Author: Helena

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…

Continue reading “US political retreat in Lebanon”

Amazing, the power of the internet! Big thanks to all who emailed me with offers of help on PDF-ing my 1984-85 monograph titled The Shia community and the future of Lebanon. A reader from west-coast USA was able to do it for me from a version that I faxed over to her.
Here it is.
I must have written it in late 1984. I found a copy of it in my father’s estate after he died in 1999; it had in it the letter, dated January 1985, that I tucked in the front cover when I mailed it to him in England, from Washington DC where I was then living.
What a lot has happened since then, eh? It wasn’t till February 1985 that a new, previously unknown organization called “Hizbullah” issued a letter publicly announcing its formation…
In the monograph you can find background material about the Shiite community of Lebanon from which Hizbullah sprang. You can find out about the origins of the Amal movement, the political body from which Hizbullah’s founders had split off. And you can read my “policy conclusions” for the US:

The inter-sect system in Lebanon is a delicate mechanism, often fristratingly bloddy in its operation. At the moment it is undergoing a long-term shift in power [from Maronite dominance to Shiite dominance] which is probably comparable to the one experienced from 1825 to 1861 [from Druze dominance to Maronite dominance]. Neither the US nor any other outside actor can do much to reverse this shift. But the US can change its policies–as the Israelis already have done, in part– to align themselves with rather than against the historical processes at work. That necessarily includes addressing the political dimension of Lebanon’s increasingly pressing Shia question.

Hey, not bad for the pregnant 32-year-old that I then was, eh?
The child in question was safely born, grew up healthy (thank G-d), and is now nearly 20 years old.
As for Hizbullah….
(By the way, apologies for the poor quality of the photos in the PDF file. I may or may not be able to get something done about that. Especially, no offense at all intended to Nabih Berri for the fact that he came out looking a bit bad there. Technical factors were at work considerably beyond my ability to control.)

THE SHIA COMMUNITY AND THE FUTURE OF LEBANON
By Helena Cobban

In yesterday’s post about Lebanon, remember, I wrote:

I think Shalom and the Israeli government in general made a really stupid mis-step when they decided openly to throw their hat into the Lebanese political arena over the weekend.

In Wednesday’s HaAretz, Akiva Eldar has this:

The United States has asked Israel to stop making statements about the withdrawal of Syrian forces from Lebanon. Washington believes these comments undermine American interests in the area by serving the interests of extremists in Arab countries who oppose the reforms that President George W. Bush wants to bring to Syria and other Arab nations.
U.S. Ambassador Dan Kurtzer delivered the message to the Foreign Ministry after Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom turned an Israeli demand for the withdrawal of all Syrian forces from Lebanon into the centerpiece of his latest visit to the United States, making it the main subject of all his public addresses.
… The message from Washington criticizes leaks to the press about contacts between Lebanese opposition figures and Uri Lubrani, the government’s special adviser on Lebanon, over the opening of a communications channel between Israel and its northern neighbor.
The Americans are also displeased with reports that Israel is demanding that the United States and Europe not reduce their pressure for a complete withdrawal of both Syrian forces and the Iranian Revolutionary Guards. A Western diplomatic source said, “You don’t have to be a political genius to understand that public pressure from Israel for steps to be taken against Syria on the Lebanon issue could boomerang, since it would turn the U.S. and Europe, in Arab eyes, into puppets of Israel.”

Oh yes, the Keystone cops “do” Lebanon once again, indeed. Including the ever silly, ever ill-informed, ever dangerous Uri Lubrani, it seems.
And in other news in HaAretz, it seems the Israeli general staff and “security” circles I referred to yesterday (well, I quoted Ze’ev Schiff referring to yesterday), haven’t completely lain down after their apparent “defeat” in terms of policy advice re Lebanon, at the hands of the Foreign Ministry…
Amos Harel writes:

Israeli security officials are concerned that a Syrian pullback of forces in Lebanon to the Bekaa could spur Hezbollah to renew violence on the Israeli-Lebanese border, outgoing Israel Defense Forces chief Lt. Gen. Moshe Ya’alon said Tuesday.
The Syrians may want to “bring about an increase in the terror threat” on their way out of Lebanon, Ya’alon told reporters in Tel Aviv.

