Category: Lebanon

Condi Rice seems to have been edging toward a realization that you can’t for very long hope to both use Syrian power to help rein in Hizbullah and attack the Syrian regime politically on a sharp, continuous, and very childish basis.
This AP article reports that,

Rice said Sunday the United States’ poor relationship with Syria is overstated and indicated an openness to working with Damascus to resolve the crisis.

As with everything else halfway sensible she is planning to do regarding the crisis, this tiny shift of emphasis is far too little, far too late.
The administration seems to have gotten to the point where it has zero capacity of its own to judge political dynamics in the Middle East, that is separate from the constant barrage of hasbara (propaganda) and “advice” it gets from the Israelis and their allies. Hence its officials seem to have believed that the “Sunni-Shiite divide” that the Israelis and their allies have been trying to play up for all it is worth in the region as a whole (as in Iraq– pursuant to longtime Israeli front-man Martin Indyk’s April 2003 advice to Bush to play divide and rule there for all its worth) would really bring Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia into diplomatic play regarding Lebanon and strongly on the anti-Hizbullah side.
It ain’t that simple. All those three countries have large and politically publics. Especially Egypt and Jordan. Neither those publics– nor, I have to say, any of the leaders of those regimes– can stomach the sight of what Israel has been doing, with, up to now, the full support of the Bush administration to the people and country of Lebanon.
I read this, also in the same AP piece, which is by someone called Kathy Gannon:

Arab heavyweights Egypt and Saudi Arabia were pushing Syria to end its support for the guerrillas, Arab diplomats in Cairo said.
A loss of Syria’s support would deeply weaken Hezbollah, though its other ally, Iran, gives it a large part of its money and weapons. The two moderate Arab governments were prepared to spend heavily from Egypt’s political capital in the region and Saudi Arabia’s vast financial reserves to break Damascus from the guerrillas and Iran, the diplomats said.
Syria said it will press for a cease-fire to end the fighting — but only in the framework of a broader Middle East peace initiative that would include the return of the Golan Heights. Israel was unlikely to accept such terms but it was the first indication of Syria’s willingness to be involved in efforts to defuse the crisis.
In Washington, Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Saud al-Faisal asked President Bush to intervene.
“I have brought a letter from the Saudi King to stop the bleeding in Lebanon,” Saud told reporters after the Oval Office meeting.

I had to issue a wry laugh. This Mubarak regime in Egypt is willing to “spend deeply from its political capital in the region” to aid US efforts to rein in Hizbullah?? And what political capital would that be, pray?

Just a reminder, in case any readers here do not recall that I had a lengthy article on the history and politics of Hizbullah in Boston Review last year.
Right now I’m in an internet-poor country, Uganda, doing some challenging research into war and peacemaking issues here, and unable to keep up with all breaking developments in Lebanon. But I think much of the material I have in that piece should prove useful to people today.

I’m in Kampala, Uganda. News is hard to get. But I see from Haaretz that Olmert’s government seems to be stepping up the pace of its military assault against Lebanon:

Fifty-three Lebanese civilians were killed on Monday in 70 Israel Air Force strikes as the Israel Defense Forces continued its offensive on Lebanon, in an effort to push for the release of two abducted soldiers and to stop Hezbollah from raining rockets on northern Israel.
By nightfall Monday, 210 Lebanese had been reported killed in the six days of ferocious fighting between Israel and Hezbollah guerrillas.

