Category: Lebanon

My very best wishes to my Lebanese friends (and relatives), whose parliamentarians today succeeded in electing a president, former army commander Michel Suleiman, and in resolving the country’s other immediately outstanding issues of governance– all in a single session.
The session was attended by the Emir and Prime Minister/Foreign Minister of Qatar, who last week played a very constructive role mediating (and no doubt also financially “lubricating”) the political agreement among the major Lebanese political movements that lay behind today’s election. The foreign ministers of Egypt, Syria, and Iran were also there, along with the Secretary-General of the Arab League. (The significance of Syria’s foreign minister being there should be noted.)
Parliament speaker Nabih Berri, a stalwart of the pro-Hizbullah bloc, made a speech recognizing the contribution of many outside powers that, he said, had contributed to the Doha reconciliation. Here’s how he also took a side-swipe at the Bush administration:

Berri… thanked various countries, including Qatar, Iran, Turkey, Russia, France, Italy, Spain as well as the Arab League for their help in bringing an end to Lebanon’s 18-month old political crisis.
“I thank the United States nonetheless, seeing that it seems to have been convinced that Lebanon is not the appropriate place for its New Middle East plan,” Berri said.
“This plan will not find any place in the entire Middle East,” he added. He was referring to comments made by US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who said while on a visit to Beirut during Israel’s war on Lebanon in summer 2006 that the war was part of “birth pangs of the New Middle East.”
“This is a historic moment,” Berri said, while introducing the president. “I ask God to help you succeed in steering the Lebanese ship to a safe haven … today no one in the world can turn Lebanon into a fighting arena.”

Berri was also at pains to point out two other significant anniversaries that fall on this date:

“May 25 happens to be the eighth anniversary of the victory of our heroic resistance and the withdrawal of the Israeli army from most of Lebanon’s territory expect for the Shebaa Farms and the Kafar Shuba Hills,” Berri said. [Btw, you can read Hizbullah’s own breathless retelling of the epic of those days, here.]
“It also happens to be the fist anniversary of the victory of our army against terrorism in Nahr al-Bared,” [Berri] added, referring to last year’s clashes between the army and Islamist militants at a Palestinian refugee camp in the North of the country.

That great, round-up-style Daily Star story linked to above tells us that in his inaugural address Suleiman,

expressed his belief that Lebanon should “respect all United Nations decisions” and stressed the importance of following through with “the international tribunal pertaining to the assassination of [former Prime Minister] Rafik Hariri.”
… The new president said a strong defense strategy is “necessitated by Israeli aggression,” calling for a composed dialogue aimed at creating such a strategy, which he said should “utilize the capabilities of the resistance.”
Suleiman added that Lebanese-Syrian relations should be “brotherly,” with mutual respect for the “boundaries of each sovereign country.”
Suleiman also argued that “the Palestinian struggle cannot be used as a pretext” for terrorism and that “the gun should never be aimed inward, but should always point toward our enemies.”

On balance I think this outcome so far looks positive and hopeful, though– like As’ad Abu Khalil and others– I have many continuing concerns that the Doha Agreement has most likely entrenched the role that sectarian affiliations play in Lebanon’s politics.
On the other hand, it’s not as if there are many particularly compelling and well-organized non- or anti-sectarian political movements active in Lebanon today…. So you kind of have to deal with what you’ve got. And some of these sect-based political movements do certainly have a national(ist) dimension to their worldview and have shown themselves to be fairly flexible and broad-minded actors within the national political scene. And yes, that description fits Hizbullah as well as its main current ally in the Christian camp, the Free Patriotic Movement, with the FPM probably being one of the most actively anti-sectarian movements in Lebanon today..
At its core, the Doha Agreement allows a governing formula for Lebanon that adequately represents the balance of power at both the domestic and the regional level. That’s why it has a good chance of sticking, and Lebanon now has a good chance of moving away from the abyss of all-out internal armed conflict it was staring right into just two two weeks ago to a situation in which the country’s many very pressing social and economic challenges can now– I hope!– start to be rationally addressed in a climate of broad, if not yet perfect, public security.
At both the domestic and regional levels, the current balance really is one of (to quote the well-worn old Lebanese slogan) “No victor, no vanquished.” At the regional level– to which Lebanon by its very nature is as always so terribly vulnerable– the situation is one in which the pro-US forces and the anti-US forces are facing off against each other, just about equally balanced for now. Though trending over time against US unilateralism.
So we should all be very glad that the long-stressed people of Lebanon now have a hope of sitting out the next few years in a situation of some governance, perhaps even some faintly accountable and helpful governance. The Shihabist era of the latest 1950s comes to mind…
Quick addendum, Monday a.m.:
Shihab era: Not great on accountability; horrible for the Palestinian refugees in Lebanon; but pretty good on delivery of basic services to Lebanese citizens. Let’s hope Pres. Suleiman can do much better than Shihab on those first two items. Delivery of basic services, meanwhile, depends on him being able to (re-)build a strong, functioning corps of government administrators. Not sure if this is possible on a basis of continuing sect-based divvying-up of posts? Can he transform the civil service into a truly meritocratic system? Let’s hope so.

