Ruins in His Wake: President Bush, in the Middle East this week for probably the last time in his presidency, is leaving behind a region in far worse shape than he found it eight years ago despite the toppling of Saddam Hussein in Iraq and the Taliban in Afghanistan. (Photo by Ronen Zvulun-Pool/Getty Images).

In an American Scholar article in Autumn 1993, then in a book in 2001, the historian Bernard Lewis asked about Islam's decline from high civilization to closed-in regression, "What Went Wrong?" The same question can be asked about George W. Bush's Middle East policy, with one distinction: a few weeks of deceptive military victories in Iraq and Afghanistan aside, it never had a high point in eight years.

Bush this week is making what will likely be his final trip to the Middle East as president (parachuting flash-visits to Iraq and Afghanistan notwithstanding). It's one of eight foreign trips he's undertaking in 2008 as domestic policy wears on him and foreign travel gives him a chance at what "a political and a psychological books," as The Times' Sheryl Gay Stolberg put it Sunday.

But how much of a boost can he get from the Middle East?

In Afghanistan, in Iraq, in Lebanon, in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, the "war on terror" and al-Qaeda's free reign in Pakistan, with regards to Iran's nukes, even with regards to oil policy and Saudi Arabia or relations with North Africa and the Maghreb, which Bush has virtually ignored, conditions today are more belligerent, more unstable, or, in Iraq's case, more catastrophic than they were eight years ago.

Hamas is as entrenched as ever in Gaza. Hezbollah faced down the Lebanese government and its army this month, bringing Lebanon a hair away from a resumption of dormant its civil war. Bush thought he was moving Israelis and Palestinians toward a "final" peace agreement with his carefully choreographed conference at Annapolis late last year. But he proved as personally committed to that conference as he was to his "road map" for peace in 2002--which is to say, not committed at all.

There's a reason for the disengagement and the failures it brought about: "At no point," writes Aaron David Miller in his just-releast The Much Too Promised Land, "did anyone, with the exception of several lonely souls at the State Department, believe that advancing the Arab-Israeli issue might actually help in the president's war on terror and his goals in Iraq." Bush himself certainly didn't think so. Vice President Dick Cheney scorned any connection between the Arab-Israeli issue and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

So here we are, at a worse point for American involvement in the Middle East than, possibly, ever. How did we get this low this fast? Here's a country-by-country profile of the Bush presidency and the Middle East.

For Palestinians, Every Day is Al-Naqba--the Catastrophe: A Palestinian woman weeps over the rubble of her home in the Gaza Strip's Rafah Refugee Camp. The Israeli military demolished the home, one of dozens, during an operation in 2003. (Photo by Abid Katib/Getty Images).

May 14, 1948 marks Israel's declaration of independence. To Israelis, it's a day of celebration. For Palestinians and Arabs, May 14, 1948 marks a day of rage they call al-Naqba, Arabic for "the Catastrophe."

The stereotypical view of the Palestinian Arabs voluntarily abandoning the land and society they'd thrived on was a Western implant, developed early in the narrative of the Jewish-Arab conflict--and countered, from time to time, just as early by factual observers.

Dana Adams Schmidt, writing in The New York Times on May 15, 1948, the day after Israel's Declaration of Independence, illustrates the point:

Zionists commonly indulge in certain fallacies about their Arab neighbors.

Firstly, they imagine that opposition to Jewish immigration comes only from the effendis (the term originally applied to landowners) and other representatives of a vestigial feudalism. On the contrary, Arab opposition is wide and deep. Even though the upper classes are articulate, the Arab fellaheen resents the foreign "intruders" and their innovations and has drunk his share of the new wine of Arab nationalism.

Secondly, many Zionists maintain that the Arabs of Palestine do not mind the influx of Jews and would live in peace with them but that "foreign Arabs" from other Arab states have stirred up trouble and led attacks.

In fact, although the Palestine Arab may be even less gifted militarily than others and Syrians and Iraqis constantly crop up in the news, most of the shooting in Palestine has been done by Palestinians.

See my full account of the meaning and controversies of al-Naqba.

Few documents in Middle Eastern history have had as consequential and controversial an influence as the Balfour Declaration of 1917. But who was it named for, and what was the meaning of the declaration, and does it remain such a contentious chapter in the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict?

Read my brief history and analysis of the Balfour Declaration. And see below an image of the actual declaration as originally typed by the office of Lord Balfour. The document, which is in the public domain, is held at the British Library.

Next week Israel turns 60. To Israelis, it's both a proud and anxious anniversary. The country is as rich, economically vibrant and strong as it's ever been. It's also in as difficult a situation as it's been since 1948.

