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The saga of the Syrian Scuds sent to Hezbollah, or perhaps not sent, continues, though for now mainly in the corridors of Washington.
The latest on the matter has come from Senator Dianne Feinstein, the chair of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. She pointed out, in a statement to AFP on Wednesday, “I believe there is a likelihood that there are Scuds that Hezbollah has in Lebanon. A high likelihood.” Feinstein added that “[t]he rockets and missiles in Lebanon are substantially increased and better technologically than they were, and this is a real point of danger for Israel.”
Meanwhile, Jeffrey Feltman, the assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs, told the House Foreign Affairs Committee, also on Wednesday, that the Obama administration would have “really, really serious” concerns if Syria transferred Scuds to Hezbollah. Feltman also brought the subject of the weapons up in conversations with the Syrian foreign minister, Walid al-Mouallem, and with Mohammad Chatah, a political advisor to Prime Minister Saad Hariri.
“If these reports turn out to be true,” Feltman said, “we’re going to have to review the full range of tools that are available for us in order to make Syria reverse what would be an incendiary, provocative action.”
Feltman’s call to Chatah had more than a little hint of warning in it. Hariri declared recently in Italy that the Scud allegations against Syria and Hezbollah were similar to the false claims that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction before the US invasion of 2003. That did not go down well in Washington. Feltman has indicated that Lebanon’s only real protection against Israel is UN Security Council Resolution 1701, and the Americans must have interpreted the prime minister’s remarks as covering for two of the parties undermining the resolution.
The problem is that Washington is of several minds over what to do about Syria. Feltman’s warning was sharp, and the State Department has taken a tougher position on Syria than others in the US capital. Earlier this week, for instance, Syria’s deputy chief of mission was called in to discuss the arms transfers to Hezbollah. However, Feltman, who honed his distrust of Syrian ways as ambassador to Lebanon after the assassination of Rafik Hariri, is also convinced that the United States gains by sending an ambassador back to Damascus.
The mood in Congress is mixed as well. There are those like John Kerry, the chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, who support engagement of Syria. But there are others, in both the Senate and House, who want to take a harder line with the Assad regime. Some advocate tightening sanctions and delaying sending Robert Ford, the new US ambassador in Damascus, to his posting.
Not for the first time when the Middle East is involved, the debate has become mainly an insular one. It’s about Washington and who can impose the Syria agenda (and by extension other related agendas affecting Iran and Hezbollah). That’s not to say that someone like Feltman doesn’t mean it when he says that the consequences of Syrian actions may be dire; but ultimately the foreign policy bureaucracy has less of a say on high-profile topics than those calculating in strictly political terms, whether at the White House or on Capitol Hill.
For a variety of reasons, domestic dynamics seem to be gaining ground in the American outlook on the Middle East. President Barack Obama is more vulnerable than ever since taking office, principally for two reasons: domestically, he has not fulfilled his promise of being a consensual president, and the discord over the health care bill embodied this shortcoming. Obama may have made history, but Democrats are bracing for the backlash next November. They also realize that polling is showing increasing public displeasure with big government, a mainstay of Obama’s political program.
In foreign affairs, the president has also come up short. His high hopes for success in the Middle East have been dashed. Many Arabs welcome the tension in US-Israeli relations, but the net effect is that Palestinian-Israeli negotiations remain stalled. Engagement of Syria and Iran has failed, while the administration is still unsure about how to deny Iran nuclear weapons. In Afghanistan the US faces an uphill struggle, with its main ally, President Hamid Karzai, regarded by many American officials as part of the problem. The withdrawal from Iraq is going forward, but Iraq is no longer high in American preoccupations, offering Obama diminishing marginal election returns.
Everyone is calculating in the shadow of these dynamics, and how they will affect Obama’s power. But because there is no broad accord, and because the president has not provided clear guidance on resolving Mideastern problems, there is confusion in Washington. And where there is confusion there is policy bedlam, with everyone trying to fill the vacuum. That explains why the Syrians feel they can relax for now, and why the Iranians see no reason yet to fear an American riposte.
Lebanon should be worried about American uncertainty. When there is doubt in Washington, it usually means the Israelis have wide latitude to do what they see fit here. With much of the Lebanese political class openly or objectively siding with Hezbollah, rather than shaping an American approach to Lebanon that might reinforce its sovereignty, we can guess the calamitous effect of that abdication.
Friday, April 23, 2010
Thursday, April 22, 2010
A question mark hovers over Washington
It is beginning to dawn on some people that Barack Obama’s recent victory in passing his groundbreaking health-care bill has done more harm than good to the president’s ambitions in the Middle East, particularly on the Palestinian-Israeli front. Not surprisingly, American priorities in the region are moving elsewhere.
Obama’s health package was a heavy meal for the United States to digest, regardless of its merits or demerits. The legislation polarized attitudes in the country, at a time when Americans fear a heavier future tax burden because of the health bill, but also because of the massive rescue plan following the financial meltdown of 2008.
More generally, Americans are increasingly mistrustful of big government, a point made by Andrew Kohut, president of the Pew Research Center, in a recent Wall Street Journal opinion piece in which he described the results of a series of surveys carried out by his institution. “By almost every conceivable measure, Americans are less positive and more critical of their government these days,” Kohut wrote. “There is a perfect storm of conditions associated with distrust of government – a dismal economy, an unhappy public, and epic discontent with Congress and elected officials.”
This does not bode well for Obama in November’s congressional and gubernatorial elections. In such a political context, the president is highly unlikely to pick a fight with Israel and in that way alienate pro-Israel voters, who form a core Democratic constituency. But that’s not all. Confronting Israel may also mobilize key Republican groups against the White House, and a great deal in the election will hinge on which party gets its constituencies out to vote. For now, the advantage seems to be leaning distinctly the Republicans’ way.
After the initial disagreement with Israel over settlement-building in East Jerusalem, the Obama administration, rather discernibly, stepped back from a full-fledged brawl. There were leaks that Washington might propose the outlines of a final peace plan, in effect cornering the Israelis, but that scheme didn’t go anywhere. Palestine seems to have steadily drifted down the administration’s importance list. Instead, US officials have become much more publicly concerned with tightening the screws on Iran’s nuclear program, and with showing they will not tolerate Syrian arms transfers to Hizbullah.
This shift represents the surest confirmation yet that Obama’s campaign promise of “engaging” Tehran and Damascus has failed. The president’s apprenticeship in the tortured ways of the Middle East may soon end, to be replaced with a more cohesive regional strategy. Or it may not end, amid signs of deep discord in Washington, particularly over Israel and Syria. If Obama is to assert his leadership on these issues, he will have to iron out the differences.
Take the recent reports that Syria has armed Hizbullah with Scud missiles. Those opposed to US engagement of Syria and those supporting it have been furiously shaping the story in a way that might advance their agenda. On Monday, Syria’s deputy chief of mission was summoned to Foggy Bottom, as the State Department spokesman Gordon Duguid put it, “to review Syria’s provocative behavior concerning the potential transfer of arms to Hizbullah.” Duguid indicated that this was the fourth time the US had expressed concerns, and added, “[o]ur dialogue with Syria on this issue has been frank and sustained. We expect the same in return.”
Not only did Duguid’s admission point to the fact that Damascus apparently sees no risks in being hard of hearing, US officials had earlier qualified his warning by saying they could not confirm the Scuds had been transferred. American displeasure was little apparent when Senator John Kerry, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, pushed the appointment of the new US ambassador to Syria, Robert Ford, through his committee, to be voted on by the full Senate. Plainly, Washington is speaking in several tongues on Syria, even as little is being said about another possible “game changer” in a war with Israel, namely advanced anti-aircraft systems that might affect Israeli air superiority over Lebanon.
Confusion was no less present after reports this past weekend that the US defense secretary, Robert Gates, had sent a secret memo to the White House suggesting the administration needed a backup plan if sanctions and negotiations failed to interrupt Iran’s nuclear program. Much of the debate that followed focused on whether Gates had issued a “wake up” call or not. But that was secondary; the secretary only hinted at what everyone else has been saying for over a year: Obama’s Middle East strategy is ambiguous, even incomplete.
Both Syria and Iran will continue to happily maneuver in the spaces opened up by policy disagreements inside Washington. Palestinian-Israeli negotiations have been brought to a halt as the administration is split over what to do next with Israel; Syria is enjoying watching the wrangling between those for and against engagement, and sees no reason to alter its behavior toward Hizbullah; and Tehran can delight in the fact that even a senior official like Gates has quite forcefully requested clearer guidelines on Iran from his boss.
Obama is finding that US behavior in the Middle East was not just about George W. Bush. However, by the time he makes good on that realization, the president’s ability to control policy may have greatly diminished. All politics are local, and foreign policy often succumbs to domestic dynamics. November may be the cruelest month for Obama, if he loses his majority. The states of the region are waiting. All they see in Washington is a big question mark.
Obama’s health package was a heavy meal for the United States to digest, regardless of its merits or demerits. The legislation polarized attitudes in the country, at a time when Americans fear a heavier future tax burden because of the health bill, but also because of the massive rescue plan following the financial meltdown of 2008.
More generally, Americans are increasingly mistrustful of big government, a point made by Andrew Kohut, president of the Pew Research Center, in a recent Wall Street Journal opinion piece in which he described the results of a series of surveys carried out by his institution. “By almost every conceivable measure, Americans are less positive and more critical of their government these days,” Kohut wrote. “There is a perfect storm of conditions associated with distrust of government – a dismal economy, an unhappy public, and epic discontent with Congress and elected officials.”
This does not bode well for Obama in November’s congressional and gubernatorial elections. In such a political context, the president is highly unlikely to pick a fight with Israel and in that way alienate pro-Israel voters, who form a core Democratic constituency. But that’s not all. Confronting Israel may also mobilize key Republican groups against the White House, and a great deal in the election will hinge on which party gets its constituencies out to vote. For now, the advantage seems to be leaning distinctly the Republicans’ way.