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.

As US officials deeply understand, there is considerable diplomatic kudos and power that attaches to being the ones that control (and elbow all others out of) key strands of Middle East peace-brokering.
So in 1989 it was the Saudis who brokered and hosted the intra-Lebanese negotiations that resulted in the “Ta’ef Accord,” named after the Kingdom’s summer capital.
The Ta’ef Accord had a lot of good elements in it. But over the years the Saudis became more and more identified as partisan actors within the Lebanese political scene.
So tomorrow, the relevant Lebanese and Arab parties will be heading to Doha, the capital of Qatar, for the latest round of intra-Lebanese negotiations, which could well be the most productive since, um, Taef nineteen years ago.
The Arab League delegation which was in Beirut today (Thursday) was headed by the Qatari prime minister, Sheikh Hamad bin Jassem al-Thani. A significant commitment of national prestige there. Notable too: none of the Arab states who are directly involved in sponsoring different movements in Lebanon was represented on this particular delegation: No Saudi Arabia, no Egypt, no Syria. Well, Egypt was sort of there, in the person of the indefatigable Amr Musa, who was formerly Egypt’s FM and has now been sec-gen of the Arab League for many years.
What the AL delegation did in Beirut was, basically, sign off on the steps the Lebanese themselves had already taken. Namely, after PM Siniora realized that he could not rely on the support of either the Lebanese army or the US navy, he hurried to reverse the provocative steps his government took ten days ago against Hizbullah’s defensive capabilities; and Hizbullah in turn finally said it would be delighted to negotiate all the tricky constitutional questions that have held up the naming of a new president for the past six months.
Hence, the “pilgrimage” to Qatar tomorrow, where those matters will be discussed.
Qatar seems like an interesting place. It hosts both a huge contingent of the US naval/military power in the region– and Al-Jazeera, a t.v. empire that, while it isn’t anywhere close to being as anti-US as some Americans believe, does nonetheless have a voice that is independent of the pro-US orthodoxy proclaimed by, e.g., the big American networks, the BBC, or Saudi media like Al-Arabiyah. Qatar is a Wahhabi state– that has always jealously guarded its independence from Saudi Arabia. Also, for Wahhabists, its rulers seem strangely entrepreneurial. (Maybe that judgment just reveals my ignorance about the nature of Wahhabism. I’m not sure.)
Anyway, the fact that the Saudis have been so totally sidelined both by the collapse of the street/popular power of their proteges within Lebanon, and by their sidelining from the levers of the AL’s Lebanon diplomacy, is extremely interesting, and has broader significance for the region as a whole.
Update, 10:45 p.m.:
The L.A. Times’s Borzou Daragahi blogs glowingly from Beirut:

Sheik Hamad also said: “Everyone knows that there is no winner in this.”
Except for maybe the sheik himself, who emerged as a diplomatic rock star.
He put on a heck of a performance.

