Lebanon, what next?

Anthony Shadid had a piece on Lebanon in the NYT today, with this lede:

With Hezbollah’s toppling of the Lebanese government, the militant Shiite Muslim movement entered what may prove to be one of the most dangerous chapters in a 30-year history that has made it reviled in the West and popular in the Arab world: At the moment seemingly of its greatest power, the path facing it could unveil its most glaring weaknesses…

Shadid’s reasoning was that if Hizbullah undertakes a repeat of the action it undertook in May 2008 when, amidst inter-communal clashes between Shiites and Sunnis in Beirut, its militiamen moved in and within a couple of hours disarmed the large “bodyguard” forces that Saad Hariri and several of his allies had assembled– then such an action “could further tarnish its reputation here, making it look more and more like a sectarian militia than the resistance movement to Israel it considers itself.”
For all of Shadid’s alarmist analysis, however, he provided no evidence that Hizbullah is about to do this! Why not? Because there is none… Not least, because Hizbullah already exercises all the control it needs over the streets and neighborhoods of western and southern Beirut.
And, it is also important to note, Saad Hariri and his political allies have remained perfectly able to continue their political activities throughout the country, even after losing their proto-militia forces back then in 2008.
Just today, indeed Hariri returned to Beirut from his very lengthy tour around many foreign countries, to try to deal with the current political crisis. If he felt that his life would be endangered by returning, do you think he would have done so? I doubt it. He does not have the reputation of being a terrifically courageous man.
In Shadid’s piece, he quotes the Crisis Group’s Rob Malley as saying of Hizbullah:

“In some ways, they’re in a Catch-22… Even as [Hizbullah] increases its power in Lebanon, it could be exacerbating its own problems in the country…
“They see the trap of either backing down, and losing credibility, or acting on their threat, and paying a price in terms of their image. At some point, they’re going to have to decide whether they cross the threshold of taking actions.”

I disagree with my friend Rob. I don’t see the present situation as one that carries any great risks for Hizbullah. Ever since 1991-92, when the organization’s leadership decided to enter Lebanon’s parliamentary political system, Hizbullah has played within that system in a way that has been extremely smart and also nearly always cautious. Interestingly, its entry into the political system back then coincided exactly with the elevation of the then-very youthful Hassan Nasrallah to the top tole in the organization’s leadership.
In every national election since 1992, Hizbullah has both had election victories of its own people, and helped organize the victories of a far greater number of political allies, who come from all the religious sects that form the basis of the countries very convoluted electoral system. In several governments formed since 1992, Hizbullah has also had its own ministers in the government. The participation of Hizbullah ministers in the government formed in 2008 was far from unprecedented.
So why do I disagree with Rob Malley’s assessment that the present situation faces Hizbullah with great risks? Firstly, because Hizbullah and its many political allies don’t actually have to do anything more at this point, beyond having pulled their 11 people out of the government. The Saad Hariri government has fallen. In his capacity as acting PM, Hariri cannot take any of the “big” political decisions that a still-extant non-caretaker PM could take (with the support of his government.) He is in Beirut. He is probably still in the lovely office in the downtown “Serail” where I met him when I was co-leading the CNI trip to Lebanon in November 2009. But he is now powerless in everything that matters. Hizbullah has him exactly where they want him.
Secondly, the overwhelming evidence from Hizbullah’s political actions inside Lebanon up to now has been that they don’t seek to exercise direct political power at this point. May that day come sometime? That is another question. But for now, they really do seem more eager to continue operating within Lebanon’s political system, but not at the head of it, than to overtly take it over.
So in the present situation, how can Lebanon get along without a government, you may ask?
Easily! Lebanon’s people have gotten along without an effective central government throughout many periods since they gained political independence in 1943. Lebanon (like Afghanistan) is a mountainous country, to whose mountains successive waves of different population groups have come, over the centuries, often seeking a safe refuge from religious- or ethnic-minority status elsewhere. By and large (I hate to get too cultural-essentialist, but here goes…) the mountain people– a group that in Lebanon notably does not include the Sunnis, who are nearly all urban and coastal– are hardy, self-sufficient types who don’t see much use for central government and work actively to keep it weak. And when it is weak, their various mountain communities and coastal enclaves have nearly always been able to continue keeping their economies, livelihoods, and trading links going– all the more easily, in the view of many of them, when there is no central government to trammel them.
That is a snapshot of Lebanon and (on a much larger scale) Afghanistan. It notably is not the case in Iraq, or Egypt, or other countries built on great river systems where over the course of now millennia, central government has played a vital role both in regulating and maintaining the water systems and in providing security for the overwhelmingly riverine and flatland (and therefore, fairly vulnerable) populations.
So now, Hizbullah and its allies have pulled out of the government in Beirut. This will not in itself provoke a serious socioeconomic or constitutional crisis. Yes, there has been a long-simmering economic crisis for many low-income Lebanese… and this can be expected to continue. But the existence or non-existence of a government makes no difference to these hard-pressed families. In many parts of Lebanon, anyway, Hizbullah and its allies are the main forces providing social services and development aid, an effort that has strengthened its political hand for the past two decades now, and can be expected to continue.
Hizbullah’s “Al-Manar” media empire reported yesterday that the organization and its allies “will name a personality with a history of national resistance to head the new government.” According to a longstanding tradition in Lebanon– one which under the Taef Agreement of 1989 was supposed to be phased out pretty rapidly thereafter, but still has not been– the country’s PM is supposed to be a Sunni. Hizbullah could easily find a Sunni personality to name for PM if they wanted. I’m not sure they’ll be in a hurry to do so. They do, as I noted, have Saad Hariri almost exactly where they want him.
Also, I certainly don’t rule out that the possibility that after further negotiations, Hariri might come back in as the next prime minister, too, and this time with a form of “backing” from Hizbullah in which his political dependence on them would have been even more clearly spelled out.
But Hizbullah need not hurry. This government “crisis” could easily carry on for 12 or 24 months, just as it did during the long period before the Doha Agreement of May 2008– and this time, without Hizbullah supporters having to go through the discomfort of sitting in chilly tents in the downtown area for all those months.
From this point of view, I think I would revise just a little bit the assessment I penned here on January 12, when I said,