After the initial disagreement with Israel over settlement-building in East Jerusalem, the Obama administration, rather discernibly, stepped back from a full-fledged brawl. There were leaks that Washington might propose the outlines of a final peace plan, in effect cornering the Israelis, but that scheme didn’t go anywhere. Palestine seems to have steadily drifted down the administration’s importance list. Instead, US officials have become much more publicly concerned with tightening the screws on Iran’s nuclear program, and with showing they will not tolerate Syrian arms transfers to Hizbullah.
This shift represents the surest confirmation yet that Obama’s campaign promise of “engaging” Tehran and Damascus has failed. The president’s apprenticeship in the tortured ways of the Middle East may soon end, to be replaced with a more cohesive regional strategy. Or it may not end, amid signs of deep discord in Washington, particularly over Israel and Syria. If Obama is to assert his leadership on these issues, he will have to iron out the differences.
Take the recent reports that Syria has armed Hizbullah with Scud missiles. Those opposed to US engagement of Syria and those supporting it have been furiously shaping the story in a way that might advance their agenda. On Monday, Syria’s deputy chief of mission was summoned to Foggy Bottom, as the State Department spokesman Gordon Duguid put it, “to review Syria’s provocative behavior concerning the potential transfer of arms to Hizbullah.” Duguid indicated that this was the fourth time the US had expressed concerns, and added, “[o]ur dialogue with Syria on this issue has been frank and sustained. We expect the same in return.”
Not only did Duguid’s admission point to the fact that Damascus apparently sees no risks in being hard of hearing, US officials had earlier qualified his warning by saying they could not confirm the Scuds had been transferred. American displeasure was little apparent when Senator John Kerry, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, pushed the appointment of the new US ambassador to Syria, Robert Ford, through his committee, to be voted on by the full Senate. Plainly, Washington is speaking in several tongues on Syria, even as little is being said about another possible “game changer” in a war with Israel, namely advanced anti-aircraft systems that might affect Israeli air superiority over Lebanon.
Confusion was no less present after reports this past weekend that the US defense secretary, Robert Gates, had sent a secret memo to the White House suggesting the administration needed a backup plan if sanctions and negotiations failed to interrupt Iran’s nuclear program. Much of the debate that followed focused on whether Gates had issued a “wake up” call or not. But that was secondary; the secretary only hinted at what everyone else has been saying for over a year: Obama’s Middle East strategy is ambiguous, even incomplete.
Both Syria and Iran will continue to happily maneuver in the spaces opened up by policy disagreements inside Washington. Palestinian-Israeli negotiations have been brought to a halt as the administration is split over what to do next with Israel; Syria is enjoying watching the wrangling between those for and against engagement, and sees no reason to alter its behavior toward Hizbullah; and Tehran can delight in the fact that even a senior official like Gates has quite forcefully requested clearer guidelines on Iran from his boss.
Obama is finding that US behavior in the Middle East was not just about George W. Bush. However, by the time he makes good on that realization, the president’s ability to control policy may have greatly diminished. All politics are local, and foreign policy often succumbs to domestic dynamics. November may be the cruelest month for Obama, if he loses his majority. The states of the region are waiting. All they see in Washington is a big question mark.
Friday, April 16, 2010
They love Barack, whether he thrives or dives
This week the Carnegie Middle East Center held a gala at the Phoenicia Hotel. The event was highlighted by a roundtable discussion that included Jessica Matthews, the president of the Carnegie Endowment. Matthews was asked several questions about Iran’s nuclear program, and her answers, in many regards, showed how wide a berth President Barack Obama has been given by those who can influence policy in Washington.
Matthews argued that something had definitely changed on Iran under the Obama administration. She noted that the international consensus had turned against the Islamic Republic, which “hated” being taken to the United Nations Security Council. At the same time, however, Matthews acknowledged that it was difficult to predict what the outcome of UN sanctions against Tehran might be.
As a National Security Council staffer during the 1970s who covered nuclear proliferation issues, Matthews is worth listening to. However, there was a clear subtext to her comments, namely that Obama had succeeded in pushing the political burden of Iran’s nuclear project onto the Iranians, whereas George W. Bush had failed to do so. Matthews’ colleague, Dmitri Trenin, director of Carnegie’s Moscow Center, echoed that thought by adding “the ball is in Iran’s court.”
But is it really? The ultimate test is how effective the United States will be in using international goodwill to prevent Iran from building a nuclear weapon. For now, the signs are not reassuring. Obama may be popular with policy mavens in the American capital (even as his appeal abroad appears to be waning), but all Matthews was really telling us is that the optics have changed, that Obama is easier to like than Bush. However, if Iran builds a bomb anyway, political burden or not, this alone will be the measure of its success.
It is remarkable how often Barack Obama has been judged positively on his intentions by the policy community, while Bush was judged (justifiably) on the basis of his actions. This isn’t sour grapes. One can debate Obama’s Middle East policy, but his effort to avoid a military confrontation with Iran is judicious. The administration’s efforts to suspend Israeli settlement building are overdue. And Obama’s desire to “engage” Iran and Syria is, in some ways, defensible. But ultimately, the only benchmark we should use to determine if the US president is doing things right is whether he achieves his political aims.
Yet Obama is at serious risk of letting his actions undermine his intentions. Attacking Iran is a bad idea, but the administration, through Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, needn’t have so explicitly removed military action from the table recently. All this did was confirm that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is right when saying the US will fail in derailing Iran’s nuclear program – surely winning him key internal debates on the matter in Tehran.
Washington’s standoff with Israel is excellent news, but there has been a high price to pay. It put off the start of “proximity talks”, which the administration expended considerable political capital to initiate. The delay may prove fatal to Obama’s peace efforts if it drags on until the November congressional elections, where there is a distinct possibility that voters will turn against the president, in large part because of the discontent provoked by his health care plan.
As for engagement, we have seen the consequences of Obama’s opening to Syria in recent weeks. Damascus has never stopped arming Hezbollah, in violation of Security Council Resolution 1701. The latest reports are that the Syrians may have sent the party advanced anti-aircraft weaponry and even Scud-D missiles. The information was apparently serious enough to be brought up by John Kerry, the chairman of the Senate’s Foreign Relations Committee, with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad recently in Damascus.
Yet the administration did nothing more, persisting in its decision to return an ambassador, Robert Ford, to Syria. Kerry moved the approval through his committee, and now the full Senate is expected to vote on Ford’s nomination, though this may be held up by senators demanding more information before deciding. Don’t be surprised if Assad, like Ahmadinejad, concludes that America has jelly for knees.
And yet Obama still can do little wrong among the policy centers and foreign affairs journalists, the non-governmental organizations and Middle East studies departments, and the reason is that most remain devoured by antipathy for George W. Bush. It’s still very much about Bush in Washington, and about Obama as the anti-Bush. But Obama has proven less insightful than his predecessor about the benevolence of other states, and he is much more ambiguous about the uses of American power. That’s why he needs to be assessed on the grounds of his verifiable achievements, not according to relative intangibles, such as whether he has altered the international mood on Iran.
A few years ago had someone defended Bush in the same way that Obama is being defended today by many who should know better, he or she would, rightly, have been ridiculed. Power is what matters, and for the moment Obama is hemorrhaging power in the Middle East.
Matthews argued that something had definitely changed on Iran under the Obama administration. She noted that the international consensus had turned against the Islamic Republic, which “hated” being taken to the United Nations Security Council. At the same time, however, Matthews acknowledged that it was difficult to predict what the outcome of UN sanctions against Tehran might be.
As a National Security Council staffer during the 1970s who covered nuclear proliferation issues, Matthews is worth listening to. However, there was a clear subtext to her comments, namely that Obama had succeeded in pushing the political burden of Iran’s nuclear project onto the Iranians, whereas George W. Bush had failed to do so. Matthews’ colleague, Dmitri Trenin, director of Carnegie’s Moscow Center, echoed that thought by adding “the ball is in Iran’s court.”
But is it really? The ultimate test is how effective the United States will be in using international goodwill to prevent Iran from building a nuclear weapon. For now, the signs are not reassuring. Obama may be popular with policy mavens in the American capital (even as his appeal abroad appears to be waning), but all Matthews was really telling us is that the optics have changed, that Obama is easier to like than Bush. However, if Iran builds a bomb anyway, political burden or not, this alone will be the measure of its success.
It is remarkable how often Barack Obama has been judged positively on his intentions by the policy community, while Bush was judged (justifiably) on the basis of his actions. This isn’t sour grapes. One can debate Obama’s Middle East policy, but his effort to avoid a military confrontation with Iran is judicious. The administration’s efforts to suspend Israeli settlement building are overdue. And Obama’s desire to “engage” Iran and Syria is, in some ways, defensible. But ultimately, the only benchmark we should use to determine if the US president is doing things right is whether he achieves his political aims.
Yet Obama is at serious risk of letting his actions undermine his intentions. Attacking Iran is a bad idea, but the administration, through Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, needn’t have so explicitly removed military action from the table recently. All this did was confirm that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is right when saying the US will fail in derailing Iran’s nuclear program – surely winning him key internal debates on the matter in Tehran.
Washington’s standoff with Israel is excellent news, but there has been a high price to pay. It put off the start of “proximity talks”, which the administration expended considerable political capital to initiate. The delay may prove fatal to Obama’s peace efforts if it drags on until the November congressional elections, where there is a distinct possibility that voters will turn against the president, in large part because of the discontent provoked by his health care plan.
As for engagement, we have seen the consequences of Obama’s opening to Syria in recent weeks. Damascus has never stopped arming Hezbollah, in violation of Security Council Resolution 1701. The latest reports are that the Syrians may have sent the party advanced anti-aircraft weaponry and even Scud-D missiles. The information was apparently serious enough to be brought up by John Kerry, the chairman of the Senate’s Foreign Relations Committee, with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad recently in Damascus.
Yet the administration did nothing more, persisting in its decision to return an ambassador, Robert Ford, to Syria. Kerry moved the approval through his committee, and now the full Senate is expected to vote on Ford’s nomination, though this may be held up by senators demanding more information before deciding. Don’t be surprised if Assad, like Ahmadinejad, concludes that America has jelly for knees.