Hostility from within Israel is growing among Israel's Arab population, which makes up 20 percent of its 7 million inhabitants. There's immense resentment from the 3 million Palestinians under Israeli occupation in the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem. There's the noisy belligerence of Iran and Hezbollah, Iran's proxy army in Lebanon, and the continuing rise of Islamic fundamentalism, which pegs its popularity to the rhetoric of hatred toward Israel.

What does the future hold for Israel? Can it survive as a democracy? Will it even be a viable state 60 years from now?

Join the discussion, speak your views in the forum.

That's how it was in Lebanon back in 1974 and 1975, just before the outbreak of civil war: labor strikes turning violent, protesters blocking roads, setting tires on fire, clashing with police or each other, militias taking to the streets and marking their turf until, on April 13, 1975, the civil war broke out in earnest. It lasted 15 years and claimed 150,000 to 200,000 lives in a country of less than 4 million.

And that's how it's felt this week in Lebanon as a General Labor Confederation strike turned violent today. As always in Lebanon, a mishmash of causes and grievances latch on to seemingly unrelated events and explode into uncontrollable circumstances. The confederation represents the country's labor unions, much like the AFL-CIO in the United States. The confederation called the general strike to protest rising prices and demand an increase in the minimum wage. Meanwhile, the Lebanese government has been confronting Hezbollah, the Shiite opposition group and militia, over Hezbollah's installation of an illegal telephone and surveillance-camera network around Beirut's international airport and in South Lebanon. The Lebanese government wants the cameras and the network removed. Hezbollah claims it's paerty of its defenses against Israel (the telephone network was used by hezbollah during its 2006 war with Israel).

What does the labor strike have to do with Hezbollah's spy network? Nothing. But when the Lebanese government sacked the airport's security chief over his refusal to stop Hezbollah from setting up its spy cameras, Hezbollah used the labor strike as an excuse to take to the streets, allegedly on the side of protesters, to block roads (including the road to the airport), set tires and cars on fire, and engage in gun battles with Sunni gunmen. In Lebanon as in Iraq, Sunnis and Shiites, though Muslims both, despise each other.

Violence escalated from there. The Lebanese army was seen rushing from clash to clash to keep Sunnis and Shiites from battling each other, although the army has yet to confront Hezbollah directly over the closing of the airport road or Hezbollah's spy cameras.

To many Lebanese, this is all too reminiscent of the months leading up to the 1975-1990 civil war. Lebanese press reports quote many saying that the tensions of the last 17 months are finally exploding into outright warfare. For those 17 months, Lebanon has been gripped by a constitutional crisis over the choice of a new president. The crisis pits the western-backed government against a Hezbollah-led opposition backed by Syria and Iran. What has so far been a proxy war between those forces may finally erupt into open conflict.

Aaron David Miller was an Arab-Israeli specialist at the State Department for almost a quarter century. He served six administrations along the way, Democratic and Republican, beginning with the Carter administration in 1978 and ending with the second Bush administration in 2003. The Much Too Promised Land: America’s Elusive Search for Arab-Israeli peace, is a testament of those years, rather than to those years: From Miller’s vantage point, America’s mediating role in the Middle East has been more limited than the public realizes, and less effective and failure-prone than American policy makers like to believe.

Miller’s story-telling is breezy and immediate. He was a witness to history, however unseemly the history. But his writing is atrocious. He cannot write a page without a cliché, and usually many more than that. His sports analogies, his penchant for quoting high officials’ obscenities, his sometimes stunningly sophomoric conclusions (“What stands in the way of a solution is the absence of political will and leadership on both sides to understand what’s necessary to meet the other side’s needs and to take the political decisions to move forward”) undermine the seriousness of the book.

Then again, those very deficiencies unwittingly speak of the very weaknesses in American policy that Miller diagnoses so well: the principal reason for the failure of American policy in the Arab-Israeli conflict is American officials’ insistence on seeing it all exclusively from the American and Israeli perspective, through the prism of American analogies, simplicities and history. Miller himself admits repeatedly to his biases. He once wrote a book about the PLO “with almost no contacts with actual Palestinians.” You’d think he’d learned a lesson. He hasn’t. Aside from his affinity for Arafat’s slippers and kindnesses, along with a couple of interesting negotiators and translators, Palestinians are absent from Miller’s book, just as they seem to be from American negotiators’ perspectives.

The book is nevertheless valuable for its summation of a history from that particularly American, and, by Miller’s own admission, glaringly deficient, perspective.

See my full review of Aaron David Miller's The Much Too Promised Land.

It isn't often that an Arab nation will hold an event where human rights hold center stage. Today and tomorrow, however, Bahrain is holding the first Human Rights International Film Festival, first of its kind of a Gulf Cooperation Council country. The festival coincides this year with the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Israel's 60th anniversary this month and, this week, World Press Freedom Day.