I guess it was my understanding that the Lebanese parties had concluded their basic deal before the AL delegation reached Beirut. Borzou quotes Karim Makdissi, who teaches political science at AUB as saying, “The lesson to be drawn is that the notion of an international community… imposing itself cannot work unless the real situation on the ground allows it.”
Someone send that bit of basic wisdom to GWB?

Rami Zuraik has yet another excellent post on his blog today. It is about the vulnerable and encircled small informal settlement in West Beirut in the area known as “Behind Sports City.” (At one point, I lived not far from there. I know exactly what he’s talking about.)
He focuses on the experiences during the recent fighting of one BSC resident, a house-cleaner called Najwa:

On Wednesday, Najwa told me, the Future militia established armed presence around her and shot at the houses of opposition supporters. Many left. When the skirmishes started on Thursday afternoon, the neighborhood filled up with armed men. She looked out of her door and saw her neighbors sitting outside the house. Their 17 years old stood up and walked towards the street. He was shot and died there.
Najwa and her son left the house in a hurry and ran down the hill to seek shelter in Sabra. The Palestinian camp was boiling, filled with armed men. Hamas and Fateh supporters were eying each others menacingly. Hama’s people support Hizbullah, and Fateh are sympathetic to Hariri and the Future movement. But when the night fell, they all joined rank as the camp began to tremble. As the sound of explosion and gunfire increased, a rumor had spread through the camp: Samir Geagea men, the Lebanese Forces, were coming back to massacre everyone, as in September 1982. Najwa tells me that as of this moment, the camp established serious guard rounds till the morning, and only relaxed when the news came that the Opposition had taken over the city.
When she went back to her house, Najwa found the neighbors in mourning. Being Shi’a, their grief and anger had been adopted by the Amal militiamen. These had gone around shooting and terrorizing some of the known Future supporters. The Nawar [i.e. Roma] people, she told me, paid the price. But her neighbor’s son was dead.
The poor, regardless of color, race or creed, always pay the price.

You can only imagine how vulnerable these BSC residents were if they felt that fleeing into the Sabra refugee camp could make them more secure…
(That reminds me of the period in Beirut in the late 1970s when Turkish Kurds started pouring into the city. Beirut was in the full throes of the civil war… but those Kurds felt that even Beirut was more secure than their own home areas in Turkey at the time. I visited some of the places where they lived in Beirut: half-destroyed houses very close to the Green Line. It was truly Dickensian– but still, better than staying where they had been in Turkey.)
As Rami says, when there’s war and insecurity it is always the poor and marginalized who pay a disproportionate amount of the price.

So there was George Bush, telling the BBC today that he is willing to send US aid to the Lebanese Army… Doesn’t he realize that, as I suggested here yesterday, the Lebanese Army isn’t on his side any more??
Is it any wonder that the administration led by this man is losing so badly in the Middle East these days?

Rami Khouri, a very astute observer, writes in Monday’s Daily Star

The consequences of what has happened in the past week may portend an extraordinary but constructive new development: the possible emergence of the first American-Iranian joint political governance system in the Arab world. Maybe.
If Lebanon shifts from street clashes to the hoped-for political compromise through a renewed national dialogue process, it will have a national unity government whose two factions receive arms, training, funds and political support from both the United States and Iran. Should this happen, an unspoken American-Iranian political condominium in Lebanon could prove to be key to power-sharing and stability in other parts of the region, such as Palestine, Iraq and other hot spots. This would also mark a huge defeat for the United States and its failed diplomatic approach that seeks to confront, battle and crush the Islamist-nationalists throughout the region…