And yet Obama still can do little wrong among the policy centers and foreign affairs journalists, the non-governmental organizations and Middle East studies departments, and the reason is that most remain devoured by antipathy for George W. Bush. It’s still very much about Bush in Washington, and about Obama as the anti-Bush. But Obama has proven less insightful than his predecessor about the benevolence of other states, and he is much more ambiguous about the uses of American power. That’s why he needs to be assessed on the grounds of his verifiable achievements, not according to relative intangibles, such as whether he has altered the international mood on Iran.
A few years ago had someone defended Bush in the same way that Obama is being defended today by many who should know better, he or she would, rightly, have been ridiculed. Power is what matters, and for the moment Obama is hemorrhaging power in the Middle East.
Thursday, April 15, 2010
The Ghosts of Martyrs Square
Interview by Nicholas Lowry of Michael Young regarding Young's latest book "Ghosts of Martyrs Square: An Eyewitness Account of Lebanon’s Life Struggle."
Michael Young, the opinion editor of the Daily Star and a contributor to this website, has written his first book, The Ghosts of Martyrs Square: An Eyewitness Account of Lebanon’s Life Struggle, which hits stores today. A mix of reportage as well as an introduction to Lebanon’s political culture, the book focuses on the turbulent period in Lebanese history stretching from the assassination of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri in 2005 and the subsequent withdrawal of Syrian forces that same year, to 2009, which Young says marked Syria’s return. NOW Lebanon caught up with Young to talk about his new book, the events of the last four years, and Lebanon’s future.
First the obvious: What inspired you to write The Ghosts of Martyrs Square?
Michael Young: I always wanted to write something on Lebanon, and after 2005 this vague desire suddenly had the structures of a genuine story, and in many respects part of that story was developing as I was writing the book. I was lucky – or perhaps unlucky – that there was a neat finality to the story. It begins in 2005 with the assassination of Rafik Hariri and ends in 2009 with what I consider to be the return of Syrian domination over Lebanon – 2005, of course, being the year the Syrians withdrew their army. But also more generally the point of the book was to use the events between 2005 and 2009 to write an introduction to Lebanon’s political culture. It was always my idea that this book would be more than a narrative limited in time; it would also be a way of explaining how Lebanon functions.
It’s common in Lebanon and the West to bemoan Lebanon’s sectarian system, but you note a somewhat paradoxical connection between the sectarian balance and the inability of one group to dominate others, and the country’s relative openness and vibrancy.
Young: I think that Lebanon, though it is a dysfunctional place, is also in many respects a paradoxically liberal place. Why paradoxical? Because its liberalism is often based on illiberal institutions. Political leaders in Lebanon are not really liberals. The way the system functions, its reliance on sect, is not inherently liberal. Yet this mishmash of contradictions in the society has allowed spaces to open up where people can behave much more freely than in other parts of the Middle East.
My argument is quite simple: The biggest problem in the Middle East is the overbearing state that keeps citizens in line with the perpetual threat of violence, usually implicit. But in Lebanon, because of the sectarian structure, we were never able to develop such a state. Society is stronger than the state, in many respects. And, while this poses problems, it also has advantages, because it is much more difficult to impose an autocratic order. So Lebanon’s different sects tend to balance each other out, the system tends toward equilibrium, and consequently it’s more difficult for a single leader or group of leaders to control all aspects of life.
To what degree during the years of Syrian domination were certain spaces closed off, and to what degree did the Syrians respect those spaces?
Young: The Syrians allowed spaces in which society could maneuver, as they could not control everything. They essentially controlled the commanding heights of the system and the machinery of repression. They used this sparingly, and, when they did use it, they tended to operate through the Lebanese.
The Syrians to a certain extent respected [the] rules of the game... And one of the arguments of the book is that Bashar al-Assad, when he extended the mandate of [then-President] Emile Lahoud in 2004, made the mistake of not respecting those rules... These were in no way liberal rules, but there was always a certain understanding between the Syrian leadership and the Lebanese political class, and when Bashar failed to respect them, there was a revolt of part of the Lebanese political leadership that had once been allied with Syria.
What happened in 2005 did not begin as a popular movement; it only became that later on once Hariri was assassinated. But let me add that while the Syrians did respect certain rules, at least until 2004, what they also did was empty Lebanon’s political system of its meaning by eroding any sense of constitutional continuity.
As someone who has supported March 14, where do you think the coalition went wrong, what did it do right?
Young: One thing I must insist upon is that my book is not a March 14 interpretation of what happened in 2005, even if my sympathies for the objectives of March 14 are evident. On the contrary, what I want to argue once again is that what happened in 2005, while it was a popular revolt for about one month, began as a revolt of part of the Lebanese ruling class against Syria, in part because they felt the Syrians had betrayed them by extending Lahoud’s mandate. This was not a liberal revolt on their part; it was not a revolt for freedom and independence; it was a revolt because part of the ruling class felt Syria was trying to marginalize them.
When Hariri was assassinated in February that’s when people came out, when you had a genuine popular revolt, which, incidentally, some leaders in March 14 always wanted to ensure that they could control. We saw what happened in its aftermath: the divisive elections of 2005. When you look at Lebanese politics you have to understand the limitations on political action. The notion that what happened in February to March 2005 was a revolution against the established order was always, to my mind, very naïve.
Where did March 14 go wrong?
Young: March 14 was always a coalition of disparate forces that remained united through a common agreement that Syria had to leave Lebanon, then later through a common fear of a Syrian return to Lebanon in the aftermath of the Syrian military withdrawal in April 2005. The Syrians almost immediately began a process of trying to reassert their control over Lebanon even though there was an electoral alliance in 2005 between Saad Hariri, Walid Jumblatt and two Syrian allies, Hezbollah and Amal. When that alliance broke down and Syria continued to try to reassert its domination, this forced March 14 to remain unified against a Syrian return.
March 14 was always a coalition of parallel interests. It was not a party, not a movement. It was a coalition of different forces that pragmatically came together against Syria. And last year, when Saad Hariri, at the urging of Saudi Arabia, was compelled to reconcile with Syria, March 14 began disintegrating. Suddenly the game changed. And that is why the end of the book is quite pessimistic. It’s a post-mortem of sorts. Syria is back politically, and I very much believe they intend to prepare the terrain for a military return.
Michael Young, the opinion editor of the Daily Star and a contributor to this website, has written his first book, The Ghosts of Martyrs Square: An Eyewitness Account of Lebanon’s Life Struggle, which hits stores today. A mix of reportage as well as an introduction to Lebanon’s political culture, the book focuses on the turbulent period in Lebanese history stretching from the assassination of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri in 2005 and the subsequent withdrawal of Syrian forces that same year, to 2009, which Young says marked Syria’s return. NOW Lebanon caught up with Young to talk about his new book, the events of the last four years, and Lebanon’s future.
First the obvious: What inspired you to write The Ghosts of Martyrs Square?
Michael Young: I always wanted to write something on Lebanon, and after 2005 this vague desire suddenly had the structures of a genuine story, and in many respects part of that story was developing as I was writing the book. I was lucky – or perhaps unlucky – that there was a neat finality to the story. It begins in 2005 with the assassination of Rafik Hariri and ends in 2009 with what I consider to be the return of Syrian domination over Lebanon – 2005, of course, being the year the Syrians withdrew their army. But also more generally the point of the book was to use the events between 2005 and 2009 to write an introduction to Lebanon’s political culture. It was always my idea that this book would be more than a narrative limited in time; it would also be a way of explaining how Lebanon functions.
It’s common in Lebanon and the West to bemoan Lebanon’s sectarian system, but you note a somewhat paradoxical connection between the sectarian balance and the inability of one group to dominate others, and the country’s relative openness and vibrancy.
Young: I think that Lebanon, though it is a dysfunctional place, is also in many respects a paradoxically liberal place. Why paradoxical? Because its liberalism is often based on illiberal institutions. Political leaders in Lebanon are not really liberals. The way the system functions, its reliance on sect, is not inherently liberal. Yet this mishmash of contradictions in the society has allowed spaces to open up where people can behave much more freely than in other parts of the Middle East.
My argument is quite simple: The biggest problem in the Middle East is the overbearing state that keeps citizens in line with the perpetual threat of violence, usually implicit. But in Lebanon, because of the sectarian structure, we were never able to develop such a state. Society is stronger than the state, in many respects. And, while this poses problems, it also has advantages, because it is much more difficult to impose an autocratic order. So Lebanon’s different sects tend to balance each other out, the system tends toward equilibrium, and consequently it’s more difficult for a single leader or group of leaders to control all aspects of life.
To what degree during the years of Syrian domination were certain spaces closed off, and to what degree did the Syrians respect those spaces?
Young: The Syrians allowed spaces in which society could maneuver, as they could not control everything. They essentially controlled the commanding heights of the system and the machinery of repression. They used this sparingly, and, when they did use it, they tended to operate through the Lebanese.
The Syrians to a certain extent respected [the] rules of the game... And one of the arguments of the book is that Bashar al-Assad, when he extended the mandate of [then-President] Emile Lahoud in 2004, made the mistake of not respecting those rules... These were in no way liberal rules, but there was always a certain understanding between the Syrian leadership and the Lebanese political class, and when Bashar failed to respect them, there was a revolt of part of the Lebanese political leadership that had once been allied with Syria.
What happened in 2005 did not begin as a popular movement; it only became that later on once Hariri was assassinated. But let me add that while the Syrians did respect certain rules, at least until 2004, what they also did was empty Lebanon’s political system of its meaning by eroding any sense of constitutional continuity.
As someone who has supported March 14, where do you think the coalition went wrong, what did it do right?
Young: One thing I must insist upon is that my book is not a March 14 interpretation of what happened in 2005, even if my sympathies for the objectives of March 14 are evident. On the contrary, what I want to argue once again is that what happened in 2005, while it was a popular revolt for about one month, began as a revolt of part of the Lebanese ruling class against Syria, in part because they felt the Syrians had betrayed them by extending Lahoud’s mandate. This was not a liberal revolt on their part; it was not a revolt for freedom and independence; it was a revolt because part of the ruling class felt Syria was trying to marginalize them.
When Hariri was assassinated in February that’s when people came out, when you had a genuine popular revolt, which, incidentally, some leaders in March 14 always wanted to ensure that they could control. We saw what happened in its aftermath: the divisive elections of 2005. When you look at Lebanese politics you have to understand the limitations on political action. The notion that what happened in February to March 2005 was a revolution against the established order was always, to my mind, very naïve.
