US political retreat in Lebanon

As a proud member of the reality-based community I am always happy when people who exercise great power deign to join us in the world of real facts… Like, apparently, the Prez, or at least some smart person in his entourage who must be a little open to the real heave and sway of human affairs.
That link there, by the way, goes to the piece by Steve Weisman in today’s NYT, in which he reports,

After years of campaigning against Hezbollah, the radical Shiite Muslim party in Lebanon, as a terrorist pariah, the Bush administration is grudgingly going along with efforts by France and the United Nations to steer the party into the Lebanese political mainstream, administration officials say.
The administration’s shift was described by American, European and United Nations officials as a reluctant recognition that Hezbollah, besides having a militia and sponsoring attacks on Israelis, is an enormous political force in Lebanon that could block Western efforts to get Syria to withdraw its troops.

Let’s just recall the comment posted on this JWN post on Tuesday in which “Timur, Beirut” wrote:

Helena: The turbulence we are now passing through,which seems to be getting worse, is the price we are paying for the monumental of blunder of the authors of Security Council Resolution 1559 for putting the departure of Syrian troops from Lebanon in the same basket as what to do with Hizballah. Even the most ardent opposition figures here now say Hizballah issue will be tackled later on in context of Taef Accord.

Weisman quoted, “a diplomat who is closely tracking the negotiations” [most likely, a high-ranking US diplomat, possibly, the ambassador–HC] as saying:

“There is a realization by France and the United States that if you tackle Hezbollah now, you array the Shiites against you. With elections coming in Lebanon, you don’t want the entire Shiite community against you.”

Duh. It took them that long to realize that?
What, no memories of 1996, the year in which the Israelis tried and failed miserably to smash Hizbullah definitively? (That was the famous time when the late lamented Rafiq Hariri, then the prime minister, proclaimed to the whole world, “We are all Hizbullah now!”)
What, no memories of–at the very least– last spring, when Hizbullah candidates trounced Amal in the municipal election races they competed in in all the Shiite-dominated areas?
It’s as if these people in, what do they call it– the “ideas-based community?– have a deep contempt for history and context, as well as for the “reality” which is the building-block of both of those.
Anyway, as my little contribution to the ability of westerners to regain some focus on historical realities in Lebanon I just put up the text of my 1984-85 monograph on the Lebanese Shia onto the archive portion of this site. And shortly (I hope!) Boston Review will be bringing out my 10,000-word-plus article on Hizbullah (to which the monograph, as it happens, makes a fortuitous preface.)
Before I look at what the events of this week could be said to “mean” for the prospects of Bush’s much-publicized “push for democracy” in the Middle East (a text that we might perhaps sub-title: “Lebanon: A bridge too far”) I just want to come back with a quick little reproach to everybody in the so-called “international community” who should have known better about the realities of Lebanese politics… Of course, the Americans, but equally certainly the French…