The rest of his piece is worth reading, too.
I’ll only attach the one further small observation: That actually, the government in Iraq is already, effectively a US-Iranian condominium, given the long and still-continuing ties between Iran and the parties that dominate the government in the Baghdad Green Zone.
It is possible, though, that in Lebanon Hizbullah may be aiming for a bit more than a “US-Iranian condominium”?
On Saturday, after the collapse of the anti-Hizbullah militias in West Beirut, the Siniora government backed down from its earlier demands that (1) the pro-Hizbullah security chief at the Beirut airport be removed and (2) Hizbullah dismantle its relatively secure, fiber-optics communications system. Siniora said something like, “Oh gosh, we really didn’t mean to do that– but let the army decide what’s best.”
The army, whose officers have been extensively courted by Hizbullah over the past years, reacted by requesting the government to revoke those two decisions.
The position adopted by the army leadership has considerable importance for the prospects of any kind of stability in the country in the months ahead. Not least because, under UNSC resolution 1701 it’s the army that is responsible for assuring the security of Lebanon’s southern border. And various things like the movements of the UNIFIL forces in the south are subject to the supervision of the army, which represents Lebanon’s sovereignty within the country.
Hizbullah has acted in responsible fashion in most parts of the country where it routed opposing militias: It almost immediately handed over the areas it thereby brought under its control to the army.
Evidently, right now, Hizbullah’s leaders feel they have reason to trust the army.
But what of Lebanon’s civilian “government”? So far, PM Siniora (or as Pres. Bush routinely mis-names him “Sonora”) has kept on hewing to a fairly strongly anti-Hizbullah line — with the exception of the bowing toward realism Saturday, when he said it should be the army that decides on the airport-security and Hizbullah telephony issues.
But in at least one semi-official Hizbullah commentary today, (here in English) a Hizbullah person is “predicting” that Siniora himself won’t last long in office. Mohamad Shmaysani writes there, on the Al-Manar English website that “sources” had told him that close US ally Saudi Arabia

stopped Saniora from tendering his resignation on Friday… The source told Al-Manar that Riyadh was close to agree[ing] on Saniora’s resignation, but US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice interfered and stopped the process. She assured Saniora and promised his big Arab support during the ministerial meeting in Cairo Sunday as well as international backing Monday.
What’s next?
The fast fall of the ruling bloc is for sure and a new political era will start; an era that will have its repercussions on the regional stage, for sure.

Regarding the Arab League’s sparsely attended ministerial meeting in Cairo today, I see that AP is reporting that about the only thing the meeting could agree on was that:

The Arab League demanded Shiite gunmen pull out of West Beirut and leave Lebanon’s army in charge of security. The gunmen had mostly left the streets by Sunday, a day after the army called on them to clear out.

Well, there is a “mission” that has already been largely “accomplished.”
But I’m not sure that the Arab League can save Siniora’s government at this point?
Oh, and did I mention that Pres. Bush is going to be making a splashy big appearance in Jerusalem on Wednesday?
In the context of the continuing stasis in the Palestinian-Israeli peace negotiations, I imagine that all the heavily trumpeted instances of Bush’s undying support for Israel that we’ll hear over the days ahead might not be quite what the increasingly embattled pro-US forces in the Arab world need at this point?

If you want to know what’s happening in the Ras Beirut/Manara area of Beirut, go check Rami Zuraik’s excellent ‘Land and People’ blog. Though the wisdom he dispenses there is usually on agricultural and food issues in the ME and worldwide, right now he and his kids are hunkered down in their Ras Beirut apartment.
This is what he blogged earlier this morning:

We woke up this morning to the sound of machine gun shooting. I looked from the window and there was a few young armed civilians running in all directions. The kids were startled and we did what everybody does at times like these: seek the news. I sat at my computer and logged into the usual websites, then left the laptop to go to the tv, in the same room. The kids came in the room. Suddenly there was a small explosion, like a firecracker, with a cloud of dust and smoke. My 10 years old was the nearest to the source and we all looked towards him. There was a little hole in the glass door of the balcony, and another one in the wall a meter or so away from him. A bullet had come through the balcony, passed between the children and removed a small chunk of the wall, a meter or so away from my kid. We are now all huddled in a small room with no windows, waiting for the storm to pass. As I write, the fighting and shooting is still going on.
My kid had his baptism of fire at 10.

In other posts he both manages to convey the terror of what his family’s life is like and to explain/analyze some of what is going on.
I think Rami would agree that the situation in many Beirut neighborhoods is probably quite a lot worse than in his. But his family’s situation is bad enough. Allah yusellimak, Rami.