Where did March 14 go wrong?
Young: March 14 was always a coalition of disparate forces that remained united through a common agreement that Syria had to leave Lebanon, then later through a common fear of a Syrian return to Lebanon in the aftermath of the Syrian military withdrawal in April 2005. The Syrians almost immediately began a process of trying to reassert their control over Lebanon even though there was an electoral alliance in 2005 between Saad Hariri, Walid Jumblatt and two Syrian allies, Hezbollah and Amal. When that alliance broke down and Syria continued to try to reassert its domination, this forced March 14 to remain unified against a Syrian return.
March 14 was always a coalition of parallel interests. It was not a party, not a movement. It was a coalition of different forces that pragmatically came together against Syria. And last year, when Saad Hariri, at the urging of Saudi Arabia, was compelled to reconcile with Syria, March 14 began disintegrating. Suddenly the game changed. And that is why the end of the book is quite pessimistic. It’s a post-mortem of sorts. Syria is back politically, and I very much believe they intend to prepare the terrain for a military return.
Syria seeks a military return to Lebanon
When Syria’s President Bashar Assad withdrew his army from Lebanon in 2005, there was a naive belief he had accepted the new situation and would be satisfied merely with reasserting Syrian political influence in Beirut. In fact, his ambition always was, and remains, to return Syria militarily to Lebanon.
In recent weeks, the US has accused Syria of transferring advanced weaponry to Hizbullah. Kuwait’s Al-Rai al-Aam newspaper and Israeli media have suggested this may include Scud-D missiles. There have also been reports, including statements by Israeli officials, that Syria has sent the party anti-aircraft missiles, including possibly the advanced SA-24 Igla. Damascus has denied this, but in 2007, when Hizbullah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, said the party had acquired a new “surprise” weapon against Israel, many believed that he meant an advanced anti-aircraft capability.
It is hard to accept as credible Syria’s denials that it has sent improved weapons to Hizbullah when Assad has repeatedly stated that he would not allow the “resistance” to be defeated. Senator John Kerry, a prominent defender of American engagement of Damascus, is said to have raised concerns about the weapons when he last visited with the Syrian president. Why is Damascus upping the ante in Lebanon today?
Let’s go back to April 2007 to understand Assad’s frame of mind. At the time, the Syrian president received UN chief Ban Ki-moon, in Damascus. The two men discussed several issues, then Assad made this comment: “In Lebanon, divisions and confessionalism have been deeply anchored for more than 300 years. Lebanese society is very fragile. [The country’s] most peaceful years were when Syrian forces were present. From 1976 to 2005 Lebanon was stable, whereas now there is great instability.”
Assad was right; there was great instability. And that was largely thanks to the efforts of Syria and its Lebanese allies, who between 2005 and 2009 undermined all efforts by the parliamentary majority to consolidate a sovereign Lebanese state. But Assad’s assessment was more than a detached observation. It was an essential part of his worldview, passed on by his father, Hafez, that Syria must rule over Lebanon to punch above its weight in the Middle East.
And without a military presence in Lebanon, Bashar Assad knows, Syrian hegemony will always be incomplete. Damascus has no real “soft power” in Beirut. It’s allies, other than Hizbullah, which is ultimately more Iranian than Syrian, are weak. Only an army in place can intimidate the two communities at the heart of the Syrian regime’s preoccupations since the mid-1970s, when Hafez Assad dispatched his brigades to Lebanon: the Sunnis and the Maronites.
The Maronites have lost much since then, but continue to be a significant thorn in the Syrians’ side. They have long led opposition to Syria, and even if Michel Aoun has reconciled with Damascus, his efforts have convinced few Christians. The Syrians aren’t blind. The Lebanese Forces have proven more dynamic than the Aounists lately, even if there are Christians who will never embrace Samir Geagea. But the future bodes ill for the Aounists. The movement is divided over Aoun’s succession and is likely to fragment once he expires.
The Syrians are watching Geagea very carefully, and have made it clear that their relationship with Prime Minister Saad Hariri is partly a function of Hariri’s ties with Geagea. Syria wants to break the Hariri-Geagea bond, and through it a Sunni-Maronite barrier to a Syrian military return. But Assad also must sense that unless his army is in Lebanon, little will keep the Sunnis and Maronites in line.
More disturbing to Syria’s regime is Lebanese Sunni discontent. Strangely enough, Geagea speaks to that more effectively than Hariri, principally because the prime minister is constrained by his position and by his Saudi sponsors. The Sunnis are the main hindrance to absolute Syrian control over Lebanon, a community as powerful as the Shiites, a reminder to the minority-dominated Assad regime of its own vulnerabilities, and, under Hariri, a personification of the divorce from Syria after the assassination of Rafik Hariri and the May 2008 takeover of western Beirut by Hizbullah and Syria’s allies.
In this context, what role are the Syrian arms to Hizbullah playing? To return to Lebanon militarily, Syria needs several prerequisites: An Arab consensus in favor; an Israeli green light; approval by Western governments, above all the United States; and a Lebanese political class that is split over Syria. Assad is working hard on the last of these conditions, and would probably face anemic Arab opposition to a military return to Lebanon if the situation allowed it.
That leaves the US and Israel. In 1976, both signed off on a Syrian move into Lebanon to bring the PLO to heel. If Bashar Assad were able to depict Hizbullah as a new PLO, a threat to regional stability, he might successfully replicate his father’s actions over three decades ago. But for that to work, the Syrian leader needs a new war to show up the party as a problem that only Syria can resolve. So you arm Hizbullah with weapons that are game changers in a conflict against Israel. However, Hizbullah need not worry. Assad would never stifle the party, since he needs to keep it alive as a menace to justify Syria’s presence in Lebanon. This would return the country to the pre-2005 balance that Syria and Hizbullah mutually benefited from.
That’s Assad’s objective, but can he implement it? Much will depend on America. Unless Assad sees that a new Lebanon war might also harm him, he will continue to plot his Lebanese military comeback.
In recent weeks, the US has accused Syria of transferring advanced weaponry to Hizbullah. Kuwait’s Al-Rai al-Aam newspaper and Israeli media have suggested this may include Scud-D missiles. There have also been reports, including statements by Israeli officials, that Syria has sent the party anti-aircraft missiles, including possibly the advanced SA-24 Igla. Damascus has denied this, but in 2007, when Hizbullah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, said the party had acquired a new “surprise” weapon against Israel, many believed that he meant an advanced anti-aircraft capability.
It is hard to accept as credible Syria’s denials that it has sent improved weapons to Hizbullah when Assad has repeatedly stated that he would not allow the “resistance” to be defeated. Senator John Kerry, a prominent defender of American engagement of Damascus, is said to have raised concerns about the weapons when he last visited with the Syrian president. Why is Damascus upping the ante in Lebanon today?
Let’s go back to April 2007 to understand Assad’s frame of mind. At the time, the Syrian president received UN chief Ban Ki-moon, in Damascus. The two men discussed several issues, then Assad made this comment: “In Lebanon, divisions and confessionalism have been deeply anchored for more than 300 years. Lebanese society is very fragile. [The country’s] most peaceful years were when Syrian forces were present. From 1976 to 2005 Lebanon was stable, whereas now there is great instability.”
Assad was right; there was great instability. And that was largely thanks to the efforts of Syria and its Lebanese allies, who between 2005 and 2009 undermined all efforts by the parliamentary majority to consolidate a sovereign Lebanese state. But Assad’s assessment was more than a detached observation. It was an essential part of his worldview, passed on by his father, Hafez, that Syria must rule over Lebanon to punch above its weight in the Middle East.
And without a military presence in Lebanon, Bashar Assad knows, Syrian hegemony will always be incomplete. Damascus has no real “soft power” in Beirut. It’s allies, other than Hizbullah, which is ultimately more Iranian than Syrian, are weak. Only an army in place can intimidate the two communities at the heart of the Syrian regime’s preoccupations since the mid-1970s, when Hafez Assad dispatched his brigades to Lebanon: the Sunnis and the Maronites.
The Maronites have lost much since then, but continue to be a significant thorn in the Syrians’ side. They have long led opposition to Syria, and even if Michel Aoun has reconciled with Damascus, his efforts have convinced few Christians. The Syrians aren’t blind. The Lebanese Forces have proven more dynamic than the Aounists lately, even if there are Christians who will never embrace Samir Geagea. But the future bodes ill for the Aounists. The movement is divided over Aoun’s succession and is likely to fragment once he expires.
The Syrians are watching Geagea very carefully, and have made it clear that their relationship with Prime Minister Saad Hariri is partly a function of Hariri’s ties with Geagea. Syria wants to break the Hariri-Geagea bond, and through it a Sunni-Maronite barrier to a Syrian military return. But Assad also must sense that unless his army is in Lebanon, little will keep the Sunnis and Maronites in line.
More disturbing to Syria’s regime is Lebanese Sunni discontent. Strangely enough, Geagea speaks to that more effectively than Hariri, principally because the prime minister is constrained by his position and by his Saudi sponsors. The Sunnis are the main hindrance to absolute Syrian control over Lebanon, a community as powerful as the Shiites, a reminder to the minority-dominated Assad regime of its own vulnerabilities, and, under Hariri, a personification of the divorce from Syria after the assassination of Rafik Hariri and the May 2008 takeover of western Beirut by Hizbullah and Syria’s allies.
In this context, what role are the Syrian arms to Hizbullah playing? To return to Lebanon militarily, Syria needs several prerequisites: An Arab consensus in favor; an Israeli green light; approval by Western governments, above all the United States; and a Lebanese political class that is split over Syria. Assad is working hard on the last of these conditions, and would probably face anemic Arab opposition to a military return to Lebanon if the situation allowed it.
That leaves the US and Israel. In 1976, both signed off on a Syrian move into Lebanon to bring the PLO to heel. If Bashar Assad were able to depict Hizbullah as a new PLO, a threat to regional stability, he might successfully replicate his father’s actions over three decades ago. But for that to work, the Syrian leader needs a new war to show up the party as a problem that only Syria can resolve. So you arm Hizbullah with weapons that are game changers in a conflict against Israel. However, Hizbullah need not worry. Assad would never stifle the party, since he needs to keep it alive as a menace to justify Syria’s presence in Lebanon. This would return the country to the pre-2005 balance that Syria and Hizbullah mutually benefited from.
