Politics By Assassination is Middle East Tradition

David Ignatius has a WaPo piece today with the following torso:

The Middle East needs the rule of law -- not an order preached by outsiders but one demanded by Arabs who will not tolerate more of this killing. Any leader or nation who aspires to play a constructive role in the region's future must embrace this idea of legal accountability. That is what the United Nations insisted this week, with a unanimous Security Council resolution demanding that the murderers be brought to justice.

Now the United Nations must find a way to make the rule of law real. It has chartered a special investigator, Serge Brammertz, to gather the facts and has called for an international tribunal to try the cases. It must make this rule of law stick.

But the killers always seem to win in Lebanon. That's the cynics' rejoinder, and, looking at the record of the past quarter-century, it's hard to argue otherwise. The healthy parts of Arab life keep being overwhelmed by the sickness. The more the United States and its allies try to support the forces of moderation, the more they seem to undermine them. Western ideas about democratic progress instantly produce deadly antibodies in the Arab body. The disease keeps winning.

Sadly, Ignatius is right, and it is predictable that the UN's "Investigative Inquiry" will submerge as the evidence and counter-evidence that crime forensics in the Muddled East produces surround the process. Professional assassins [remember the art form was invented in its derivation from "hashishiim" who killed the enemies of the Old Man of the Mountain while stoned] know how to cover their tracks as part of their metier and when caught, assassins tend to die quickly and unexplainably, so as not to reveal their paymasters.

Although Islam did have a cultural flowering from 850-1258, the political/economic trajectory of the Middle East has been downward relative to its neighbors since then. And one of the reasons for the Arab caliphs cession of their ascendancy to the Turks was that Arab caliphs rarely died a peaceful death. The Turks were able to counter this murderous tendency by killing all the brother-relatives of the Ottoman Caliph at his accession, and before that accession, sequestering them in the so-called Golden Cage. Read Lord Kinross's Ottoman Centuries for the details.
Ignatius ends his article on an downbeat note:

The idea that America is going to save the Arab world from itself is seductive, but it's wrong. We have watched in Iraq an excruciating demonstration of our inability to stop the killers. We aren't tough enough for it or smart enough -- and in the end it isn't our problem. The hard work of building a new Middle East will be done by the Arabs, or it won't happen. What would be unforgivable would be to assume that, in this part of the world, the rule of law is inherently impossible.

But the mass murders and then reprisals now occurring in Iraq indicate that assassinations have their democratized counterpart in civil war, or at least clan and tribal war on a broad scale.

Poor Lebanon merely suffers assassins who hide in Damascus and the mountains of the Shouf.