I was trying to think through why the Bush White House and its Lebanese allies have been acting in such a provocative, escalatory way in Lebanon in recent weeks. There is no way the pro-US forces in Lebanon could ever hope to “win” a civil war if the country should indeed be tipped over the brink into one.
Actually, the history of the past 33 years in the country should prove that no-one wins if there is a civil war there.
So why do the US and its Lebanese allies currently seem so risk-happy?
Then it struck me. There are 15,000 UN troops, most of them from NATO countries, currently deployed in the south of the country; and most of them aren’t doing very much there. (The peace is kept between Israel and Hizbullah much more by the deterrent power that they exert towards each other than by UNIFIL’s lightly armed peacekeepers, as I wrote here, a long time ago.) But if a civil war should suddenly threaten to engulf the whole of Lebanon, maybe the Bushists would seek to get UNIFIL’s mandate suddenly enlarged, so that its troops could intervene at short notice, and in support of the Lebanese side that the Bushists judge to be “legitimate”?
Obviously, I have no way of knowing if this is their plan. If it is, it would be a plan fraught with large numbers of dangers and uncertainties. For one thing, it’s by no means certain the UN Security Council– or indeed, most of the troop-contributing countries– would ever agree to such an enlargement of the UNIFIL mandate. But if entangling UNIFIL in a Lebanese civil war is not part of the Bushists’ plan, then what are they doing acting in such an escalatory and self-defeating way there?

Tomorrow is the third anniversary of the truck-bomb killing of former Lebanese PM Rafiq Hariri. Quite understandably, many of those most horrified by that killing are planning large-scale marches to commemorate it. This, amidst the the political crisis caused by the failure of the country’s political leaders to agree on a formula for forming the country’s next government. (That bottleneck has also led to the failure of the country’s MPs to form a quorum large enough to elect the new president; the country has been without a president since November 23.)
Obviously, many Lebanese and their friends are concerned at the possibility that the spate of acts of violence that has occurred in recent weeks might, at this very sensitive time, tip over that hard-to-discern brink into a large-scale, outright, very damaging, and possibly lengthy civil war.
Last Saturday, February 10, I wrote a post here in which I said that the real story in Lebanon is actually that there is not, already, a civil war there. I also noted the efforts that many Lebanese political leaders, including those from Hizbullah, had been pursuing in an effort to prevent the outbreak of a civil war.
But on that very same day, MP Saad Hariri, the son of the late Rafiq H. and a leader of the anti-Syrian “March 14” bloc in the parliament, made a belligerent speech in which he said that if the country’s “destiny” is confrontation, then he and his allies were “ready” for that.
The following day, Hariri’s ally, the ever-mercurial Walid Jumblatt, went much further, issuing this very public threat:

“You want disorder? It will be welcomed. You want war? It will be welcomed. We have no problem with weapons, no problem with missiles. We will take them from you.”

On Feb. 11th, too, at least two people were wounded Sunday in a gunfight between Jumblatt supporters and opponents in Aley, east of Beirut, and shots were reportedly fired Sunday in an altercation between Hariri supporters and members of Parliament Speaker Nabih Berri’s security services.
(When I got to the bottom of my incoming mail pile on Sunday, I found a charming, Christmas card from Walid– featuring a photo he had taken of the snow-covered steps of his family’s feudal home in Moukhtara. Maybe I should have a conversation with him about Jesus’s teachings on nonviolence sometime?)
Back in November, Walid notoriously threatened to unleash car-bombs against the Syrian capital, Damascus. Yesterday, just such a bomb did explode there. It killed Imad Mughniyeh, long wanted by the US government as being the accused architect of the very lethal attacks against US military and diplomatic facilities in Lebanon in 1983-84, and by Israel for his alleged role in organizing very lethal attacks against Israeli and Jewish facilities in Buenos Aires. Hizbullah’s Manar website today described him as “a great resistance leader who joined the procession of Islamic Resistance martyrs.”
No indication, yet, of whether Walid’s threat of last November was related in any way to Mughniyeh’s killing. But did the belligerent words Walid pronounced last Sunday about “We have no problem with weapons, no problem with missiles” have anything to do with yesterday’s visit by US Undersecretary of Defense Eric Edelman to Beirut?
This AP report tells us that,

Since 2006, the United States has committed US$321 million in security assistance to the Lebanese army, and has pledged to provide equipment and training to the country’s armed forces.
In the letter Edelman handed (Lebanese PM Fuad) Saniora from Bush, the American president expressed strong support to the Lebanese government and said that Iran and Syria are trying to “undermine Lebanon’s democratic institutions through violence and intimidation.”

