A Middle Eastern New Year

I wish I could write that I began 2007 -- and this blog -- in typical Beirut style: at an outrageous party. New Year's is a key event in the Beirut social calendar, a time when Lebanese working abroad return home to swell the tide of partygoers who flood the nightclubs of Monot Street and the bars in Gemmayze. This year's celebrations were meant to be especially symbolic -- coming after this summer's war with Israel, and in the midst of the country's current political crisis -- acts of defiance (or denial?) against the forces of war, chaos and sectarianism. One friend threw a "Good vs. Evil" costume party, the theme of which seemed to capture this divisive Middle East moment. Groups backing Lebanon's pro-American government staged an "I Love Life" rave for 15,000 people at a convention center, an event that party-poopers among the Hizballah-led opposition suggested might be more appropriately named, "I Love Israel." It wasn't clear if Hizballah itself had something specific planned for New Year's Eve, though I was fairly certain that the several thousand tea-totaling Islamist protestors who throng Hizballah's central Beirut city campground every evening wouldn't be popping champagne corks at midnight.

But either way, I was in no mood to celebrate. Two thousand and seven has all has all the makings of a bad year in the Middle East, a bitter vintage that I'd rather put off drinking as long as possible. It's not just the standoff in Lebanon that's worrying, or the relentless disaster in Iraq, but the many other cold conflicts of the region -- from Iran through Kurdish Northern Iraq, down to Syria and the West Bank -- that look like they are going to get hot. Why? Because the American-era in the Middle East is all over but the shouting. Our inability even to dispatch Saddam Hussein without more than a modicum of state----sanctioned justice, on view for all to see thanks to mobile phone video cameras, was merely the latest in our public humiliations. Who knows what new paradigm will fill the American vacuum -- Israeli unilateralism? The rejectionist crescent of Syria and Iran? Sectarian war between Shi'ites and Sunnis? -- but I'm sure I'll spend the better part of the next twelve months chronicling the transition. I doubt it'll be pretty.

So with the Lebanese government and the opposition on a temporary truce for the holidays, I declared one of my own, and fled the country for Holland, of all random and seemingly off-topic places. Yet even in the soggy bottomland of Northern Europe (and the occasional foggy bank of second-hand legalized marijuana smoke) I found it hard to escape the Middle East.

It's not just that I spent New Year's Eve with two other Middle East hacks -- my very good friends Thomas, a Dutch journalist, and his wife Newsha, an Iranian photographer -- who, when not in Tehran, live in a townhouse by the Old Rhine river in Leiden. Like me, Thomas and Newsha were worried about the year ahead, especially since they would be on the receiving end of whatever military strike Israel might possibly make against Iran's nuclear development program. Still, it wasn't the brief discussion of the latest developments in flak jackets or satellite modem technology, but the quaint and normally quiet canal-crossed city of Leiden itself that made me the think of current events.

It turns out Leiden is no stranger to sectarian violence of a kind that would be familiar to a Middle Easterner. Only it took place several hundred years ago. The Eighty Years War that the Dutch fought for independence from Spain in the 16th century was very much a war of religion, pitting the largely Protestant Dutch rebels against the Counter-Reformation shock troops of Catholic Spain. It was complete with irregular militias, forced conversions, revenge killings, the smashing of religious statues and paintings deemed heretical, the usual stuff. For Leiden, the main event was the siege of the city by the Spanish Army, which wreaked such privation and despair among the inhabitants that the city's mayor, in order to boost morale, offered to cut off his own arm as a sacrifice to the Resistance. There are several paintings (and at least one statue) of that mayor, sword raised, arm aloft, ready to chop, but restrained by his supporters. How Shi'te is that? The people of Leiden finally raised the siege when they destroyed their dykes, drowning the Spanish Army and flooding much of their own town. They were the suicide bombers of their day.

When I watched the maniacal abandon with which the Dutch launch fireworks on New Year's Eve – as when Thomas's seemingly bourgeois Bohemian neighbors unveil a fireworks weapons cache smuggled over the border from Belgium complete with an RPG-sized bottle rocket launcher – it was hard not to think that the country's bloody past isn't so far behind. At the stroke of midnight, all Leiden exploded as if the Mother of All Battles had descended upon the city. "The Catholic militias have taken the suburbs!" Thomas and I laughed, but the joke wasn't really funny. As he said later: "Spending time in Baghdad takes most of the fun out of fireworks."

I'm back in Beirut now, and my only Dutch souvenir is a cold. The Lebanon truce is over, and Hizballah has promised to ratchet up it protests on Monday. Will 2007 will be one of the last of this region's own Eighty Years War, or is it just the beginning of another cycle? All I can say is expect fireworks.

--Andrew Lee Butters/Beirut