I guess Shalom is having his knuckles rapped in Washington a little right now, so it’s probably a good time for his domestic opponents on this issue to try to regain some ground from under his absent feet.

I sit here in the US. For the past week or so, I’ve been bombarded with all these ill-informed, shallow, self-referential “analyses” from people in the mainstream media here who two months ago couldn’t tell a Jumblatt from a Janjawid who’ve been frantically telling me that because of the “flowering” of (a certain kind of) democracy in Lebanon, then probably the US invasion of Iraq wasn’t such a bad thing after all.
(Okay, Walid Jumblatt himself fed into that kind of delusional fantasy a little bit with some of his utterances.)
You read David Brooks telling us to “Give Wolfowitz his due”; you read Fareed Zakariya; you read Jim Hoagland, crowing about how the Middle East ” has recently been jolted by a surge of positive political change (in a piece where, amazingly, he also confesses that he’s just been acting as Tony Blair’s shill for these past years)… And you read that great political thinker George W. Bush himself, today– “Today I have a message for the people of Lebanon: All the world is witnessing your great movement of conscience. Lebanon’s future belongs in your hands…” — Well you sit there and you listen in amazement to all this totally choreographed and totally phantasmagoric nonsense.
Nonsense on stilts, in the words of one of my gurus, Jeremy Bentham.
So today, something over half a million pro-Hizbullah Lebanese took to the streets to exercise their democratic rights. (I hope you read what I posted here yesterday.)
I have to admit, I found something fairly delicious in the fact that, even as Prez Bush was spouting off with those immortal words quoted above, half a million Lebanese (from a national population of some 3.5 million, remember) were indeed taking part in a “movement of conscience “, and in the process, according to every journalistic report I’ve read so far, completely dwarfing the movement mounted by the US-stoked anti-Syrian forces over the past two weeks.
One thing I learned, from my work on the upcoming Boston Review piece on Hizbullah is that Sayed Hassan Nasrallah, the party’s 44-year-old secretary-general, is one heck of a wily political organizer. I go into his political biography a little in the BosRev piece. By my calculation, he was just 15 years old in 1976, when he became the party organizer in his home village of al-Bazouriyeh, near Tyre, for Imam Musa Sadr’s then-new Shiite political movement, Amal. After that, he was rapidly groomed by the network of Shiite mullahs that spans between south Lebanon and the Hawzas (seminaries) of Najaf and Qom, to become an exemplary Shiite organizer and leader.
Anyway, read the piece when it comes out in 2-3 weeks: it’s got some interesting little vignettes about him. It’s also got quite a lot about the incredible political organizing job the Hizbullah leaders as a group have done in the 20 years of the party’s existence.
In their work in organizing today’s demonstration, it was not just the numbers– pulled together, remember, within less than 48 hours. It was not just the incredible timing of having their demonstration happen the very same day as Bush’s totally asinine speech quoted above. It was also the clever political positioning that Nasrallah himself had insisted upon: the exclusive use of the Lebanese national flag, with the deliberate decision not to show any hint of Hizbullah’s trademark yellow colorings; the minute of silence for Hariri; the singing of the national anthem (which every schoolchild in Lebanon knows by heart, from daily airings of it.) Oh yes, indeed, whose “cedar” revolution now?
And of course, as noted yesterday, the party leaders’ insistence on discipline and nonviolence.
Who knows where all this lead? I’m looking at the story at at least two levels: the Lebanese national level, and then the US-influence-in-the world level.
For the Lebanese, I’m am just totally delighted that so far they have been able to pursue their disagreements this time round through peaceful political means. Long may that continue to continue.
As for George W, I shall mainly sit and watch how he deals with this new challenge to his triumphalist self-narrative. Today, his spokesflack, Scott McClellan, sputtered that,

We always welcome peaceful demonstrations, and we welcome peaceful demonstrations by the Lebanese people.