This move of accusing Syria and Iran of unacceptable intervention in Lebanese politics is an increasingly common one– from a US administration that is also, (a) majorly intervening in Lebanon’s domestic politics, and (b) quite evidently a non-Lebanese actor. It would be a laughable move to make if the reality that blies behind it– of US arms supplies to the Lebanese army and hostile, escalatory rhetoric– were not so serious.
All power to the de-escalators and the bridge-builders. May their efforts succeed.

… so what’s going on?
This is a really interesting story, though most of the western (“If it bleeds, it leads”) MSM haven’t even started to notice it.
But what’s been happening in Lebanon since even before the Feb. 14, 2005 killing of ex-PM Rafiq Hariri is that– okay, in addition to the ghastly Israeli assault of summer 2006, and the brutal fighting at Nahr al-Bared refugee camp last summer– there have been numerous other sporadic acts of lethal violence. And each time, many people around the world would perk up their ears and say, “Oh my! Is Lebanon about to plunge back into civil war?” But it doesn’t happen.
Why not?
I think this is due, in large part, to the sense of realism and political wisdom that so many Lebanese political leaders actually have. Starting with the country’s biggest party, Hizbullah, but extending far beyond them. Nearly all the acts of violence that have occurred since late 2004 have been unclaimed, and unexplained. Under those circumstances, normally, people would have every reason to be fearful. Where might it happen next, and to whom? People would be on-edge and ready to “counter-attack first”. Back in December 2006, there was a small eruption of fighting between Sunni and Shiite militias in South Beirut. But it was rapidly contained and defused. Last Sunday, there was another such cliffhanging incident. Again, it got contained. There is evidently some very serious and intentional conflict-defusing work going on there, for which the people of Lebanon and the region should all be glad.
I’m just thinking back to the few days I spent in the generally cosmopolitan hub of Ras Beirut last month. Ras Beirut seemed a lot more relaxed and pleasant to be in then, than it did when we were there for two months in later 2004 (i.e., before the Hariri killing.) Maybe that had to do with the removal of the Syrian military presence from the country, which happened– as a response to Hariri killing– in summer of 2005.
Last month, the main gripe of many people in Ras Beirut was against the selfishness and arrogance that so many local parliamentarians seem to display in various facets of their personal and political lives. The parliamentarians have periodically been enacting their big drama of “Can they convene enough MPs together and reach agreement on the formula for forming the next government?” Yesterday, they just postponed that constitutionally vital session for the 14th time. As a result, the country still doesn’t have a president. The sitting ministers– that is, all the non-Shiite ones, since the Shiite ones all resigned a year or so back– continue to get their hefty salaries and to do not very much of anything except renew the contracts they all gave to their friends a while back. The MPs also take their salaries, and throw out huge barricades around their lavish residences, which inconvenience everyone else no end. No legislating, and precious little real governing, gets done at all. The country generally keeps running along, even if in an extremely unorthodox way.
Lebanon, remember, is a country whose founding ethos was one of aversion to, or flight from, anything resembling central government authority. That’s what being a mountain-dominated society full of theologically heterodox communities is all about. Iraq, which is a plains country, is actually far, far worse affected when the central government doesn’t function, since back to the days of the Sumerians the river/plains systems there have always totally relied on having a central authority to regulate both waters and the livelihoods and communities so heavily dependent on them.
So in Lebanon, it is indeed quite possible that the country won’t get a new president or a new president before the scheduled holding of parliamentary elections next year. In which case, the main job for the sitting MPs will be to draw up the rules for that election. (A bizarre system, eh?) It will be interesting to see whether an international community in which George W. Bush is no longer a leading actor will be one that supports Lebanon at last having a strong, fair, and non-sectarian election system… Let’s hope so.