My sense from afar is that Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah and his friends and backers in Tehran are sending a fairly blunt message to the west… that regime change is indeed a game that more than one side can play.

I do still think they are sending a message. But it is not particularly blunt. It is more a tweak, a little nudge (as I had also written, later in that same blog post), than a blunt message…
Hizbullah probably undertook Wednesday’s pullout of government ministers in part with a view to the issue of the overwhelmingly western-backed “Special Tribunal for Lebanon”, the role of which I explored here a little, yesterday. But the latest news today from the STL’s seat in the distant Netherlands is still that, even though prosecutor Daniel Bellemare is expected to lodge the latest round of indictments with the pre-trial judge “imminently”, it will take that judge “about six to 10 weeks” before he reaches his decision on whether to confirm the indictment and issue arrest warrants, and if so, whether to issue these warrants “under seal” or by naming suspects publicly…
Like Bellemare, that judge is also, by the way, not Lebanese, though the STL is supposed to be a “joint” Lebanese-UN institution.
So the STL issue keeps on simmering away– there in The Hague. But if there is only a “caretaker” government in Beirut when any indictments are issued, then it will not be in any position to collaborate with the court in executing its arrest warrants– as did happen back in 2006-07, when there was a government in power in Beirut, and a very pro-western government at that. (Those earlier indictments later collapsed under the weight of a lack of probative evidence, and the arrestees were released.)
So I still think, as I wrote on Wednesday, that Nasrallah and his local and Iranian allies probably decided on their “tweak” against Hariri in Beirut with much more than just the STL issue in mind. The five significant indicators of the U.S.’s regionwide weakness in the Middle East that I identified there are certainly important in the strategic planning of players within both Tehran and Beirut. (Beirut, remember, has always been something of a hub, bellwether, watchpost, and observation tower for developments in the wider region. Hizbullah’s links to Tehran are no more “extraordinary” in this regard than the ties of Hariri, pere et fils, to Saudi Arabia, or in various eras the ties of many Maronites to France or Israel, those of many Sunnis to Egypt or Syria, or whatever.)
The five indicators were, in brief, developments in Tunisia, Egypt, Palestine, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia. If you go to Al-Manar’s homepage (offered in Arabic, English, Spanish, and French) you can certainly see how closely they are following all these developments…
But my bottom line for today here is that Hizbullah’s action on Wednesday neither forces Lebanon into a deep and unmanageable constitutional crisis, nor confronts Hizbullah itself with the kind of “very tough” choices that Rob Malley describes. It was one more move, perhaps a significant one, in a political campaign that for Hizbullah’s ever-wily and smart strategists has a time-line measured in decades, not weeks or months.