Dispatch From the 'New' Mideast

DAMASCUS, Syria

Lubna is a thoroughly secular Muslim. She likes watching B movies on satellite channels and seeking out the latest reality shows sweeping the United States. She spends much of her time in Damascus coffeehouses, writing sitcoms that appear on Arabic television stations. Her latest series was about love -- 30 episodes, 30 plotlines.

The 25-year-old is the daughter of a former political prisoner who spent 15 years incarcerated in Syria, so she has an insider's sense of the cost of political involvement in her country. And she has studiously shunned politics herself. When she found her mother tuned to al-Jazeera the other day, watching the gruesome images from an Israeli attack on the southern Lebanese town of Qana that killed mostly women and children, she grabbed the remote and switched the channel to her favorite show -- "Oprah."

Lubna, in short, embodies "the new Middle East" of Condoleezza Rice's dreams. Except she isn't sure that she wants any part of it.

"Our generation could have been different," she told me with exasperation recently, clutching a Diet Pepsi in one hand and a mentholated cigarette in the other. We had taken refuge from the Damascus heat in an air-conditioned room at a friend's art gallery. "We really could have made peace. But now," she shook her head, "it's over. That possibility is gone."

And, she says, it's the United States's fault, because it didn't demand an immediate cease-fire in Lebanon. As the estimated death toll there rises to nearly 1,000, she and other secular Syrians of the art-gallery-and-democracy crowd are turning their sympathies toward the Islamic militant movement Hezbollah.

It's not a natural alliance. Even though most of the Syrian population has sided overwhelmingly with Hezbollah -- cars draped in the movement's flags roll through the streets of Damascus, and posters of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad flanked by Hezbollah leader Hasan Nasrallah and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad adorn minibuses and storefronts -- Syria remains, in name at least, a secular country. Women in tank tops walk along the street next to women wearing hijab, and the mosque shares a corner with the neighborhood pub. But over the past year, the Syrian regime has forged closer ties with Islamic groups both inside and outside the country. And that has increased secular Syrians' wariness of the rising religious conservatism around them.

But they're just as wary of the United States's failing democracy experiment in Iraq. The sectarian violence tearing that country apart is a potent vision of what they could one day face themselves. And so they feel forced into a corner, made to choose between a U.S. plan for a "new Middle East" that seems to show little respect for Arab lives and Arab ways and an Islamic-led resistance that could eventually turn against them at home.

And they are reluctantly choosing. "The issue of Hezbollah and the war is no longer rational," one Syrian opposition figure told me. "It is emotional."

In an apartment on the outskirts of Damascus, a group of twentysomethings recently played a game of 20 questions over beers and arak , a strong Mediterranean liquor. A young woman asked: "If you could live anywhere in the world, where would it be?"

It's a frustrating question for many of these young people -- a Syrian passport doesn't get you very far these days. Amre, 29, is a writer. He blurts out his answer: "I have to live in New York before I die."

Another person answers Barcelona. A third longs to return to his hometown of Aleppo.

As the game winds down, they start joking about what they would do if the war spread into Syria. A month ago, many would have said something different. But tonight most hardly hesitate before saying they would have no choice but to support Hezbollah.

When one young man disagrees, worrying about the consequences of siding with an Islamic movement, Amre, a Heineken in hand, accuses him of being an "American." Amre may dream of living in New York, but he knows this is the worst insult you can level at someone in the Arab world these days.

The host's mother says she's against Hezbollah, but has a lot of respect for Nasrallah. "He's a kind of Che Guevara," she says.

Many in the group nod.

"Before what happened, I was against Hasan Nasrallah," Amre says. "But in war, I was forced to choose. Now, I have to join Nasrallah's team.

"I'm against the new maps the United States is creating in the region," he adds, and pauses. Then he shakes his head. "But I'm really lost."

rhondaroumani@yahoo.com

Rhonda Roumani is a freelance journalist in Damascus.