Bahrain's festival is sponsored by the Bahrain Society for Public Freedom and Democracy Watch, with approval from Bahrain's King Hamad. The 27 films featured include entries from India, Japan, Pakistan, Canada, Palestine, Jordan, Iraq, the United States, and Lebanon. But not Bahrain.

Bahrain has its own human rights problems. In February, Human Rights Watch reported on torture and abuse, physical and sexual, alleged by inmates held in Bahraini prisoners, and the Bahraini government's refusal to let independent physicians examine the prisoners. In 2007, the country resumed executions in murder and terrorism cases for the first time since 1977. The same year, two Bahrainis were imprisoned for distributing political leaflets, and were freed only after Human Rights Watch's intervention. In general, Bahrain's arbitrary detentions and suspension of basic civil rights has intensified in the last two years. And the country's political structure remains autocratic, with a minority Sunni family ruling over a majority Shiite population.

So why not a single film on human rights conditions in Bahrain on the festival's list? Festival director Nasser Burdestani was candid in his explanation: "We're not showing films from Bahrain for two reasons," he told Gulf Weekly. "One is that we don't have any films that in my opinion are good enough quality and the second is that it is the first festival and we don't want to show something relating to Bahrain and conflict with the government."

In fact, every film to be shown must be cleared by local authorities first. Among those Burdestani says he hopes will be screened is "Sous Les Bombes," a French film by Philippe Aractingi that won awards at the Venice, Sundance and Dubai film festivals. The film deals with the Israel-Lebanon war in 2006.

Full disclosure: Philippe and I were not just schoolmates at the Petit College in Beirut in the late 1960s, but close friends. Naturally, I'm rooting for him.

Meanwhile another Lebanese was roiling and riling Bahrainis on the eve of the festival. The Lusty and luscious Haifa Wehbe, one of Lebanon's bustiest voices and a Miss Lebanon runner up, was appearing in a singing engagement at Bahrain's Gulf Convention Center in her trademark skimps: loose and occasionally see-through green dress (green is the color of hope in Orthodox iconography, but also the color of Islam), and sparkling make-up to go along with her sparkling sarcasm.

Members of the Bahraini parliament had voted unanimously to ban the performance, thankfully to no avail. A few of them were almost certainly hiding in the audience. And Wahbe teased them, asking fans if she was allowed to love them back after all the love they professed to her.

Restaurants, cinemas and theaters closed, flags were lowered to half staff, and at one point sirens blared across the country--not as warning of an attack, but as a signal to millions of Israelis to shut off their engines, stop working, hang up their phones, stop chattering, and observe two minutes of silence in remembrance of the 6 million Jews murdered by the Nazis from 1933 to 1945.

Thursday marked Israel's annual Holocaust Remembrance Day.

At Yad Vashem, the nation's custodian of Holocaust documentation, memory, heroism and education, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and others laid a wreath at the at the Warsaw Ghetto uprising memorial. "Today." Olmert said, "the 60-year-old State of Israel promises the millions of Jews who disappeared into the eternal silence that we will forever uphold the memory of the events of the Holocaust."

Israel declared its independence on May 14, 1948. Harry Truman, president of the United States at the time, recognized Israel's existence within 11 minutes of the declaration. Olmert was careful on Thursday not to connect the Holocaust with the creation of Israel, although it's undeniable that the two events are in many ways intricately and painfully connected. Auschwitz-Birkenau in Poland, the Nazi death camp where between 1.1 million and 1.6 million people were exterminated, some 90 percent of them Jews, 12,000 people took part today in the March of the Living ceremony, and were led, for the first time, by an Israeli military chief--Lt. Gen. Gabi Ashkenazi, chief of staff of the Israeli army.

"The fact that an independent Jewish state exists is not something to be taken for granted," Ashkenazi said. "Even today, we hear the horrible sounds of those who call for the destruction of the state of Israel. Even today we are forced to continue and fight for our right to have a national home in a safe place for the Jewish people in their own land. We have learned our lesson and we take very seriously the threats of state leaders who call for the destruction of Israel."

True to form, the Arab press was virtually silent on Holocaust Remembrance Day, when it wasn't flat-out vile. In Mid-April Hamas' Al-Aqsa TV broadcast an "educational" program claiming that "The Satanic Jews thought up an evil plot [the Holocaust] to be rid of the burden of the disabled and handicapped, in twisted criminal ways. While they accuse the Nazis or others so the Jews would seem persecuted, and try to benefit from international sympathy. They were the first to invent the methods of evil and oppression."

In a perverted sense, the Hamas libel is an improvement: Islamists and other Israel-hating extremists generally take the deniers' approach that the Holocaust never happened. (You can see the video for yourself.)

The Arab world has a new English-language daily newspaper. The National was launched on April 17 in Abu Dhabi , one of the six wealthy emirates that form the . “The role of The National,” writes Martin Newland, 46, the daily’s editor-in-chief, “is to reflect society, help that society evolve and, perhaps most importantly, promote the bedrock traditions and virtues that must be preserved even in times of change.”

