Instability Showers

Smoke of Iraq War 'Drifting Over Lebanon'
In Political and Social Life, Returned Fighters Inspire Climate of Militancy

By Anthony Shadid
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, June 12, 2006; A01

The war in Iraq has generated some of the most startling images in the Middle East today: a dictator's fall, elections in defiance of insurgent threats and carnage on a scale rarely witnessed. Less visibly, though, the war is building a profound legacy across the Arab world: fear and suspicion over Iraq's repercussions, a generation that casts the Bush administration's policy as an unquestioned war on Islam, and a subterranean reserve of men who, like Abu Haritha, declare that the fight against the United States in Iraq is a model for the future.

Abu Haritha's home, Tripoli, is one of the most visible manifestations of the war, a rough-and-tumble city being transformed by growing radicalism and religious fervor that may long outlast the death of Zarqawi and the U.S. presence in Iraq, now in its fourth year. Here, and elsewhere, that militancy may prove to be the inheritance of both the war and the Bush administration's professed aim of bringing democratic reform to the region.

As those currents gather force, Abu Haritha waits with a certain ease, confident of what is to come.

"Iraq is a badge of honor for every Arab and Muslim to fight the American vampire," he said.

"The Americans may enter Syria, they may enter another country, and we should prepare ourselves for them," Abu Haritha said at a cafe in a crowded alley. "We have to face them so that history won't record they entered our land without confrontation."

W's legacy: destabilizing the entire damn middle east.