That’s Assad’s objective, but can he implement it? Much will depend on America. Unless Assad sees that a new Lebanon war might also harm him, he will continue to plot his Lebanese military comeback.
Friday, April 9, 2010
A Lebanese directory of the dead
Next week, on April 13, Lebanon will commemorate the 35th anniversary of the start of its civil war, and you know the event will provoke laments that the Lebanese have no collective memory. Why not do something different for a change? Praise the ability of the Lebanese to forget, but with one caveat that we will return to below.
The ability of a nation to forget is underrated. When their war ended in 1990, it was not easy for the Lebanese to reach common agreement over what their 15-year nightmare was about. We could all agree that it had been a nightmare, that we were glad it was now finished, and that we regretted the fate of all those who had been killed or who had disappeared. But who was to blame? What had started the whole mess? There was no consensus among Lebanese on the answers.
So they forgot. And their forgetting was facilitated by the two pillars sustaining Lebanon’s postwar order: Syria and the reconstruction process led by the late Rafik al-Hariri. The Syrians engineered an amnesty law in 1991 that was designed to pardon wartime crimes. However, the flip side of this arrangement, as we saw with Lebanese Forces leader Samir Geagea, was that if Syria and its Lebanese acolytes could declare people innocent, it also meant they could declare them guilty if political conditions demanded it.
The amnesty law was a whitewash, but it was a necessary one. Lebanon, and by extension Syria, could not have realistically built a postwar order by condemning the abusers in the war, since that would have meant condemning every leader tasked with ending Lebanon’s wartime mindset. It would have also meant apportioning blame, and the Lebanese could find no accord on who to blame.
Then there was the reconstruction effort. Rafik al-Hariri was not a man whose natural tendency was to wallow in the past. Nor could he afford this. His reconstruction project was a thing for the future, because that’s what investment is about, and while it could be criticized in many ways, the optimism the late prime minister sought to exude and peddle left little room for recollection of the war. Indeed it necessitated a hefty dose of amnesia, since looking brightly ahead meant avoiding at all costs looking, disconsolately, backward.
Was this so bad? Lebanon was not alone in understanding that, sometimes, you have to draw a big black X through the past to progress. In recent days, for example, the Spanish judge Baltasar Garzon was indicted for investigating crimes committed by the forces loyal to General Francisco Franco during the Spanish civil war, despite the fact that Spain passed an amnesty law in 1977. Garzon’s initiative may have been defensible morally, but legally and politically it crossed a red line the Spanish authorities could not permit, because the point of the amnesty law was to put to bed a divisive past.
But we can now throw in that caveat. If it is impossible for the Lebanese to reach unanimous agreement over what their war was about, nothing prevents them from remembering in a pluralistic way. Here we are in 2010, two decades after the end of the war – meaning a period of time five years longer than the duration of the war itself – and yet hardly a memorial to the conflict can be found anywhere.
If you drive by the Defense Ministry complex in Yarzeh, you will see the monolithic Arman sculpture Hope for Peace, which was at one time supposed to be placed in the downtown area as a memento to the folly of war. That is until someone, perhaps Hariri himself, decided (not without aesthetic justification) that it would be folly to place it in an area seeking to evoke a very different version of the past. Other than that, a brief village statue or commemorative cannon here, or an eroding plaque there is all that we have to remind us of our conflict.
Lebanon can really do a bit more at this stage. Museums, memorials, even an official day of remembrance for the dead and disappeared, are all mnemonic devices that would allow the Lebanese to remember individually what happened, and to pass this on to their children. Why not start by asking the government to print a book with the names and photos of those who died or disappeared, with no more or less than their names, date of birth, and date of death when known?
This wouldn’t cost more than what it costs to print our national phone book. It would be a directory of the dead, and it’s the least that we can do for those who didn’t make it through. This endeavor would help build a collective memory, but in a natural way, absent the strident insistence that we remember whether we like it or not. Rather, we would remember because we want to, because we feel it’s time to.
The ability of a nation to forget is underrated. When their war ended in 1990, it was not easy for the Lebanese to reach common agreement over what their 15-year nightmare was about. We could all agree that it had been a nightmare, that we were glad it was now finished, and that we regretted the fate of all those who had been killed or who had disappeared. But who was to blame? What had started the whole mess? There was no consensus among Lebanese on the answers.
So they forgot. And their forgetting was facilitated by the two pillars sustaining Lebanon’s postwar order: Syria and the reconstruction process led by the late Rafik al-Hariri. The Syrians engineered an amnesty law in 1991 that was designed to pardon wartime crimes. However, the flip side of this arrangement, as we saw with Lebanese Forces leader Samir Geagea, was that if Syria and its Lebanese acolytes could declare people innocent, it also meant they could declare them guilty if political conditions demanded it.
The amnesty law was a whitewash, but it was a necessary one. Lebanon, and by extension Syria, could not have realistically built a postwar order by condemning the abusers in the war, since that would have meant condemning every leader tasked with ending Lebanon’s wartime mindset. It would have also meant apportioning blame, and the Lebanese could find no accord on who to blame.
Then there was the reconstruction effort. Rafik al-Hariri was not a man whose natural tendency was to wallow in the past. Nor could he afford this. His reconstruction project was a thing for the future, because that’s what investment is about, and while it could be criticized in many ways, the optimism the late prime minister sought to exude and peddle left little room for recollection of the war. Indeed it necessitated a hefty dose of amnesia, since looking brightly ahead meant avoiding at all costs looking, disconsolately, backward.
Was this so bad? Lebanon was not alone in understanding that, sometimes, you have to draw a big black X through the past to progress. In recent days, for example, the Spanish judge Baltasar Garzon was indicted for investigating crimes committed by the forces loyal to General Francisco Franco during the Spanish civil war, despite the fact that Spain passed an amnesty law in 1977. Garzon’s initiative may have been defensible morally, but legally and politically it crossed a red line the Spanish authorities could not permit, because the point of the amnesty law was to put to bed a divisive past.
But we can now throw in that caveat. If it is impossible for the Lebanese to reach unanimous agreement over what their war was about, nothing prevents them from remembering in a pluralistic way. Here we are in 2010, two decades after the end of the war – meaning a period of time five years longer than the duration of the war itself – and yet hardly a memorial to the conflict can be found anywhere.
If you drive by the Defense Ministry complex in Yarzeh, you will see the monolithic Arman sculpture Hope for Peace, which was at one time supposed to be placed in the downtown area as a memento to the folly of war. That is until someone, perhaps Hariri himself, decided (not without aesthetic justification) that it would be folly to place it in an area seeking to evoke a very different version of the past. Other than that, a brief village statue or commemorative cannon here, or an eroding plaque there is all that we have to remind us of our conflict.
Lebanon can really do a bit more at this stage. Museums, memorials, even an official day of remembrance for the dead and disappeared, are all mnemonic devices that would allow the Lebanese to remember individually what happened, and to pass this on to their children. Why not start by asking the government to print a book with the names and photos of those who died or disappeared, with no more or less than their names, date of birth, and date of death when known?
This wouldn’t cost more than what it costs to print our national phone book. It would be a directory of the dead, and it’s the least that we can do for those who didn’t make it through. This endeavor would help build a collective memory, but in a natural way, absent the strident insistence that we remember whether we like it or not. Rather, we would remember because we want to, because we feel it’s time to.
A Lebanese directory of the dead
Next week, on April 13, Lebanon will commemorate the 35th anniversary of the start of its civil war, and you know the event will provoke laments that the Lebanese have no collective memory. Why not do something different for a change? Praise the ability of the Lebanese to forget, but with one caveat that we will return to below.
The ability of a nation to forget is underrated. When their war ended in 1990, it was not easy for the Lebanese to reach common agreement over what their 15-year nightmare was about. We could all agree that it had been a nightmare, that we were glad it was now finished, and that we regretted the fate of all those who had been killed or who had disappeared. But who was to blame? What had started the whole mess? There was no consensus among Lebanese on the answers.
So they forgot. And their forgetting was facilitated by the two pillars sustaining Lebanon’s postwar order: Syria and the reconstruction process led by the late Rafik al-Hariri. The Syrians engineered an amnesty law in 1991 that was designed to pardon wartime crimes. However, the flip side of this arrangement, as we saw with Lebanese Forces leader Samir Geagea, was that if Syria and its Lebanese acolytes could declare people innocent, it also meant they could declare them guilty if political conditions demanded it.
The amnesty law was a whitewash, but it was a necessary one. Lebanon, and by extension Syria, could not have realistically built a postwar order by condemning the abusers in the war, since that would have meant condemning every leader tasked with ending Lebanon’s wartime mindset. It would have also meant apportioning blame, and the Lebanese could find no accord on who to blame.
Then there was the reconstruction effort. Rafik al-Hariri was not a man whose natural tendency was to wallow in the past. Nor could he afford this. His reconstruction project was a thing for the future, because that’s what investment is about, and while it could be criticized in many ways, the optimism the late prime minister sought to exude and peddle left little room for recollection of the war. Indeed it necessitated a hefty dose of amnesia, since looking brightly ahead meant avoiding at all costs looking, disconsolately, backward.
Was this so bad? Lebanon was not alone in understanding that, sometimes, you have to draw a big black X through the past to progress. In recent days, for example, the Spanish judge Baltasar Garzon was indicted for investigating crimes committed by the forces loyal to General Francisco Franco during the Spanish civil war, despite the fact that Spain passed an amnesty law in 1977. Garzon’s initiative may have been defensible morally, but legally and politically it crossed a red line the Spanish authorities could not permit, because the point of the amnesty law was to put to bed a divisive past.
But we can now throw in that caveat. If it is impossible for the Lebanese to reach unanimous agreement over what their war was about, nothing prevents them from remembering in a pluralistic way. Here we are in 2010, two decades after the end of the war – meaning a period of time five years longer than the duration of the war itself – and yet hardly a memorial to the conflict can be found anywhere.
