Power shifts inside Lebanon: Some observations

My dear friend Rami Khouri has surveyed the chances of success of the current “Doha Round” of talks among Lebanon’s leading politicians and concludes that “the real issue” is

the viability, credibility and legitimacy of Arab statehood. The weak state led to the birth of groups like Hizbullah to provide those services that it could not offer its citizens, and Hizbullah now is a parallel state. How can the state and Hizbullah coexist? This is the central issue around which all others revolve. It is also an issue that plagues many other Arab governments, as the years ahead are likely to show.

I respectfully disagree with a lot of this. Lebanon is decidedly not like most other Arab states. (To misquote Tolstoy we could say that all Arab states are dysfunctional in their own particular ways.) But Lebanon is not like any other state anywhere else. It is a state that from the get-go– and in many ways quite fittingly– was designed to be a weak state.
Fittingly, because the country is, at its core, made up of three sectarian groups who found in the fastnesses of the Lebanese Mountains a haven against the authority of centralizing and orthodoxy-imposing states elsewhere. Those are the Maronite Christians, the Shiites, and Druze. Well, you could bracket the Shiites and Druze together, in historical terms, since the Druze were an 11th-century offshoot of the Shiites.
Then around those three core, historically mountain-centered groups, you had the traders and lower-land farmers with whom they interacted: primarily the Sunnis and the Roum (Greek) Orthodox, who both had strong ties to the surrounding empires.
I am not a geographic (or historical) determinist. But it’s worth remembering that geography and history when you look at the modern Lebanese “state”, love-child as it was of Mr. Sykes and M. Picot in the immediate post-WW1 days. Maybe the strongest analogy of “Lebanese” attitudes towards the state is with the American settlers, the earliest waves of whom were fleeing the religious and political diktats of orthodoxy-dominated states back in Europe, and who therefore always harbored a deep distrust of, and antipathy towards, anything that smelled of strong (or even effective) central state bodies.
If today’s Lebanon has any possibility at all of serving the normal basic functions of a state, then it must be one that is built on a foundation of political accommodation/consensus among the numerous components of the body politic (who are NOT coterminous with the country’s “sects”, as marked forever on each citizen’s ID card.) Only a governing administration that represents something of a national consensus can be even halfway effective in providing the basic functions of any state, starting first and foremost with public security; but also, one would hope, some bigger services than that, including the effective and transparent regulation of internal and external markets, and basic services in health, education, and social welfare.
I have some hope that this Doha Round can achieve the basic level of national consensus that is required.
For the past four years, Lebanon has been the target of a western-led– in the first instance, a cynically French-spearheaded– campaign to break the national consensus by curtailing or even crushing the role played in public life by Hizbullah, the Free Patriotic Movement, and their allies, who between them represent considerably more than 50% of Lebanon’s population. That campaign was always egged on by Israel, which in 2006 tried to play its own, “super-hero” role within it: A decision that proved massively, and quite predictably, counter-productive for the broader squeeze-or-crush-Hizbullah campaign, as well as for PM Ehud Olmert’s political standing at home.
The whole anti-Hizbullah campaign in Lebanon was (yet another) very misinformed and cynical over-reach by the forces of the “west” in the modern Middle East.
Of course, the very worst such over-reach has been the US decision to invade and “remake” Iraq.
Lebanon has already witnessed its own earlier such over-reach, too. That came with Ariel Sharon’s US-backed 1982 decision to invade and “remake” Lebanon. On that occasion, Sharon even managed to entangle the US military into deploying large numbers of its own boots onto the ground of Lebanon, with tragic consequences all round.
The turnround point for that particular portion of that particular over-reach came on February 4, 1984. On that day Nabih Berri, the leader of the then-largest political/social movement within the Shiite community, called on all the Muslim members of the government to resign and on all Muslim members of the Lebanese army to refuse any orders that would have had them shooting into civilian areas…
As I wrote in my 1985 book The Making of Modern Lebanon (p.205):

At this stage, Berri was still not directly calling on the Muslims in the army to desert. But over the next few hours this is just what they did– in numbers so overwhelming that by 6 February the authority of the army had collapsed completely in all of West Beirut…
On 7 February, President Reagan made a surprise announcement to the effect that he had now ordered the Marines to withdraw from Lebanon, back to the nearby US navy ships.

