Why the Lebanese feel so switched off

Below the Future Television offices in Kantari, there is a digital counter to record the number of days that have passed since the assassination of Rafik Hariri. The idea is to mark how long it takes for the truth to come out in the case, and presumably for justice to be rendered. However, the last time I looked, two weeks ago, the counter had been switched off.

It was a deeply reluctant Saad Hariri who made his way to Damascus this past weekend. As he made clear during and after his one-night stay in the presidential palace that Rafik Hariri had built for the Syrian regime, he was doing it all because political reality demanded such “reconciliation.” As prime minister, he had no choice but to open a new page with what he pointedly remarked was Lebanon’s only Arab neighbor, in the context of inter-Arab concord sponsored by Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah.

Hariri has not forgotten his father, but like the counter that has been turned off he had to bend to the aftereffects of the Saudi-Syrian rapprochement. It was never Riyadh’s priority to obtain justice after the former prime minister was killed. At the memorable meeting between then-Crown Prince Abdullah and Bashar Assad in the Saudi capital in early March 2005, there were two facets to the conversation. The Saudis told Assad it was time to remove his soldiers from Lebanon; but they also made it clear that the kingdom would repay Assad by helping to reintegrate Syria into the Arab fold and let bygones be bygones.

Abdullah’s subsequent comments to senior Lebanese March 14 politicians confirmed his hardnosed reading of Arab realities. The regimes of the region generally don’t like to make things personal, and only when Assad did make things personal, by allying himself with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s Iran and calling the Saudi leadership “half-men” during the Lebanon war of 2006, did the Riyadh-Damascus relationship collapse.

Yet the period was not a good one for the Saudis. Their allies in Lebanon were set upon by Syria and Hizbullah and pushed onto the defensive. The effective Saudi and Egyptian boycott of the Arab League summit in Damascus in March 2008 backfired (both countries sent only low-level representatives), as most Arab heads of states attended, quite a few from the Gulf. And Hizbullah’s subsequent onslaught against western Beirut and Aley in May 2008 brought on a conference hosted by the Saudis’ bitter rival, Qatar, from which Riyadh was largely excluded and where the March 14 coalition had to accept a disadvantageous settlement.

Rather than Syria being isolated, it was Saudi Arabia and Egypt who were, a matter further reinforced during the war in Gaza almost one year ago. Both regimes were ambiguous enough about the conflict and the possibility of Hamas emerging stronger from it, that they found themselves working against the grain of angry Arab public opinion. This may have been defensible from the perspective of their self-interest, but it placed King Abdullah in such an uncomfortable position that he decided it was time to extend a hand to Bashar Assad, against what the Saudi monarch saw as the real problem in the region: Iran. After all, it was the Assad regime and the Iranians who had encouraged Hamas to scuttle the Gaza truce, which prompted the Saudis to try dividing the two.

The Saudi gamble has yet to show results. While Syria and Iran may be going in different directions, we’re nowhere near a rift. Too much is at stake for both sides to allow such a thing. Syria still needs Hizbullah to complete its counterattack in Lebanon, which the Saudis have closed their eyes to in the hope that what Syria regains in Beirut, it will surrender with regard to Tehran. The Syrians see no reason to break with the Iranian regime over the Palestinian track either. Iran helps finance Hamas, while Syria has used the movement to great effect as leverage in its own bargaining with Israel and the United States; but also in gaining more control over Palestinian decision-making against other Arab states.

In Iraq, Syria and Iran have contradictory aims, as the Syrians and Saudis appear to be colluding, each for reasons of their own, against the emergence of a stable order in Baghdad. The Obama administration, because of its impatience to withdraw its soldiers from the country, is leaving behind a vacuum that Iraq’s neighbors are trying to fill. But even there Syria and Iran have time and again overlooked their differences, while Saudi dependency on Syrian cooperation has only increased.

Those utterly ignored in the game of nations that led Saad Hariri to Damascus were the Lebanese. Almost five years after Rafik Hariri’s murder, only six months after voters gave March 14 a new majority in Parliament, Lebanon has fallen back into Syria’s hands. People cannot understand why, and do not want to. Being pawned off by one Arab state to another is not what those who participated in the Independence Intifada troubled themselves for, particularly those civilians humiliated in May 2008 by a militia that had turned its guns against its own countrymen. For many people the images from Damascus were, justifiably, nauseating, a veneer of bogus unity plastered over a series of unpunished murders, their perpetrators grinning with satisfaction.

Many give Saad Hariri credit for going through a genuinely taxing undertaking. But many more of those who sided with the majority remain unsympathetic. They sense that despite their endurance during the hard times, their political leaders have been too willing to abandon principle, to abandon the victims, and to disregard an uneasy population that they once manipulated with alacrity. We’re in for a period of prolonged political discontent among the Lebanese, not to say outright disgust, because the country is afflicted with politicians and parties on both sides of the political divide who offer no vision for sovereign Lebanese statehood.

The Syrian perspective toward Lebanon has changed not one iota since 2005. If Assad could drive his tanks into Beirut once again, he would not hesitate to do so. But for now he doesn’t need to. Lebanon is the prize in a sordid regional transaction that its own leaders have legitimized. We can’t be sure what the consequences will be, but don’t expect the Lebanese to care much about their state in the future, its independence, or the rule of law. Those heady words were emptied of their meaning last Saturday.