Well, what else can he say?
But really, over the weeks ahead, will the Prez start backing off from some of his “empowering the people” rhetoric–seeing as where it is going to lead, in practically every single Arab country? Or will he carry on mouthing it even if–as is most likely to happen– it leads to the growing empowerment of a distinctly anti-American “people’s voice”?
Watch this space.

The Lebanon story continues rapidly to evolve. On Sunday morning, Israeli FM Silvan Shalom, on his way to Washington, told reporters that his government will be working hard to push for an immediate and complete Syrian withdrawal from Lebanon and the “neutralization” of Hizbullah. In another report that I read yesterday, that I can’t now find, Shalom was described as having also said that once Syria is out of Lebanon it should be easy enough for Lebanon to make peace with Israel.
Shalom– like many people in the west– seemed to have gotten carried away by all the large and stirring images the western media have been carrying of the anti-Syrian demonstrations in Beirut this past couple of weeks… And he seems to have failed to notice that these demonstrators were notably not either (1) making any mention of the disarming or demobilization of Hizbullah, or (2) calling for peace with Israel.
Like many people in the west, Shalom seems not to have noticed, either, that on February 19, stuck right in the middle of a period of anti-Syrian demonstrations in Beirut that attracted, at an absolute maximum, some 50,000 participants, Hizbullah held its annual Ashoura Day observance in the southern suburbs… carrying large pictures of Hariri along with pics of favorite ayatollahs… and they attracted some hundreds of thousands of participants to that.
Since the western media, and the members of the western-oriented political elite in general chose not to make any mention of that large gathering in Beirut’s Dahiyeh (the extensive southern suburbs where elected Hizbullah municipal councils have now been in charge for quite some years)… Hizbullah leader Sayed Hassan Nasrallah yesterday decided it was time for Hizbullah to exit the suburbs and make its presence peacefully but massively felt in the heart of downtown Beirut.
I hate to say this to my friends in the Lebanese-leftist part of the anti-Syrian movement, but the political dynamics of what’s been happening have had some of the aspects of the street-demonstration contests last year over Hugo Chavez’s role in Venezuela… There in Caracas, a largely middle-class movement of anti-Chavezistas presented itself as a new “people power” movement and received wide and generally extremely sympathetic coverage in the western media, plus lots of support from the US government and US quasi-governmental “foundations”, etc… It took a while for Chavez’s more numerous and much more economically hard-pressed supporters to come out on the streets in their own counter-demonstrations.
Then, as I recall, once Chavez’s position there had been submitted to a nationwide referendum, its popular legitimacy was re-confirmed and the thin-ness of the “respresentivity” claimed by the western-backed “people power” leaders was revealed for all to see.
Hizbullah is a lot better organized than Hugo Chavez’s people. Plus, it can draw on a huge, continuing reservoir of goodwill from people in nearly all the communities inside Lebanon except for those in a portion of the decidedly-minority Christian community who hate and fear most brands of Islam. (I should note that this portion does not include the Patriarch of the Maronite church, or many of the Maronite political figures.)
How many times do outsiders need to hear this message: being anti-Syrian in Lebanon today is not the same as being anti-Hizbullah or being pro-Israel.
So I think Shalom and the Israeli government in general made a really stupid mis-step when they decided openly to throw their hat into the Lebanese political arena over the weekend.
That decision apparently came as a result of a significant debate within the Israeli political leadership. According to the ever-excellently-connected Ze’ev Schiff, writing on Friday in Ha’Aretz the two positions argued there were these:

Continue reading “Israel and Hizbullah: face-off in Lebanon”