The Lebanese state, fearful that absorbing its 400,000 Palestinian residents would upset the delicate sectarian balance among Christians, Sunnis and Shiites– most Palestinians are Sunni Muslims — has denied them citizenship and bars them from the country’s top professions.

Unsurprisingly, the poverty-stricken, desperate camps have become hotbeds of extremism. While radical Sunni Islamism, overshadowed by the activities of the influential Shiite faction Hezbollah, has not played a huge role in contemporary Lebanon, several al-Qaida-esque groups have emerged within Lebanon’s Palestinian camps over the past two decades. In Ein al-Hilweh, located on the outskirts of Sidon in the south and the largest of the camps, the jihadist outfit Usbat al-Ansar and its more radical offshoot Jund al-Sham are blamed for several terrorist attacks in Lebanon. And they have built a reputation as the country’s go-to groups for militants looking for a way into Iraq to fight alongside al-Qaida. Such is their profile in Ein al-Hilweh as recruiters for the Iraqi Jihad that the main street of the camp has even been renamed “Martyrs of Fallujah.”

“Ein al-Hilweh is and will remain a home for al-Qaida in Lebanon,” says Khashan. “One can expect extremist groups to have a field day in Lebanon.”

Like Ein al-Hilweh, Nahr el-Bared — religiously conservative and cut off from mainstream Lebanese society — proved a hospitable home for international militants. When the group first began to move into the camp in late 2006, its residents were initially suspicious of the militants, whose accents, traditional Islamic dress, and often darker skin color were conspicuous giveaways of their foreignness. (Some were so dark, one man in the camp told me, that they could have even been Bangladeshi or Somalian.) The foreign fighters soon began to win their trust, however, as they rented apartments, brought in their wives and children, and largely treated the camp’s residents with respect.

The militants, some of them veterans of Iraq, claimed to be setting up training camps in Nahr el-Bared in preparation for further battle against the Americans, and against Israel. Snipers who had learned their trade in Iraq taught others; some of the group’s members left the camp bound for Iraq via Syria. Their religiosity and claims to be the protectors of Islam — even one of Osama bin Laden’s sons, Saad bin Laden, reportedly played a leading role in the group — began to win them converts.

I wasn’t surprised to hear that the foreign fighters were treated with fearful respect by many in Nahr el-Bared. Like icons that clutter the walls of a cathedral to whom the faithful plead for intercession, posters of Yasser Arafat, Saddam Hussein and the leaders of Hamas and Hezbollah are plastered on nearly every building in Lebanon’s Palestinian camps. Anyone with a legitimate claim to be fighting the United States or Israel will quickly become popular. One young boy that I met in Nahr el-Bared carried with him at all times a red butane lighter, which, besides producing a flame, also beamed an image of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah in multicolored light.

“There is no Hezbollah in this camp,” I was told by one man in Nahr el-Bared. “But people respect them because they fight Israel and the USA. The Palestinians would protect them in this fight.”

In lieu of Hezbollah or Hamas, the Sunni Fatah al-Islam militants became the camp’s patron jihadists, carrying an additional currency of prestige as veterans of Iraq. The group’s leader, Shaker al-Absi, was a close associate of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi‘s there. Born in 1955, al-Absi was an elder extremist, having fought the Israelis in the 1980s in southern Lebanon. Arrested in Syria in 2002, al-Absi was released after three years and is believed to have gone to Iraq to fight shortly thereafter. After returning to Lebanon, he established a training center in Ein al-Hilweh to send fighters back to the Iraqi insurgency, then became the head of the nascent Fatah al-Islam and moved it north. His group, once ensconced within Nahr el-Bared, soon became the power brokers of the camp, replacing the more mainstream Fatah al-Intifada — a group that had splintered from Arafat’s Fatah in the 1980s and had until then been the most powerful faction in Nahr el-Bared — and brazenly seized the prior ruling group’s offices and weapons.

Not everyone in Nahr el-Bared was happy with the new group’s attempts to control the camp, however, and tensions between Fatah al-Islam and the residents of Nahr el-Bared began to increase. Accordingly, the group began to threaten the camp’s residents with death if they opposed it. Still, the group’s Islamist credentials — including its members’ Iraq war experience — continued to inspire the respect of many, and given the separation of the camp from Lebanese society, its activities were largely overlooked by authorities outside Nahr el-Bared.

A string of violent encounters between Fatah al-Islam and Lebanese forces in Tripoli in May 2007, incited by a bank robbery by members of the group, forced Fatah al-Islam to refocus its attention from international jihad to fending off the Lebanese military that threatened to drive them from Nahr el-Bared. The terrible toll of the urban conflict that ensued became apparent only after the fighting ended and the camp’s residents, the majority of whom had fled to surrounding camps during the fighting, began slowly to return home in October. Almost all lost their homes, which had been blown to bits by mortar fire or riddled nearly beyond recognition with bullet holes. Many rooftops lay littered with nails, which, I was told, had come from nail-filled mortar shells launched into the camp by the army.

“In 1948 we left everything,” one resident of the camp told me. “We built a camp, which became a huge city and a huge market. Now we are doing the same thing. We left again, left everything, and we are starting again.”

But while the residents of Nahr el-Bared await the reconstruction of their shattered camp, militant Sunni jihadist groups like Fatah al-Islam continue to operate freely in other parts of Lebanon. In March, fighting between Jund al-Sham and the mainstream Fatah group in Ein al-Hilweh led some to fear that a repeat of the Nahr el-Bared devastation could be right around the corner.

Whether or not Ein al-Hilweh erupts in violence, Fatah al-Islam’s success in taking over its sister camp to the north and turning it into an active militant jihadist outpost sets a dangerous precedent, as scores of militants cycle through Iraq seeking to continue their fight against the West, its regional allies and Israel, and even their Shiite co-religionists.

“The fate of Islamic militancy throughout the region is largely a function of the ability of the Americans to pacify Iraq,” Khashan says. “If Iraq is not won, al-Qaida militants like Fatah al-Islam will sweep throughout the Middle East.”

“As long as Iraq is a failed state, the militant Salafi movement will continue to pose a serious security threat to Middle Eastern countries,” agrees Bilal Y. Saab, a terrorism expert at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution in Washington. “Fatah al-Islam was one clear example of how the problem of al-Qaida in Iraq could spill over to neighboring countries.”

Lebanon, with its disenfranchised populations, swaths of lawless territory and simmering sectarian tensions, may continue to prove a prime destination for veterans of the Iraqi insurgency seeking to expand the conflict outward. If so, Fatah al-Islam may only be the vanguard of a new era of Islamist violence in the region.