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Lebanon: Quo Vadis with
this History?
September 30/06
With the dust settling in Lebanon and the players, old and new,
trying to stake their territories in the increasingly confined space
of this tormented nation, the emerging picture is one of a country
headed towards a major confrontation whose outcome is predictably
coupled to the outcome of the gathering clash between the West and
the Islamic fundamentalist movement. In other words, Lebanon’s fate
and the outcome of its eternal crisis, the “La Question d’Orient” of
the 19th and early 20th centuries, has
witnessed a significant shift in the underlying paradigms of its
potential solution in our present time: Western policy-makers no
longer couple a resolution of the Lebanese problem to a resolution
of the Israeli-Arab conflict (as the dinosaur Prime Minister Siniora
of Lebanon continues to blather or as the Syrian tyranny of the
Assads continues to wish for), but it has become tied to the
ultimate victory of the West over Islamic fundamentalism in the War
on Terror. Indeed, one can argue that the Israeli-Arab conflict
itself is no longer the centerpiece of US and Western policy towards
the Middle East because it too is now subsumed under the War on
Terror and the defeat of Islamic radicalism. Although the US
continues to insist on protecting “our friend” Israel, it is safe to
assume that Israel’s security comes now second to the safety of the
West, as shown by, for example, the momentous shift in European
public opinion and policy against Israel and in favor of the
Palestinians, a harbinger of the decline of Israel’s safety as
the top priority for the West, coupled with the growing Moslem
populations of Europe and the dictates they impose on policy in
terms of accommodation and fear of domestic unrest.
But as for the impact of that shift on Lebanon, and if history is
any guide and the assets of both sides evaluated for their chances
of success, the outcome of that clash are predictably a victory of
the West and the ushering of a period of long stability for Lebanon
under Western custodianship, though the battle ahead to get there
remains long, painful, and arduous.
Lebanon has always been a microcosm of the world. The recent
1975-1990 Lebanese War was in many respects the precursor of the War
on Terror since many of its elements were tied to a resurgent Arab
Nationalism couched in Islam – a departure for the failure of
post-WWII secular Arab Nationalism (Nasserism): Not only did the
Moslems of Lebanon side with the Palestinian insurgency – led by
Yasser Arafat’s PLO – against the Lebanese State and allowed the
abandonment of the Lebanese South from State sovereignty to the
benefit of the PLO, and later to Hezbollah, but the Moslems of
Lebanon in the early 1970s challenged the very foundations of the
Lebanese Constitution and the Lebanese State as shaped in the early
part of the 20th century as a compromise between the West
and the East, between Islam and Christianity, between modernity and
tradition, between pan-Arab nationalism and homegrown Lebanese
nationalism, all encompassed in the so-called “National Pact” of
1943. This writer witnessed demonstrations in Beirut calling for
abolishing the subject matter of “Civic Studies” from the final
Secondary School examination (which taught high school students the
inner workings of the Lebanese Constitution and the political
process in Lebanon, etc…), the “Arabization” of the programs (in
which the demand was for abolishing the learning of foreign
languages in Lebanese schools), the teaching of the Islamic religion
in public schools and even in private Christian schools, the
emergence of political parties that were ostensibly religious in
design and ideology, such as the Amal Shiite movement of Moussa
Al-Sadr under the guise of “dispossession and alienation” (of which,
incidentally, the Lebanese Shiites still claim to be victims, even
though they have become the most affluent and most politically
powerful community thanks to a wealthy Lebanese Shiite expatriate
community in Africa and an influx of funds from Iran). These and
other cultural and political challenges to the status quo by the
Moslems of Lebanon, long before there was any direct Syrian
intervention in the country, were the very first signs of the rise
in Islamic fundamentalism and a challenge to the secular Arabism of
the mid 20th century. The West at the time refused to see
the Lebanese War under that angle, as the Lebanese Christians tried
to convince a liberal left-leaning Western press that theirs was the
cause – not of a Lebanon dominated by Christians, not of a
conservatively religious Christian Lebanon, and certainly not of a
Christian dictatorship oppressing the Moslems of Lebanon as many in
the West perceived the conflict in the late 1960s and early 1970s –
but the cause of the defense of a secular Lebanon against Islamic
resurgence. Evidently, the Christians of Lebanon ultimately failed
in the war itself because they failed in the media war. The outcome
of the defeat, whose consequences we witness in the crises of
today’s Lebanon, was the Syrian occupation sanctioned by the West
for 3 decades, the Taef Agreement which weakened the power of the
Christian President of Lebanon to the benefit of the Sunni Prime
Minister and the Shiite Speaker of Parliament (who now have taken
the titles of “President” of the cabinet, and “President” of
Parliament”, respectively, to further underline the equality between
the three posts and to underscore this as a victory of the Moslems
over the Christians), and a general change of Lebanon from a
prosperous liberal free-market oriented democratic country in which
the Christians set the tone between the 1920s and the 1970s, to a
Syrianized economically devastated pseudo-dictatorship police State
in which the Moslems set the tone from the 1970s to this date. All
one needs to do is compare and contrast Lebanon’s wellbeing (economically
and otherwise) during the period 1920-1970 to its wellbeing during
the 1970 – 2006 period to see the devastation caused by the
victorious challenge of the Islamo-Arabs to the Lebanese construct
which, as far as the Christians viewed it, was a fair and equitable
compromise for a diverse society as that of Lebanon’s.