I saw Olmert on the BBC yesterday– giving a lengthy, live presentation of his big speech to the Knesset outlining the rationale and aims of the war. As I understood what he was saying, it was that he is determined to dismantle Hizbullah completely.
Very hard to do this if– as I suppose– the Israeli government is not, actually, prepared after its previous lengthy experience of occupying Lebanon to send forces into the country to run another lengthy occupation of substantial portions of it. (That earlier one, remember, gave birth to Hizbullah in the first place.)
Another route to “dismantling” Hizbullah, which is the one that the Israeli government seems to be taking, is to put such horrendous military and destructive pressure on the country’s people that they would move to dismantle it themselves. Therefore this battle is very much one about the internal political balance inside Lebanon.
The Israelis tried and notably failed to win a battle of exactly this same type back in 1996. This time, Olmert must be either (1) forgetting the lessons of that battle or (2) calculating that the Lebanese balance was so much changed by the “Beirut Spring” of 2005 that this time he has a chance of winning.
I am not so sure. Lebanese people certainly hate having Israel’s death and destruction rained down on them, and a fair portion of them do apparently see Hizbullah as having helped to trigger this. But still, most of them still clearly see Israel’s response as misdirected and grossly disproportional. So where are the forces in Lebanon that are ready and able actually to take on Hizbullah (whose active supporters, after all, account for more than 40% of the national population)?
Hizbullah “wins” merely by not losing this battle. It also has supply lines through Syria (though under Israeli surveillance.)
Olmert’s rhetoric against Syria’s role represents an attempt to get huge international pressure put on Syria. But in the face of the wanton destructivity of Israel’s military operations, will this pressure be forthcoming?
Depressingly, I don’t see any quick resolution to this war. I don’t see Hizbullah either “destroyed” or (easily) backing down. And certainly I don’t see Israel destroyed or (easily) backing down.
Outsiders should surely be pushing for an immediate ceasefire, that is, an immediate end to the death, destruction, and terror being rained on both sides (though highly asymmetrically). And an immediate launching of a broad new international effort finally to resolve all outstanding strands of the Arab-Israeli conflict.
If such a final resolution is not found, then every few years there will be horrible, anti-humane crises like the present one…
This present maelstrom of violence is particularly depressing and unnecessary, for two reasons:

(1) The vast majority of the peoples of Lebanon, Israel, and Palestine all want exactly the same thing— which is to be able to live their lives in safe and flourishing communities that are not plagued by war. Olmert’s speech in the Knesset was long on expressing this with regard to the Israeli people but absolutely devoid of any recognition that this is exactly what the majority of the Lebanese and Palestinian peoples also want; and
(2) The outlines of how such a peace might be drawn up are fairly well known by now: Israeli withdrawals from just about all of the lands seized by military force from their neighbors in 1967, and the establishment of full relations of normal peace between Israel and all its nieghbors. If such a peace were indeed built, the support for militant irredentists in the Palestinian, Lebanese, Jewish-Israeli, and other communities of the region would go down to very low and absolutely manageable levels… Most people would be too busy celebrating and building upon the newfound regional peace.

So I just want, in the midst of these dark, dark days, to underscore that there is indeed a way to avoid these repeated plungings into cycles of death and destruction. Let the UN, which was founded on the principle of the urgent need to find nonviolent ways to resolve international conflicts, lead the way.

So today, Lebanon’s Hizbullah raised the stakes in the rapidly evolving
confrontation between Israel and the militant Arab organizations on its
borders– and it also demonstrated its own continuing operational
prowess, daring, and inventiveness– when it sent
a squad into action against an Israeli tank operating apparently
just inside Israel, killing three of the tank’s crew members and
snatching two others into captivity.  When the Israeli military
responded by sending other tanks into Lebanon, one hit a landmine
killing four more soldiers inside it.

Hizbullah’s capture of two Israeli soldiers
comes, of course, a couple of weeks into the crisis Israeli society is
already facing as a result of Hamas’s capture of an IDF soldier in
Gaza.  I can easily imagine that many Israelis are in a turmoil of
emotion.  Though their army has killed around 70 or so
Palestinians– many of them civilians– in the past two weeks of
military actions, Palestinian society shows few signs of “cracking”
politically, in terms of backing down on the demand of the PA
government leaders that Israel agree to a widespread release of
Palestinian detainees in return to the safe release of Gilad
Shalit.  (This is, of course, very similar to the “sumoud” shown
by the Lebanese public when Israel tried to bomb it into political
submission back in April 1996. Other people might recall the response
of Londoners to the Blitz.)

