WWII, Nasrallah, Pack Rats, Chalabi, Iraq Arch, Kingdom of Heaven

1) This is a nice editorial on WWWII:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1481793,00.html
Forward to VE Day
Our memory wars will never end, but a common future is
possible
Timothy Garton Ash in Warsaw
Thursday May 12, 2005
The Guardian
After a continent-wide round of commemorations to mark
the 60th anniversary of the end of the second world
war in Europe, it's clear that the peoples of Europe
have a shared past, but not a common one.
Sixty years on, the memory of war here in Warsaw is
still irreconcilable with that in Moscow. But it's
also utterly different from London's low-key festival
of "We'll meet again" nostalgia. Only in the
recollections of former inmates of the Japanese
prisoner-of-war camps does British memory approach the
horrors of daily degradation that are the stuff of
everyday Polish or Russian memory...
2)  This is a nice bio of Nasrallah, translated into
English by one of the readers of this list:
Le Monde | May 2nd 2005
Portrait
Hassan Nasrallah: man of the Party of God
By Patrice Claude
Bad omens in Lebanon. From $200 a piece on the black
market at the beginning of January, the price of a
Kalashnikov has recently risen to “close to 700”,
according to a newspaper in Beirut. In the void and
confusion that rule over Lebanon since the Syrian
withdrawal, the man who receives us is, in the phrase
of Samir Qassir, a Beiruti academic, “the one who
holds in his hands the keys of peace or war in
Lebanon”. One word from this small, stocky, bearded
man and this country of 4 million inhabitants could
plunge into another bloody civil war, like the one
that took place between 1975 and 1990 (146,000
victims).
The power of Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah is not illusory.
He is the uncontested chief of what the Americans, the
Israelis and many others consider a “terrorist
organisation”. The man who “guides” Hezbollah is by
contrast celebrated in Lebanon as a genuine resistance
fighter. Hundreds of thousands of Shiites vow him
admiration and obedience. The whole political class,
divided and quarrelsome as it may be, from Christians
to Sunnis by way of the Druze, regularly laud his
“charisma, his political intelligence, his genius for
organisation, and his statesman-like temperament”.
This does not mean that the man of the black turban,
whose portrait decorates thousands of houses, shops,
streets, schools and clinics in Lebanon’s Shiite
regions—they make up 40% of the population—has no
enemies.
Inside the country, those who do not like him denounce
the “diabolical ability” of a politician who arranges
things so that he can weigh in the conduct of affairs
without ever taking direct responsibility for them.
Other critics, secular and numerous in Lebanon, reject
above all what he represents: a shadowy and powerful
religious nationalism, complete with regiments of
disciplined devotees. On the outside, his principal
enemy is called Ariel Sharon, the Israeli prime
minister, who regularly warns anyone “who might want
to give this terrorist life insurance”.
Hassan Nasrallah—whose surname means “Victory of God”
in Arabic—is a targeted man. And he knows it. “I am
not losing sleep over it”, he affirms. But those who
want to approach him might find it a difficult task.
Surrounded 24 hours a day by a Praetorian guard of
young, suspicious men uniformly dressed in grey or
black, he never forgot how his “brother, friend and
mentor” Abbas al-Moussaoui was killed, along with his
wife and three-year-old daughter, on February 16th
1992 by an American Hellfire missile fired from an
Israeli helicopter which was lurking for him at a bend
on a mountain road.
“It was perhaps the only time we saw the sheikh weep”,
an old friend remembers. A few weeks later, Hassan
Nasrallah, at 32, replaced the deceased leader in one
of the most dangerous political functions in the
Middle East: secretary general of Hezbollah, the Party
of God.
Having been elected by his peers to a consecutive
fifth term in office in August 2004, Nasrallah lives
in semi-reclusion, appearing only occasionally and
never announced. His address in Beirut, assuming he
has only one, is one of the best-kept secrets in a
country that talks too much. Apart from a few
relatives, no one knows what his wife looks like, or,
for that matter, his three children, aged 25, 20 and
15. Also unknown are the likenesses of his eight
brothers and sisters, and those of his mother and
father, we do not even know if they are dead or alive.
This personality, which Farid Khazen, professor of
political sciences at the American University of
Beirut, considers as “the best known and most popular
Shiite figure of the Arab World”, remains an enigma
for the majority of his compatriots. Did he keep only
friends from the years 1976-78 when he was studying at
the seminary in Najaf, the holy city of world Shiism?
One encounter at least has changed him for ever, that
with the “spiritual master” who at the time was a
refugee in Najaf: Ayatollah Khomeini. “His presence
radiated,” remembers Nasrallah, “in his company, time
and space became immaterial.”
For the young student of theology, 18 years old at the
time, it was a revelation. Even today, in Lebanon, the
teachings and portraits of the Iranian Guide of world
Islamic revolution dominate the intellectual and urban
landscapes of Hezbollah. Without Khomeini, his advice,
his weapons, the millions of dollars and the hundreds
of revolutionary guards he dispatched to Lebanon after
the Israeli invasion of 1982, the Party of God would
have never seen the light of day. From that troubled
period Nasrallah has kept “an old dream”: to become
one day an ayatollah, a mujtahid, that is a recognised
interpreter of the divine word, and even—why not?—a
marji, a supreme religious guide and “source of
imitation” for millions of practicing Shiites.
After the death of Khomeini in 1989, Hezbollah
endorsed his successor on the spiritual throne of the
Iranian theocracy, Ayatollah Khamenei. Yet, even
though the creation in Lebanon of an Islamic
government à l’iranienne is still a declared aim of
the party in its official manifesto of 1985, Secretary
General Nasrallah is no less keen to repeat that,
because of the “religious diversity particular to
Lebanon”, an Islamic state, “which in any case cannot
be imposed by force, is not on the agenda”.
In Najaf, another marji, Grand Ayatollah Ali
al-Sistani, who belongs to the quietist school of
Shiism, which refuses to “squander” religion in the
exercise of temporal power, is on the same line. On
many occasions since the American intervention in Iraq
in 2003, Nasrallah, full of his aura in the region,
called for “the defence” of the old ayatollah and for
“respecting his word”. The two men, however, are
neither exactly on the same wavelength—the Lebanese
hardly appreciate the cooperation of Iraqi Shiites
with America and would have certainly preferred that
Ali Sistani call for Jihad against the invaders—nor
are they from the same world.
As much as his men like systematically to give him his
title as a presumed descendant of the prophet, “His
Eminence Sayyed Nasrallah