History never fails. Since time immemorial, all international and
regional conflicts had tentacles and repercussions on the Lebanese
scene. Looking at the history of Lebanon from the early 1800s to the
present time, one can see three cycles of history recurring with
extraordinary identity. For complex reasons that have to do with the
relationship between religion and governance, as well as the
internal social-political structure of historical Lebanon and its
political culture, Lebanon’s modern history is characterized by
alternating periods of stability-prosperity and instability-decline
that seem to closely parallel an alternation of which the two
constituent communities of the country – the Christians and the
Moslems – appears to be setting the tone, which in turn seems to
reflect whether the West or the Moslem East has the ascendancy of
power on the world stage.
The first cycle began after the Egyptian invasion of the 1820s and
1830s (itself coming on the footsteps of the debacle of the West,
represented by the evacuation of Napoleon’s French forces from Egypt).
Lebanon was thrown into a 20-year period of civil unrest in which
the leaders of the country - at the time Prince Bashir Shehab II and
the Feudal families – allied themselves with the Egyptian occupiers
against their own people. With increasing European thrust in
penetrating the weak flanks of the Ottoman Empire, Lebanon was
pulled into several centrifugal directions and civil unrest (including
pogroms of Christians and Jews by Moslems), and political
instability set in between the 1840s and the 1860s. In 1861, the
West, at the time represented by the five European Powers: France,
England, Prussia (Germany), Russia, and the Austro-Hungarian Empire,
intervened directly to stabilize Lebanon, the Ottomans being too
occupied with their own internal reforms and several other more
dangerous secessions from the Empire. A complicated settlement was
reached in which Mount Lebanon – which is the central mountains of
Lebanon without the peripheral Bekaa Valley or the cities of the
coast (Beirut, Sidon, Tyre and Tripoli) – to satisfy all the
protagonists. Mount Lebanon was granted autonomy from the Ottoman
Empire and Ottoman troops were evacuated, though the country still
reported to Istanbul through a Governor General (Mutasarrif) who was
to be a Catholic Christian (concession to the Christian community
and to the European powers), but an Ottoman subject (Concession to
Istanbul and the Moslem community). From the 1860s to 1914, Lebanon
experienced stability, though with moderate prosperity, and was
relatively isolated from the ongoing tremors of the continued
Ottoman decline and the European convulsions caused by the
coalescence of the European city-states into the modern countries we
now know (Germany, Italy, and others). In sum, a Western
intervention (Europe) against an Islamo-Arab (Turkish
Ottoman-Egyptian) occupation led Lebanon to stability and prosperity.