Israeli PM Ehud Olmert is, fairly predictably,  huffing and
puffing a lot of very angry rhetoric.  That AP report linked
above, by Joseph Panossian, says:

(That page on the AP news site, by the way, had a photo of Hizbullah
leader Sheikh Hassan Nasrullah “taking questions at a press conference
in Beirut”– in which it looked for all the world as if he’d been
taking lessons in projecting a commanding public presence from the
School of Donald Rumsfeld…  Oh well, on second thoughts,
Nasrullah was already able to give a talented and commanding public
performance a long time before Rumsfeld became Bush’s Secretary of
Defense.)

Panossian wrote this:

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said the Hezbollah
action went against the interest of the Lebanese people, and that Syria has a
“special responsibility” to resolve the crisis. [whatever that might mean– HC]

“All sides must act with
restraint to resolve this incident
peacefully and to protect innocent life and civilian infrastructure,”
she said ahead of meetings in Paris.

That latter statement is new and interesting.  It seems clearly
directed at Israel, and indicates she has a new awareness of how
disastrous the consequences of a continuation or (heaven forfend) even
a new escalation by Israel of its use of military force could be for
all the status quo powers in the region… And yes, that certainly
includes the US military presence in Iraq and all its associated supply
lines, as well as the US’s network of political alliances and allies
throughout the region.

But guess what.  If Haaretz’s often well informed Amos Harel is to
be believed, then his sources in at least the Israeli military (but
let’s hope not their political commanders?) are talking
about inflicting damage on Lebanon that will force the country’s
“civilian infrastructures [to] regress 20, or even 50 years.”

Well, at one level, we could say to that: no big deal.  The
Lebanese people in general– and Hizbullah’s associated “jihad
al-bina'” construcvtion companies in particular– are really quite good
at rebuilding civilian infrastructures.  The Israeli military gave
them plenty of practice doing that in the decades before 2000.  At
anothert level, though, we all know well today that when roads and
bridges are cut, power generating plants and water and sewage plants
incapacitated, then real people suffer and die– and usually the sick,
the old, the disabled, and the weak.

Maybe that’s why Condi expressed some public concern for “civilian
infrastructures.”

So what will the Israeli government decide to do?  I guess we’ll
see that in the hours and days ahead…  But I should imagine they
are royally annoyed (which might be a dangerous circumstance, in itself.) Even
Harel, who is by no means a Hizbullah sympathizer, was forced to admit
that,

And this:

If
Israel is having difficulty in deterring Hamas in Gaza, and certainly
if it is unable to bring the crisis to a conclusion, indeed Hezbollah
is a much more sophisticated and experienced rival than its Palestinian
counterpart.

It is safe to assume that Hezbollah planned the
abduction months in advance, and that the Shi’ite organization has made
every effort to conceal the location where the kidnapped soldiers are
being held…

His prediction seemed to be that Olmert would now feel able to “take
the gloves off”–  or, as he put it, “It now seems that the
government may be able to stop acting like it is walking on eggshells,
as it has thus far.”

(Walking on eggshells?  Tell that to the people of Gaza!)

Anyway, let’s wait and see.

But meantime, let’s still keep in mind that that there are always
alternatives to the use of violence.  Negotiating a complete,
comprehensive and final resolution of the Israeli-Arab conflict is
still quite possible.  And perhaps today we should say it is more
necessary than ever.  Enough fussing around with piddly little
nickel-and-diming partial and incomplete “acccords.”

