{"id":482,"date":"2006-08-15T15:23:10","date_gmt":"2006-08-15T19:23:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/000af36.netsolhost.com\/wordpress1\/2006\/08\/15\/who_were_losing\/"},"modified":"2006-08-15T15:23:10","modified_gmt":"2006-08-15T19:23:10","slug":"who_were_losing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/griendling.com\/wordpress1\/2006\/08\/15\/who_were_losing\/","title":{"rendered":"Who We’re Losing"},"content":{"rendered":"

For those who may have missed it, The Post had a “Dispatch from the ‘New’ Mideast” in Sunday’s Outlook.<\/a> These are the people we are losing and why we’re losing the “war on terror.”<\/p>\n

“Our generation could have been different,” [Lubna] told [the article’s author] with exasperation recently, clutching a Diet Pepsi in one hand and a mentholated cigarette in the other. We had taken refuge from the Damascus heat in an air-conditioned room at a friend’s art gallery. “We really could have made peace. But now,” she shook her head, “it’s over. That possibility is gone.”<\/p>\n

And, she says, it’s the United States’s fault, because it didn’t demand an immediate cease-fire in Lebanon. As the estimated death toll there rises to nearly 1,000, she and other secular Syrians of the art-gallery-and-democracy crowd are turning their sympathies toward the Islamic militant movement Hezbollah.<\/p>\n

…But they’re just as wary of the United States’s failing democracy experiment in Iraq. The sectarian violence tearing that country apart is a potent vision of what they could one day face themselves. And so they feel forced into a corner, made to choose between a U.S. plan for a “new Middle East” that seems to show little respect for Arab lives and Arab ways and an Islamic-led resistance that could eventually turn against them at home.<\/p>\n

And they are reluctantly choosing. “The issue of Hezbollah and the war is no longer rational,” one Syrian opposition figure told me. “It is emotional.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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For those who may have missed it, The Post had a “Dispatch from the ‘New’ Mideast” in Sunday’s Outlook. These are the people we are losing and why we’re losing the “war on terror.” “Our generation could have been different,” [Lubna] told [the article’s author] with exasperation recently, clutching a Diet Pepsi in one hand… Read More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/griendling.com\/wordpress1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/482"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/griendling.com\/wordpress1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/griendling.com\/wordpress1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/griendling.com\/wordpress1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/griendling.com\/wordpress1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=482"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/griendling.com\/wordpress1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/482\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/griendling.com\/wordpress1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=482"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/griendling.com\/wordpress1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=482"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/griendling.com\/wordpress1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=482"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}