The Second Coming of Saladin

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/IE18Ak01.html

Conditions are more than ripe for the advent of a new Saladin - after the Nakhba, the 1967 lightning Israeli victory against the Arabs, the failures of pan-Arabism, the occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq, the Israeli attack on Lebanon, the limited appeal of Salafi-jihadism, the non-stop stifling of nationalist movements by Western-backed brutal dictatorships/client monarchies.


Iran of course can be very persuasive, holding some tasty cards up its sleeve - such as hard-earned intelligence directly implicating the Saudis in training the Sunni Arab muqawama (resistance) in Iraq on explosive form penetrators (EFPs), which the Pentagon foolishly insists come from Iran. Everyone in Iraq knows it is operatives from "axis of fear" allies Saudi Arabia and Egypt - and also Pakistan - who have provided the Sunni Arab guerrillas in Iraq with technology and training on improvised explosive devices and EFPs.

...I'm leavin' on a jet plane, don't know when I'll be back again. Oh babe I love to go:

A possible Saudi-Iranian entente would be a classic case of local powers taking the destiny of the region in their own hands. In a parallel register, in southern Beirut - prime Hezbollah territory - there are plenty of banners in front of buildings destroyed by Israel last summer. They read: "The Zionist enemy destroys, the Islamic Republic of Iran builds."


The UN Sounds Blue

There are jackels out
there in the fields,
guarding a hundred ghosts,
dead Roman soldiers
near Saladdin's castle-

-a bat
skirts
through
the early morning air-

The UN makes another patrol
down the thistle-lined
roads of South Lebanon.
The sun will climb over the horizon
one more time to make a small history
where Christ will walk -

sweeping for land mines
in the frost-cracked hills.

The jackal is innocent if we
let her be, leave her to her pups.
Their cry sounds like a herd of goats

-or a hundred frogs

-or dying birds

-a plague of locusts

Bats witness to Rome and Geneva
in the weary eyes of the UN
that hide in jeeps and tanks,

big white tanks-

their blue flag courses in the wind

flappity flap flap flap,

it sounds blue, like blue flappity flap
in the cold southern wind full of jackal.