So far, both the Israelis and their Hamas/Hizbullah opponents have been using force in their conflict. (Though with a very high degree of asymmetry.) But Hizbullah– and to a great extent Hamas– also has a very determined, well-thought-out, and intelligently implemented political aspect to its work, too. It is in the political domain that the real duel of wits will be determined. The IDF might kill and maim thousands of Palestinians and Lebanese– as indeed, it dhas done on several occasions in the past. But unless Israel’s leaders can figure out how to build a stable and sustainable peace with all its neighbors, Israel will never actually be the secure and prosperous little European-style state that most of its people would dearly love it to be…

According to this Reuters story used by Al -Jazeera,

Lebanon has detained three leaders of an ultra-nationalist Christian party after it distributed CDs calling on every Lebanese to kill a Palestinian, judicial sources say.
A prosecutor on Wednesday ordered the detention of Habib Younes, Naji Awdeh and Joseph Khoury Tawk, members of the Guardians of the Cedars Party, “on charges of breaching judicial clauses and harming relations with Arab countries”, the sources said.
The three leaders of the party, which was set up during the 1975-1990 civil war but has been dormant for the past 15 years, called at a news conference on Tuesday for “expelling Palestinian refugees and confiscating their property”.
“No Palestinian should be left in Lebanon”, and “Every Lebanese should kill a Palestinian”, are two of its civil war slogans distributed on CD during the conference, the daily As Safir newspaper said.

Well, it’s not only Al-safir that says that. Back in the late 1970s when I used to travel around the parts of East Beirut totally controlled (and religiously “cleansed”) by the Maronitist militias, nearly every piece of blank wall bore on it the slogan “It’s the duty of every Lebanese to kill a Palestinian”. These slogans were put up with spray-paint, sprayed through stencils. They bore the “signature” of the very extreme little group Guardians of the Cedars.
I wrote about that here a bit, when I was in Lebanon (and Syria) last November. I also wrote this:

Throughout East Beirut, the walls had the stenciled-on slogan “It’s the duty of every Lebanese to kill a Palestinian”. Ala kul lubnani in yuqtil filastiniyan. I never saw anyone trying to cover those slogans over or otherwise erase them: they loomed over the public streets there for years.
And I saw, counted, smelled, and examined the putrifying phsyical remains of a good number of the thousands of Palestinians– women, children, men, old people– who were killed in the enactment of that openly genocidal campaign.

That is extremely depressing that 25 years later, that hate-speech and genocidal incitment is once again being distributed in Lebanon– and by the same group! Encrouaging, though, if this time around, the country has a state apparatus that is (a) strong enough and (b) motivated enough to try to crack down on it.
In general, I believe the answer to hate speech is more speech. But in the case of the Guardians of the Cedars, their proven track record of following through on their very explicit incitement indicates that judicial measures are completely appropriate for them.
(Hat-tip to the two friends from Kansas who got this to me.)

I can’t resist writing something quickly about the Lebanese elections. And about the Michel Aoun phenomenon.
I thought I’d lost my capacity to be amazed (and frequently amused) at Lebanese politics many, many years ago… Maybe around 1983 or 1984, when I saw the brutally anti-Palestinian Falangists aligning themselves with Fateh against the Syrians…
Well, the kaleidoscope that is Lebanese politics has been twisted and re-twisted many times since them. With each twist the colored pieces fall into a new, and ever more amazing pattern…
We pick up the tale in late February of this year. Then, in the aftermath of the dastardly killing of Rafiq Hariri, the mainstream media in the US started crowing about the newfound strength and power of what they called the Lebanese “opposition”. Opposition, that is, in relation to Syria’s then-stifling military and political presence in the country.
At that point, Aoun was still in exile, rallying his supporters against Syria’s presence in the homeland he had been chased out of some 15 years earlier.
And many neocons and others close to the Bush administration in Washington were braying about the imminent victory of the Lebanese “opposition”, and the need for both a Syrian withdrawal, and the speedy disarming of Hizbullah…
Okay, since then, the Syrians have left Lebanon, and Aoun has returned. Has this led to the victory of the “opposition” forces– and is Lebanon now that much closer to the disarming of Hizbullah?
No, indeed. For a number of reasons. One is that none of the “parties” in the Lebanese “opposition”– with the possible exception of Aoun’s own Free Patriotic Movement– is really worthy of the name of “party” at all.
Another is that Aoun has suprised everyone on three crucial counts:

(1) He has said that since the Syrians have now withdrawn, he’s not going to get drawn into continuing any anti-Syrian vendetta

Continue reading “In a class of his Aoun”