If you drive by the Defense Ministry complex in Yarzeh, you will see the monolithic Arman sculpture Hope for Peace, which was at one time supposed to be placed in the downtown area as a memento to the folly of war. That is until someone, perhaps Hariri himself, decided (not without aesthetic justification) that it would be folly to place it in an area seeking to evoke a very different version of the past. Other than that, a brief village statue or commemorative cannon here, or an eroding plaque there is all that we have to remind us of our conflict.
Lebanon can really do a bit more at this stage. Museums, memorials, even an official day of remembrance for the dead and disappeared, are all mnemonic devices that would allow the Lebanese to remember individually what happened, and to pass this on to their children. Why not start by asking the government to print a book with the names and photos of those who died or disappeared, with no more or less than their names, date of birth, and date of death when known?
This wouldn’t cost more than what it costs to print our national phone book. It would be a directory of the dead, and it’s the least that we can do for those who didn’t make it through. This endeavor would help build a collective memory, but in a natural way, absent the strident insistence that we remember whether we like it or not. Rather, we would remember because we want to, because we feel it’s time to.
The ability of a nation to forget is underrated. When their war ended in 1990, it was not easy for the Lebanese to reach common agreement over what their 15-year nightmare was about. We could all agree that it had been a nightmare, that we were glad it was now finished, and that we regretted the fate of all those who had been killed or who had disappeared. But who was to blame? What had started the whole mess? There was no consensus among Lebanese on the answers.
So they forgot. And their forgetting was facilitated by the two pillars sustaining Lebanon’s postwar order: Syria and the reconstruction process led by the late Rafik al-Hariri. The Syrians engineered an amnesty law in 1991 that was designed to pardon wartime crimes. However, the flip side of this arrangement, as we saw with Lebanese Forces leader Samir Geagea, was that if Syria and its Lebanese acolytes could declare people innocent, it also meant they could declare them guilty if political conditions demanded it.
The amnesty law was a whitewash, but it was a necessary one. Lebanon, and by extension Syria, could not have realistically built a postwar order by condemning the abusers in the war, since that would have meant condemning every leader tasked with ending Lebanon’s wartime mindset. It would have also meant apportioning blame, and the Lebanese could find no accord on who to blame.
Then there was the reconstruction effort. Rafik al-Hariri was not a man whose natural tendency was to wallow in the past. Nor could he afford this. His reconstruction project was a thing for the future, because that’s what investment is about, and while it could be criticized in many ways, the optimism the late prime minister sought to exude and peddle left little room for recollection of the war. Indeed it necessitated a hefty dose of amnesia, since looking brightly ahead meant avoiding at all costs looking, disconsolately, backward.
Was this so bad? Lebanon was not alone in understanding that, sometimes, you have to draw a big black X through the past to progress. In recent days, for example, the Spanish judge Baltasar Garzon was indicted for investigating crimes committed by the forces loyal to General Francisco Franco during the Spanish civil war, despite the fact that Spain passed an amnesty law in 1977. Garzon’s initiative may have been defensible morally, but legally and politically it crossed a red line the Spanish authorities could not permit, because the point of the amnesty law was to put to bed a divisive past.
But we can now throw in that caveat. If it is impossible for the Lebanese to reach unanimous agreement over what their war was about, nothing prevents them from remembering in a pluralistic way. Here we are in 2010, two decades after the end of the war – meaning a period of time five years longer than the duration of the war itself – and yet hardly a memorial to the conflict can be found anywhere.
If you drive by the Defense Ministry complex in Yarzeh, you will see the monolithic Arman sculpture Hope for Peace, which was at one time supposed to be placed in the downtown area as a memento to the folly of war. That is until someone, perhaps Hariri himself, decided (not without aesthetic justification) that it would be folly to place it in an area seeking to evoke a very different version of the past. Other than that, a brief village statue or commemorative cannon here, or an eroding plaque there is all that we have to remind us of our conflict.
Lebanon can really do a bit more at this stage. Museums, memorials, even an official day of remembrance for the dead and disappeared, are all mnemonic devices that would allow the Lebanese to remember individually what happened, and to pass this on to their children. Why not start by asking the government to print a book with the names and photos of those who died or disappeared, with no more or less than their names, date of birth, and date of death when known?
This wouldn’t cost more than what it costs to print our national phone book. It would be a directory of the dead, and it’s the least that we can do for those who didn’t make it through. This endeavor would help build a collective memory, but in a natural way, absent the strident insistence that we remember whether we like it or not. Rather, we would remember because we want to, because we feel it’s time to.
Thursday, April 8, 2010
The son also rises, for Arab misfortune
In his book “What’s Left,” the British author Nick Cohen quotes a onetime Foreign Office official as saying, “All isms are wasms.” That amusing phrase is an apt summation of Arab nationalism, as regimes throughout the Middle East claiming some sort of fealty to nationalist ideology find themselves at different levels of political breakdown.
The most flagrant sign of the decline of Arab nationalist regimes is their transformation into hereditary republics. Recently, Hosni Mubarak returned from an operation in Germany to face questions about his future. What ailed him remains unknown, but it is no secret that the 81-year-old Egyptian president has long sought to prepare the way for his son, Gamal, to succeed him.
In this, Mubarak is little different than the late Hafez Assad, whose son Bashar followed him as president of Syria. Had Saddam Hussein remained in power in Iraq, he would almost certainly have handed over to one of his psychopathic sons. Yemen’s president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, hopes one day to see his son Ahmad in office. In Libya, Moammar Gadhafi appears to have similar aspirations for one of his boys, perhaps Seif al-Islam or the younger Moatassem. And in Tunisia, President Zein al-Abedin bin Ali is rumored to want his son in law, Sakher al-Materi, to one day lead the country.
Forgotten in these family plots is that, in several countries, nationalist regimes once drew their legitimacy from overthrowing monarchical orders perceived as corrupt or in the pocket of foreign powers. Inherent in the Arab nationalism of the latter years of colonial rule and the first decades of independence was a conviction that the ideology was a byword for reform. Baathism in Syria and Iraq introduced purportedly egalitarian socialist principles, as did Nasserism in Egypt. Habib Bourghuiba gave Tunisian women rights while also introducing improvements in education and more.
Yet that did not prevent all Arab regimes from consolidating autocratic rule, usually in the guise of family-led kleptocracies. Whereas specific nationalist leaders may have enjoyed legitimacy upon taking office, all came later on to rely substantially on violence to maintain order. This was the case in Syria, Iraq, Egypt, Algeria, Libya, and Tunisia after Bin Ali, and the list goes on. Arab nationalists, previously thought of as representing the vanguard of a new Middle East, instead merely reproduced the methods of pre-Independence regimes, usually in far more brutal ways.
At its heart, Arab nationalism is about unity, the establishment of a broader Arab nation reflecting the professed oneness of the Arab people. National borders were always regarded as the unnatural legacy of Western colonialism. However, what has emerged from that ideological conceit is a region more divided than virtually all others in the world. In the same way that Arab republics became the near-private domains of families, minorities, or ruling classes sharing the narrow goals of self-preservation and profit, did their interests (in reality those of its leaders) collide with those of other states.
In other words, Arab regimes have spent decades generating and relying upon antagonism to preserve their authority, because only antagonism allowed them to impose the massive security apparatuses propping up such authority. This always went beyond fighting Israel, which all major Arab countries have studiously avoided doing since 1973. Arab regimes deploy violence most frequently against their own populations and neighboring countries. In this context, the political unity of the Arab nation is not just a mirage, it is also a cruel joke.
Not surprisingly, many ostensibly secular national regimes have compensated for their waning legitimacy by falling back on Islam and religious symbolism. After his regime crushed the Muslim Brotherhood in the early 1980s, Hafez Assad began a massive program of building mosques and religious schools. The aim was to better control believers, certainly, but also to burnish Assad’s Muslim credentials. After his ouster from Kuwait in 1991, Saddam Hussein placed the words “God is Great” on the Iraqi flag. The Egyptian state has supported legislation favoring Islam as the flip side of a policy to marginalize the opposition Muslim Brotherhood.
The notion that secular Arab nationalists are necessarily hostile to Islam is simply untrue. There has always been a complex interplay between Arab nationalists and Islamists, particularly when both opposed colonialism. Even today their objectives may overlap, for example when Syria decides to support Hamas against the Palestinian Authority, or allows Al-Qaeda militants to pass through its territory to destabilize Iraq. For that matter, consider the sheer poverty of Iraqi Baathists, who have spent years collaborating with Al-Qaeda against the emergence of a secure Shiite-dominated system in Baghdad.
Arab nationalism has turned into what it was supposed to displace. The ensuing democratic degradation in Arab countries has been to the advantage of the Middle East’s periphery, where relatively democratic systems, or at least pluralistic ones, prevail. Israel may treat Palestinians abominably, but its leaders are disposable, therefore legitimate domestically. Turkey, although the religious proclivities of its government have hit up against state secularism, is nonetheless representative, making a military coup less likely today.
To describe Iran as a democracy would be naïve. However, until the fraudulent presidential election last year, the country’s elections were more than rubber-stamp processes. The system preserved, and in many respects still does, the pluralistic structures needed to absorb its complex hierarchies of authority. Who knows where Iran is heading, but few believe that a dictatorship of the Revolutionary Guards will do anything but weaken the Islamic Republic down the road.
Arab nationalism’s obituary has been written many times, and no one can deny that what we have here is a corpse. However, the ideology retains its vivacity, as would any nostalgic yearning for an Arab world never attained. Self-delusion has mitigated the hisses of intimidation.
The most flagrant sign of the decline of Arab nationalist regimes is their transformation into hereditary republics. Recently, Hosni Mubarak returned from an operation in Germany to face questions about his future. What ailed him remains unknown, but it is no secret that the 81-year-old Egyptian president has long sought to prepare the way for his son, Gamal, to succeed him.
In this, Mubarak is little different than the late Hafez Assad, whose son Bashar followed him as president of Syria. Had Saddam Hussein remained in power in Iraq, he would almost certainly have handed over to one of his psychopathic sons. Yemen’s president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, hopes one day to see his son Ahmad in office. In Libya, Moammar Gadhafi appears to have similar aspirations for one of his boys, perhaps Seif al-Islam or the younger Moatassem. And in Tunisia, President Zein al-Abedin bin Ali is rumored to want his son in law, Sakher al-Materi, to one day lead the country.