Down the road in Dubai, the 7th Annual Arab Media Forum last week featured a scroll of speakers and themes focused on "Bridging Arab Media Through Technology," but also controversy as participants criticized the Arab League's latest suppression of nascent media freedoms throughout the Middle East--a media charter, signed by 20 of the league's 22 member nations, that gives regimes the power to shut down television stations or deny them access to satellites.

Read my full report on "The Media Landscape in the UAE."

Guns Over Afghanistan: The shadow of repression stalks the beleaguered country, especially from within. (Photo by John Moore/Getty Images)

One of the very few funny bits in A Thousand Splendid Suns (Khaled Hosseini's much less successful follow-up to The Kite Runner), features the novel's two heroines burying a television in their backyard in Kabul, the Afghan capital. By then the two women, Mariam and Laila, are not just dealing with the brutality of the man imprisoning them in his house, but with the Taliban, which rules the country by the noose of its prohibitions: Singing is forbidden, dancing is forbidden, playing cards, playing chess, flying kits, writing books, painting, watching films, listening to music--all strictly forbidden.

The Taliban had taken to raiding homes to ensure that every prohibition was being followed. People found with a television were liable to be whacked or publicly beaten with "lashings of soles and palms." So there they were, the two women, lowering their plastic-wrapped television into the hole they'd dug. "When it was safer, they'd agreed," Hosseini writes, "when the Taliban cut down on their raids, in a month or two or six, or maybe longer, they would dig the TV up."

Tallying the Taliban's Repressions

Its own fictional fantasies about establishing a caliphate over and done with five years after its regime took hold of Afghanistan, the Taliban, of course, was routed from Kabul and at least a few parts of Afghanistan with the 2001 American-supervised invasion and subsequent infusion of NATO troops. Afghanistan after that was supposed to be the "good war," the example from the West to the East of what an enlightened occupation could bring--democracy, pluralism, peace, stability. It hasn't turned out that brightly.

An Embarrassment of Failures

On Friday, Afghan President Hamid Karzai was raging against the Bush administration and the British government for flouting Afghan independence and killing too many civilians in heavy-handed attacks. "I want an end to civilian casualties,” he told The New York Times. “As much as one may argue it’s difficult, I don’t accept that argument.”

Two days later, while Karzai was out celebrating Afghan Mujahideen Day, gunmen attempted to assassinate him. He escaped. But three people were killed. Instead of celebrating the nation's pride and military, the event turned into a national embarrassment--the more so for having unraveled so soon after Karzai had dressed down western forces for not letting Afghans assume more authority for their country.

The attack on Karzai should be no surprise: leaders in the region, and those who visit them, routinely live in fear of assassination and make it a habit not to wander out of their fortresses. Even when they're supposedly safe inside those fortresses, they occasionally have to duck and take cover, as U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice did last week in another contrived, surprise visit to Baghdad.

Return of Prohibitions

But less known to Western eyes and ears is the degree to which Afghanistan has regressed to its old, Taliban self. The Taliban doesn't have to be in power for retrograde clerics to keep the country's morality police busy, and to ensure that old bigotries thrive.

A few days before the assassination attempt on Karzai, the ministry of information and culture, the Times reported, "ordered television networks to stop broadcasting five soap operas." The reason: they're not in keeping with "Afghan religion and culture." We're not talking General Hospital or Passions here, nothing like Starr learning of her unwanted pregnancy in General or Eve in Passions explaining how Julian could die if he gets aroused (that's from an episode last week).

The fare on Afghan airwaves is much tamer. It's all the product of Indian television--"Will Prina on “Life’s Test” convince her husband that she is not having an affair with a tycoon, Mr. Bajaj? Can Tulsi, the heroine of “Because the Mother-in-Law Was Once the Daughter-in-Law,” ward off the schemes of her husband’s former mistress?"--but even that is too much for dour mullahs, especially after a local television station, Tolo TV (which is perennially in trouble with the authorities), showed men and women dancing together at some sort of awards ceremony. Multisex dancing in Afghanistan is still taboo.

Cosmetic Controls

The country is struggling to rebuild. The Taliban still controls huge regions. Al-Qaeda is across the hills and in nearby Pakistan. The US-NATO counter-insurgency war is in a rut. And Afghan authorities can't keep control of their own military parades long enough to keep them from being infiltrated by insurgents. In light of all that, the country's self-righteous brigades imagine they can manufacture a sense of order out of impositions and prohibitions. The most they'll be doing is joining the crowd of those attempting to rule and repress Afghans from above. But haven't Afghans spent the last 35-odd years proving to what extent they'll refuse to submit to authority, especially the irrational, heavy-handed kind? With or without television, Afghans are adept at one thing: changing the channel they don't like.