President Amin Gemayel had worked since his inauguration in fall 1982 to further the US-Israeli agenda in Lebanon at the time, which was focused on excluding Syria from exercising any influence over the Beirut government….
So then (p.206),

At the end of February [1984], Amin Gemayyel made his first presidential visit to Damascus, to discuss the terms under which President Assad’s regime there would save him.

… Which it did. He served out the remainder of his six-year term as, essentially, a vassal of Damascus. The US military went home to lick its wounds. Israel stayed bogged down in southern Lebanon for a further 16 years. By the way, Israel’s continuing presence there in those years was precisely the situation in which Hizbullah was born, incubated, and grew to maturity as a political force inside Lebanon.
One additional note here: I see that Haaretz’s Zvi Barel has tried to show of his “insidery” knowledge of Lebanese politics in a lengthy analytical piece in the paper today. But I think his bottom line (and title) there is most likely wrong. It was: Siniora’s gov’t will fall, the question is when. My impression is that the victors from the past week’s upsets might well prefer to keep Siniora around… to have him be their “Amin Gemayyel on the road to Damascus.”
Barel’s piece is full of “hot” details about the feud between rival Druze leaders Walid Jumblatt and Talal Arslan– including lots of scandalous allegations against Arslan, presented as gospel fact, with amazingly not a single mention of the many scurrilous details it would be possible to mention about Walid’s personal life. Also, it’s hard to get too far into any discussion of the present state of the Jumblatts vs. the Arslans without recalling that the redoubtable Mai Jumblatt, Walid’s mother, is herself an Arslan?
Here’s how The Daily Star’s Hussein Abdullah and Maher Zeineddine described yesterday’s surrender by Walid Jumblatt to Talal Arslan, which was carried out in generally gracious fashion by both sides:

Walid Jumblatt said Friday after visiting his Druze rival, Lebanese Democratic Party head Talal Arslan, that political disputes cannot be resolved through the use of arms. “Resorting to weapons does not yield any solution … Our only alternative is dialogue,” Jumblatt said.
Commenting on the efforts made by Arslan to broker a cease-fire between opposition and pro-government militants during recent clashes southeast of Beirut, Jumblatt said that Arslan’s efforts had yielded positive results.
“We asked Emir Talal to help us end the internal strife … and his efforts succeeded in ending the fighting,” Jumblatt said.
“It has been a long time since I last visited this house, which has always been a second home, the same way my house in Mukhtara is Emir Talal’s second home,” he added.
For his part, Arslan welcomed Jumblatt and praised his wisdom during the recent events.
“Jumblatt’s wisdom and that of Hizbullah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah has facilitated the success of my efforts,” he said.
Arslan stressed that Mount Lebanon has and will always embrace the [Hizbullah-led] resistance.
Jumblatt later toured a number of predominantly Druze towns in the Aley district, including Baysour and Aley.
Jumblatt urged his supporters to preserve inter-communal living in the mountains.
“We want to live peacefully alongside our fellow brothers in the Shiite towns of Kayfoun and Qmatiyyeh … We have our opinion, they have theirs, but political disputes should only be resolved through dialogue,” Jumblatt said.
After visiting Information Minister Ghazi Aridi’s residence in Baysour, Jumblatt said Baysour had always been a “gate for resistance and liberation.”
“There is a big bruise, but we are going to dialogue … Whatever our neighbors do to us, we will always react positively through dialogue.”

What, no more calls for “car bombs in Damascus”, Walid?
Jumblatt “touring” the Druze towns in the Aley district on this occasion has something of the air of Emperor Hirohito being carted around Japan by Gen. Macarthur after his surrender in 1945. There, too, the aim was to make sure the surrendered leader used his remaining political charisma to persuade his followers to lay down their arms and go along with the new order…
Finally, I see that on Thursday, everyone’s favorite Angry Arab, As’ad Abu-Khalil, wrote:

Mark my words: Hariri, Jumblat, and Hizbullah may run on the same list, again. And I am sure that they will not forget the widow of Bashir Gemayyel (who ran on Hariri-Jumblat-Hizbullah list in Beirut last time): who used to prepare for Ariel Sharon his favorite meals–as he reported in his memoirs. This proves my theory: sectarians of a feather, flock together.

He may well be right.