Forgotten in these family plots is that, in several countries, nationalist regimes once drew their legitimacy from overthrowing monarchical orders perceived as corrupt or in the pocket of foreign powers. Inherent in the Arab nationalism of the latter years of colonial rule and the first decades of independence was a conviction that the ideology was a byword for reform. Baathism in Syria and Iraq introduced purportedly egalitarian socialist principles, as did Nasserism in Egypt. Habib Bourghuiba gave Tunisian women rights while also introducing improvements in education and more.
Yet that did not prevent all Arab regimes from consolidating autocratic rule, usually in the guise of family-led kleptocracies. Whereas specific nationalist leaders may have enjoyed legitimacy upon taking office, all came later on to rely substantially on violence to maintain order. This was the case in Syria, Iraq, Egypt, Algeria, Libya, and Tunisia after Bin Ali, and the list goes on. Arab nationalists, previously thought of as representing the vanguard of a new Middle East, instead merely reproduced the methods of pre-Independence regimes, usually in far more brutal ways.
At its heart, Arab nationalism is about unity, the establishment of a broader Arab nation reflecting the professed oneness of the Arab people. National borders were always regarded as the unnatural legacy of Western colonialism. However, what has emerged from that ideological conceit is a region more divided than virtually all others in the world. In the same way that Arab republics became the near-private domains of families, minorities, or ruling classes sharing the narrow goals of self-preservation and profit, did their interests (in reality those of its leaders) collide with those of other states.
In other words, Arab regimes have spent decades generating and relying upon antagonism to preserve their authority, because only antagonism allowed them to impose the massive security apparatuses propping up such authority. This always went beyond fighting Israel, which all major Arab countries have studiously avoided doing since 1973. Arab regimes deploy violence most frequently against their own populations and neighboring countries. In this context, the political unity of the Arab nation is not just a mirage, it is also a cruel joke.
Not surprisingly, many ostensibly secular national regimes have compensated for their waning legitimacy by falling back on Islam and religious symbolism. After his regime crushed the Muslim Brotherhood in the early 1980s, Hafez Assad began a massive program of building mosques and religious schools. The aim was to better control believers, certainly, but also to burnish Assad’s Muslim credentials. After his ouster from Kuwait in 1991, Saddam Hussein placed the words “God is Great” on the Iraqi flag. The Egyptian state has supported legislation favoring Islam as the flip side of a policy to marginalize the opposition Muslim Brotherhood.
The notion that secular Arab nationalists are necessarily hostile to Islam is simply untrue. There has always been a complex interplay between Arab nationalists and Islamists, particularly when both opposed colonialism. Even today their objectives may overlap, for example when Syria decides to support Hamas against the Palestinian Authority, or allows Al-Qaeda militants to pass through its territory to destabilize Iraq. For that matter, consider the sheer poverty of Iraqi Baathists, who have spent years collaborating with Al-Qaeda against the emergence of a secure Shiite-dominated system in Baghdad.
Arab nationalism has turned into what it was supposed to displace. The ensuing democratic degradation in Arab countries has been to the advantage of the Middle East’s periphery, where relatively democratic systems, or at least pluralistic ones, prevail. Israel may treat Palestinians abominably, but its leaders are disposable, therefore legitimate domestically. Turkey, although the religious proclivities of its government have hit up against state secularism, is nonetheless representative, making a military coup less likely today.
To describe Iran as a democracy would be naïve. However, until the fraudulent presidential election last year, the country’s elections were more than rubber-stamp processes. The system preserved, and in many respects still does, the pluralistic structures needed to absorb its complex hierarchies of authority. Who knows where Iran is heading, but few believe that a dictatorship of the Revolutionary Guards will do anything but weaken the Islamic Republic down the road.
Arab nationalism’s obituary has been written many times, and no one can deny that what we have here is a corpse. However, the ideology retains its vivacity, as would any nostalgic yearning for an Arab world never attained. Self-delusion has mitigated the hisses of intimidation.
Friday, April 2, 2010
Back to an old game with Syria
By most accounts it was a confident Bashar al-Assad who received Walid Jumblatt in Damascus on Wednesday. When it comes to Damascus’ regional position, the Syrian president sees the stars aligned in his favor. Which means that, at worst, he can afford to do nothing at all, and, at best, negotiate to arrive at nothing at all.
John Kerry, the chairman of the US Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, returned to the Middle East this week, visiting both Lebanon and Syria, and it’s not difficult to see what he had in mind. With the prospect that the Palestinian-Israeli track will remain stalled, ambitious foreign policy players in Washington are looking to the Syrian-Israeli track for a possible breakthrough. And these days when Americans propose openings toward Syria, they come to Beirut first, as did Kerry, to insist that “anything we do with respect to the peace process in this region will not come at the expense of Lebanon.”
That’s good to hear, but also irrelevant since the Syrians have already managed to largely reimpose their writ in Beirut. And this they’ve done because of many factors, Lebanese divisions chief among them, but also because people like John Kerry have spent years feeding Assad political oxygen by lauding the advantages of engaging Syria, even when Syria was destabilizing its neighbors.
Kerry’s trip will likely yield few tangible results. But the senator already knows that. His primary aim is to register his political stake in a Syrian-Israeli negotiation process, if one eventually resumes.
That may sound familiar. The Syrian regime spent the decade of the ‘90s receiving buoyant Americans in Damascus wanting to talk about peace with Israel. And while it’s true that the Syrians were prepared at one stage to conclude a final settlement, which was rejected by Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, it was always essential to their approach that peace should not undermine the Assad regime. Peace had to be on Syrian terms and defined in such a way that it would preserve Syria’s complex security scaffolding propping up the regime.
Little has changed. For Bashar al-Assad, finalizing a negotiation process with Israel is far less important than using negotiations to advance other Syrian priorities. The first (not in any special order) is the consolidation of Syria’s hegemony over Lebanon, which is moving forward at a brisk speed. This means weakening all independent, potentially refractory Lebanese figures, above all Saad al-Hariri.
A second priority is positioning Syria advantageously regionally at a time when the Middle East is going through major transformations. Assad has maneuvered well. The Saudi and Egyptian regimes are getting old and Syria is, for now, on good terms with two of the more powerful states of the Arab periphery, Turkey and Iran. But the latter relationship only makes Assad more reluctant to engage in serious negotiations with Israel, unless it first accepts his minimal condition: a full withdrawal to the June 4, 1967 lines in the Golan Heights.
A third priority for Assad is to bolster his regime internally. The president is running Syria in a more centralized, hands-on fashion than his father. The notion that he was controlled by an “old guard” was untrue five years ago, and is utterly ridiculous today. Those from his family or community who had any leeway to threaten his position have either been eliminated or pushed to the sidelines. Under these circumstances, Assad will think long before embarking in resolute talks with Israel. He is more likely to prefer talking just for the sake of talking, which little threatens Syria’s domestic equilibrium.
Finally, there is the United States. With the Americans ensnared in Afghanistan and heading toward the exits in Iraq, Assad has nothing to worry about. Time is on his side, even as American envoys knock at his door in the name of engagement, but without any clear idea of how this is supposed to benefit the United States. Assad has already made clear that he has no intention of breaking with Iran or changing his policy toward Hezbollah. Yet the Americans just keep coming.
The natural reflex in a positivist place like Washington is to generate optimism in one direction when pessimism characterizes another. You know that soon the Syrian-Israeli track will again excite foreign policy actors, wonks and pundits in the American capital, because the Palestinian track might remain closed. We’ll be back to the old game the Syrians played so well in the past. That means don’t expect much from Bashar al-Assad. He’s perfectly at ease where he is.
John Kerry, the chairman of the US Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, returned to the Middle East this week, visiting both Lebanon and Syria, and it’s not difficult to see what he had in mind. With the prospect that the Palestinian-Israeli track will remain stalled, ambitious foreign policy players in Washington are looking to the Syrian-Israeli track for a possible breakthrough. And these days when Americans propose openings toward Syria, they come to Beirut first, as did Kerry, to insist that “anything we do with respect to the peace process in this region will not come at the expense of Lebanon.”
That’s good to hear, but also irrelevant since the Syrians have already managed to largely reimpose their writ in Beirut. And this they’ve done because of many factors, Lebanese divisions chief among them, but also because people like John Kerry have spent years feeding Assad political oxygen by lauding the advantages of engaging Syria, even when Syria was destabilizing its neighbors.
Kerry’s trip will likely yield few tangible results. But the senator already knows that. His primary aim is to register his political stake in a Syrian-Israeli negotiation process, if one eventually resumes.
That may sound familiar. The Syrian regime spent the decade of the ‘90s receiving buoyant Americans in Damascus wanting to talk about peace with Israel. And while it’s true that the Syrians were prepared at one stage to conclude a final settlement, which was rejected by Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, it was always essential to their approach that peace should not undermine the Assad regime. Peace had to be on Syrian terms and defined in such a way that it would preserve Syria’s complex security scaffolding propping up the regime.
Little has changed. For Bashar al-Assad, finalizing a negotiation process with Israel is far less important than using negotiations to advance other Syrian priorities. The first (not in any special order) is the consolidation of Syria’s hegemony over Lebanon, which is moving forward at a brisk speed. This means weakening all independent, potentially refractory Lebanese figures, above all Saad al-Hariri.
A second priority is positioning Syria advantageously regionally at a time when the Middle East is going through major transformations. Assad has maneuvered well. The Saudi and Egyptian regimes are getting old and Syria is, for now, on good terms with two of the more powerful states of the Arab periphery, Turkey and Iran. But the latter relationship only makes Assad more reluctant to engage in serious negotiations with Israel, unless it first accepts his minimal condition: a full withdrawal to the June 4, 1967 lines in the Golan Heights.
A third priority for Assad is to bolster his regime internally. The president is running Syria in a more centralized, hands-on fashion than his father. The notion that he was controlled by an “old guard” was untrue five years ago, and is utterly ridiculous today. Those from his family or community who had any leeway to threaten his position have either been eliminated or pushed to the sidelines. Under these circumstances, Assad will think long before embarking in resolute talks with Israel. He is more likely to prefer talking just for the sake of talking, which little threatens Syria’s domestic equilibrium.