Principally, re the French, why on earth did they (and, let us remember, the Russians, Chinese, and most of the rest of the Security Council) let the Americans get away with crafting such a counter-productive, hostile, and unrealistic Security Council resolution as 1559?
It is quite true– and very significant– that the text of 1559 did not place any timetable on its insistence that Syria withdraw completely from Lebanon and that all militias in Lebanon (read Hizbullah) must disarm.
But still, those two demands were quite clearly both there in the resolution. Small wonder that as Prez Bush and the French tried to ratchet up the demands for “immediate” Syrian compliance, Hizbullah should quite clearly have gotten the message they would be next.
I say that France “should have known better”, because it was France– back in 1996– that played a pivotal role reaching out to the US at the same time as it provided a crucial counter-balance to US power in, for example, the composition of the “monitoring committee” formed to monitor the compliance– by Israel, as well as by Syria and Hizbullah– of the terms of the ceasefire agreement that ended the crisis sparked by Shimon Peres’s gratuitous and extremely harmful assault upon the Lebanese.
Of course, the Lebanese remember an earlier France than that one, too… They remember the France of the post-WW1 era that deliberately sought to enlarge the portion of the new state of “Lebanon” that it split off from surrounding “Syria” to put it under round of significant territorial aggrandizement, the French used Maronite surrogates to help them bring the “outlying” (and predominantly Muslim) parts of Lebanon under the control of Beirut. The Shiites of south lebanon and the Beqaa, and the Sunnis of Tripoli (in north Lebanon) did not, ahem, fully appreciate those actions.
And so this week, which have been the forces most prominent in the anti-1559 movement? You guessed it: Shiites from south Lebanon and the Beqaa (and the many extensions of their families who have made their homes in the south-Beirut Dahiyah), and Sunnis from Tripoli– hometown of, you guessed it, newly reinstated PM-to-be Omar Karami…
Good Lord, the French should have known better than to try to tangle again with all those forces! Instead of which, kowtowing to the US at the UN seemed to be the order of the day in Paris last September. I guess that was part of a broader French policy of doing that. But still, what a pity that it encouraged the Bushies in their ideologically dreams of advancing by “a bridge–or two, or three– too far” in Lebanon.
Anyway, I’ll just reiterate that I really do welcome it when powerful people, whoever they are, step back from escalation and attempts to marginalize whole significant groups of people in a vulnerable place like Lebanon. Good for the Bushies!
But oh, how very much better if they’d never set out down that dangerous path of trying to confront, disempower, and marginalize Hizbullah, an organization that (whether outsiders like this fact or not) represents something authentic, respected, and highly valued for a high proportion–quite possibly, a clear majority– of the Lebanese population.
All this nonsense about Hizbullah “bussing in supporters from Syria” or (from Nahar’s Jibran Tweini) that the demonstrators were “too ignorant to understand what they were doing” is just arrogant, silly spin and not worth paying attention to. The vast, vast majority of participants in Tuesday’s demonstration were authentically, 100% Lebanese– probably, with a far lower proportion of second-passport holders among them than among those at the “opposition” rallies.
And from every single account I’ve read and heard, participants in Tuesday’s mega-demonstration knew exactly why they were there.
Now, the interesting thing will be to see if they can get their voices appropriately represented in the parliamentary elections due in May.
One of the many apparently little-known facts about the Lebanese parliamentary system is that it is not in fact really acceptably democratic. It is not a one-person-one-vote system, but a very complex system of multi-seat electoral districts in which the lists that compete in each district have to have a finely calibrated “balance” (read, “imbalance”) of members of the coutnry’s 17 different recognized religious sects…
The way that this comes out–as per Taef– is so that they can accurately emerge with a parliament in which the “big” balance is 50 percent Christian, 50 percent Muslim. But within that, the Shiites have to get so may seats; the Armenian Catholics so many; the Melkites (Rum Catoleek) so many seats; etc etc… It is quite bizarre, and only made more so by the fact that the size and boundaries of the electoral districts are not fixed, but are redefined anew in each electoral cycle by the members of the sitting parliament.
Well, you might wonder what the effect of that is?
Of course, Taef also stipulated that “eventually” Lebanon should move to a quite non-“confessional” system. In other words, do away with sectarian quotas in all respects. Which strikes me as an eminently laudable and democratic objective.
Is it time for that now? Would the Maronites like it? Would the US? Would France?
And in case folks are worried about the risks of an oppressive “Shiite takeover” in Lebanon, I should just say– many, many people who make decisions relevant to Lebanon have engaged in gross over-reaching and made very damaging errors of judgment in the past few months. That includes the Syrians (gratuitously foisting a generally unpopular Prez Lahoud onto the country for a further 3 years when there are plenty of other Maronite pols who would have been happy to do the job.) It includes the Israelis, and yes most certainly also the Americans.
The Hizbullah leaders, by contrast, tend not to over-reach and not to make errors of judgment about matters of vital importance to them and their country. They’ve worked hard to reach out to members of all sects and parties in Lebanon, including the Maronite patriarch, people inside the Lebanese political “opposition”, and so on.
No, it is not their over-reaching that I worry about when I think about Lebanon. As for the others? Phew, I’m just glad the Bushies seem to have decided to step back from the abyss of confrontation– for now.