Finally, there is the United States. With the Americans ensnared in Afghanistan and heading toward the exits in Iraq, Assad has nothing to worry about. Time is on his side, even as American envoys knock at his door in the name of engagement, but without any clear idea of how this is supposed to benefit the United States. Assad has already made clear that he has no intention of breaking with Iran or changing his policy toward Hezbollah. Yet the Americans just keep coming.
The natural reflex in a positivist place like Washington is to generate optimism in one direction when pessimism characterizes another. You know that soon the Syrian-Israeli track will again excite foreign policy actors, wonks and pundits in the American capital, because the Palestinian track might remain closed. We’ll be back to the old game the Syrians played so well in the past. That means don’t expect much from Bashar al-Assad. He’s perfectly at ease where he is.
Thursday, April 1, 2010
Power plays between friends in Beirut
No one could fail to notice that it was a Syrian spokesperson, Wi’am Wahhab, who spilled the beans recently about Hizbullah members being called in for questioning by investigators working on behalf of the Special Tribunal for Lebanon. It was also Wahhab alone who mentioned the possibility of a link between the late Imad Mughniyeh and the Hariri assassination. This has raised interesting questions about what Syria is trying to achieve.
Of course, Wahhab’s professed purpose was to warn against what an accusation directed against Hizbullah might mean for Lebanon’s stability. This has been a recurrent theme sounded by the Syrians and their allies in recent years. However, party officials must also have suspected that Wahhab’s comments, by providing information no one else had, threw the light, uncomfortably, on Hizbullah to avoid it falling elsewhere.
Beyond the tribunal, there are other dynamics at play specifically related to the Syria-Hizbullah relationship. In its effort to reassert its hegemony in Lebanon, Damascus has not only sought to wear down its one-time adversaries in March 14; it also seems to be looking for ways to tighten its control over its more autonomous allies, above all Hizbullah.
It’s not difficult to grasp why. In the five years after Syrian soldiers left Lebanon in April 2005, the party became the pre-eminent defender of Syria’s interests in Lebanon. With no soldiers on the ground the regime of President Bashar Assad had to watch as Iran’s sway over events in Beirut increased, because although Hizbullah remained close to Syria, there was never any question that it was, above all, an Iranian venture.
For Assad, this was unwelcome. From the moment his men left Lebanon, his ambition was to recover the country as a Syrian card in regional politics. But if it was Iran that was primarily calling the shots, because Syria remained so dependent on the pro-Iranian Hizbullah to defend its Lebanese stakes, all that really meant was that Assad was a secondary player in Lebanon. That is, until the Saudis came to the rescue.
In February 2009, King Abdullah “reconciled” with Assad at an Arab economic summit in Kuwait. After having spent more than three years trying to isolate Syria regionally, only to see Saudi Arabia itself become more isolated, the kingdom’s leadership concluded that it was time to change tack. With Iran gaining power and developing a nuclear capability, and Iraq perceived as being under the control of a Shiite regime, the Saudis decided that Lebanon was a distraction worth dispensing with.
What appears to have emerged from that rapprochement is a quid pro quo with Syria, explicit or more likely implicit: the Syrians would be granted considerable leeway in Lebanon, in the process containing Hizbullah, while Syria and Saudi Arabia could find common ground in looking the other way on Iraq’s destabilization, each for its own reasons. A byproduct of the understanding was that Saad Hariri, if he became prime minister, would visit Damascus in the context of a lowering of hostility between Lebanon and Syria. This could be placed under the rubric of “Arab solidarity.”
While Syria has done almost nothing to curb Hizbullah, the Saudi calculation may have been more subtle. In handing Assad great latitude to impose Syrian priorities on the party, Riyadh probably took the minimalist view that it was better to have an Arab state in charge in Lebanon than Iran. That hard-nosed assessment preserved little of the sporadic sovereignty that Lebanon enjoyed after 2005, but the Saudis were too preoccupied with the future of their own regime to pay much heed to this.
That is where the Hariri tribunal comes in. Although the Syrians want to ensure that the investigation does not harm them or Hizbullah, the situation offers political opportunities. A Hizbullah feeling the heat, even if this is unjustified, is also one more vulnerable to Syrian power plays in Lebanon. Assad and party officials have denounced prosecutor Daniel Bellemare’s investigation as politicized; they have raised the pressure on him by warning that indictments might carry Lebanon into a new civil conflict; and they will both use the ensuing fears to politically emasculate Hariri, who will find it difficult to approve measures that might threaten civil peace.
But within this complex game is another one, whereby the mere prospect of an accusation against Hizbullah makes the party doubly exposed: toward its traditional enemies such as the United States and Israel; but also toward Syria, which could make Hizbullah more beholden to it by using its weight in Beirut to ensure that the Lebanese government defends the party’s innocence. Syria’s developing rapport with Hizbullah would bring home that Hizbullah now needs Syria to protect its margin of maneuver in Lebanon rather than the other way around following the Syrian departure.
This does not mean that Syria and Hizbullah are on a collision course. Both share multiple aims. Wahhab’s recent criticism of Michel Sleiman was perhaps, in part, a sign of Syrian displeasure with the president’s endorsement of municipal elections, which Hizbullah wanted to postpone. Both Syria and the party are collaborating to control the Palestinian camps by marginalizing officials recently appointed by the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas. For Assad to depict Hizbullah as a problem that only Syria can resolve, he must give the party room to be a problem.
That is why we should understand statements by Hizbullah officials as addressed both at the party’s foes and, somewhere, at Syria. Hizbullah does not relish becoming a Syrian bargaining chip once again, even if it has no choice but to cooperate with Damascus. But the grip is tightening on all.
Of course, Wahhab’s professed purpose was to warn against what an accusation directed against Hizbullah might mean for Lebanon’s stability. This has been a recurrent theme sounded by the Syrians and their allies in recent years. However, party officials must also have suspected that Wahhab’s comments, by providing information no one else had, threw the light, uncomfortably, on Hizbullah to avoid it falling elsewhere.
Beyond the tribunal, there are other dynamics at play specifically related to the Syria-Hizbullah relationship. In its effort to reassert its hegemony in Lebanon, Damascus has not only sought to wear down its one-time adversaries in March 14; it also seems to be looking for ways to tighten its control over its more autonomous allies, above all Hizbullah.
It’s not difficult to grasp why. In the five years after Syrian soldiers left Lebanon in April 2005, the party became the pre-eminent defender of Syria’s interests in Lebanon. With no soldiers on the ground the regime of President Bashar Assad had to watch as Iran’s sway over events in Beirut increased, because although Hizbullah remained close to Syria, there was never any question that it was, above all, an Iranian venture.
For Assad, this was unwelcome. From the moment his men left Lebanon, his ambition was to recover the country as a Syrian card in regional politics. But if it was Iran that was primarily calling the shots, because Syria remained so dependent on the pro-Iranian Hizbullah to defend its Lebanese stakes, all that really meant was that Assad was a secondary player in Lebanon. That is, until the Saudis came to the rescue.
In February 2009, King Abdullah “reconciled” with Assad at an Arab economic summit in Kuwait. After having spent more than three years trying to isolate Syria regionally, only to see Saudi Arabia itself become more isolated, the kingdom’s leadership concluded that it was time to change tack. With Iran gaining power and developing a nuclear capability, and Iraq perceived as being under the control of a Shiite regime, the Saudis decided that Lebanon was a distraction worth dispensing with.
What appears to have emerged from that rapprochement is a quid pro quo with Syria, explicit or more likely implicit: the Syrians would be granted considerable leeway in Lebanon, in the process containing Hizbullah, while Syria and Saudi Arabia could find common ground in looking the other way on Iraq’s destabilization, each for its own reasons. A byproduct of the understanding was that Saad Hariri, if he became prime minister, would visit Damascus in the context of a lowering of hostility between Lebanon and Syria. This could be placed under the rubric of “Arab solidarity.”
While Syria has done almost nothing to curb Hizbullah, the Saudi calculation may have been more subtle. In handing Assad great latitude to impose Syrian priorities on the party, Riyadh probably took the minimalist view that it was better to have an Arab state in charge in Lebanon than Iran. That hard-nosed assessment preserved little of the sporadic sovereignty that Lebanon enjoyed after 2005, but the Saudis were too preoccupied with the future of their own regime to pay much heed to this.
That is where the Hariri tribunal comes in. Although the Syrians want to ensure that the investigation does not harm them or Hizbullah, the situation offers political opportunities. A Hizbullah feeling the heat, even if this is unjustified, is also one more vulnerable to Syrian power plays in Lebanon. Assad and party officials have denounced prosecutor Daniel Bellemare’s investigation as politicized; they have raised the pressure on him by warning that indictments might carry Lebanon into a new civil conflict; and they will both use the ensuing fears to politically emasculate Hariri, who will find it difficult to approve measures that might threaten civil peace.
But within this complex game is another one, whereby the mere prospect of an accusation against Hizbullah makes the party doubly exposed: toward its traditional enemies such as the United States and Israel; but also toward Syria, which could make Hizbullah more beholden to it by using its weight in Beirut to ensure that the Lebanese government defends the party’s innocence. Syria’s developing rapport with Hizbullah would bring home that Hizbullah now needs Syria to protect its margin of maneuver in Lebanon rather than the other way around following the Syrian departure.
This does not mean that Syria and Hizbullah are on a collision course. Both share multiple aims. Wahhab’s recent criticism of Michel Sleiman was perhaps, in part, a sign of Syrian displeasure with the president’s endorsement of municipal elections, which Hizbullah wanted to postpone. Both Syria and the party are collaborating to control the Palestinian camps by marginalizing officials recently appointed by the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas. For Assad to depict Hizbullah as a problem that only Syria can resolve, he must give the party room to be a problem.
That is why we should understand statements by Hizbullah officials as addressed both at the party’s foes and, somewhere, at Syria. Hizbullah does not relish becoming a Syrian bargaining chip once again, even if it has no choice but to cooperate with Damascus. But the grip is tightening on all.
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