The second cycle begins in 1914 with the beginning of WWI
hostilities. No sooner was the war declared against the Ottoman
Empire allied with Germany that Istanbul abolished the autonomous
status of the Lebanese Mutasarifiyah and brutally re-occupied
Lebanon, ushering 4 years of famine, executions of Lebanese
nationalists – both Christians and Moslems – forced conscription and
general devastation that led to one of the greatest waves of
emigration to the Americas (Almost a third of the Lebanese
population emigrated, and another third perished to disease and
famine). When the Ottomans were defeated in 1918, modern Lebanon was
born out of the Paris Peace Conference of 1919. It was placed under
a League of Nations mandate, as was much of the Middle East emerging
from under 400 years of Ottoman Turkish occupation. Lebanon grew
into a prosperous, democratic and liberal country that rid itself of
the French mandate in 1943 to become independent and prosper for
another 30 years when the third, and current cycle, began. Lebanon
drew a constitution, elected Presidents and Parliaments and had
effective governments, co-founded the United Nations (when many its
current neighbors did not even exist as nation-states), developed a
very prosperous economy based on tourism and banking, and –
importantly – stayed out of the Israeli-Arab conflict (except for
brief hostilities between Lebanon and Israel in1949 and an influx of
Palestinian refugees escaping to the country from
Israeli-Palestinian civil wars in Palestine, and subsequent
crackdowns by Arab dictatorships on their Palestinian refugees). All
this period was characterized by an ascendancy of the Christian
community that set the tone to the country’s outlook and conduct
without any of the attributes of the domination they are often
accused of: No Intelligence Services hunting down Moslems, the Prime
Minister and the Speaker of Parliament, like today, were Sunni and
Shiite Moslems, no coup d’Etats, and no alliances with regional
powers or involvement in regional conflicts. Again, an Islamic
(Ottoman) occupation brought the country down only to be followed –
quickly this time – by a stabilization brought about by the
internationalization of the problem.
In today’s seemingly endless crisis in Lebanon, the parallels to
that historical cyclical perspective are inescapable. The third
cycle began in the 1960s with the emergence of the Palestinian
guerilla movements and their settlement in Lebanon – after their
eviction from Israel and the Arab countries – which ushered the
destabilization of Lebanon and its fall outside the
international-Western orbit and into Islamic-Arab hands.
As described earlier in this paper, the 1975-1990 Lebanese War and
its current extensions were essentially a deliberate extrication of
Lebanon from the Western-internationalist umbrella and under an
Arab-Islamic dependency. The Palestinian refugee guerilla movements
were used by the Moslem community spurred by the newly hatched
Syrian dictatorship of the Assads to try and gain ascendancy at the
expense of the Christians. With the West abandoning its
responsibilities and the country, Lebanon fell to an increasing
Syrian meddling, followed by the Syrian military invasion in 1976,
and the above-mentioned challenges raised by the Lebanese Moslem
community against the Lebanese Constitution and the status quo of
the neutrality of Lebanon. The Syrians managed a mélange of
Islamo-Lebanese-Arabist-Palestinian militias consisting of the
PLO-led Palestinian guerillas, the Nasserite Sunni militias (Murabitoun),
the Shiite militias (Amal and Hezbollah), the Druze self-styled
“Progressist” militia, the National Syrian Party, the Syrian Army,
the Baath Party and renegade Moslem brigades of the Lebanese Army
(Ahmad Khatib’s Arab Army of Lebanon), all coalesced into the
so-called National Movement. This movement was used by Lebanon’s
Sunni Prime Ministers to scuttle every effort by the Lebanese
Maronite President to rein in the PLO and restore the sovereignty of
the State over its own affairs and territory. In sum, this was an
anti-Western effort to destabilize Lebanon, shove it head-first into
the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, force it into alliances with
regional powers (Iran and Syria), abolish the implicit neutrality of
small and militarily powerless Lebanon in those regional conflicts,
and as Hezbollah emerged on the scene in 1982, to evict all Western
influence and presence from Lebanon: From assassinations of Western
ambassadors to the bombing of the US and French contingents of the
Multinational Force which came in 1982 to help the Lebanese State
stand on its feet, to outright massacres and sieges of the city of
Beirut by the Syrian army (1978, 1981, 1989), to the forced toppling
of the free Lebanese government of Michel Aoun in October 1990, and
on to today’s obvious attempts by Hezbollah to drag Lebanon further
into the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
All of this was taking place under the watchful eyes of an
irresolute West that refused – until September 11, 2001 – to accept,
recognize and stand up to the threat of the Islamic challenge. Had
Lebanon not been abandoned to the Syrians by Europe and by US
Presidents Reagan and Bush Sr., the West would not have had the
difficulties it has today to stabilize Lebanon against the
intractable problem that Hezbollah represents. Had the West
intervened forcefully early on in the Lebanese crisis, the latter
would not have become the quagmire into which the West finds itself
treading today. Many have argued that had President Reagan stood his
ground in Beirut after the suicide bombing by Hezbollah that killed
241 US Marines and 58 French Paratroopers in 1983 and not left the
scene of the crime because his Arabist-leaning US State Department
advised to do so, perhaps September 11 would not have occurred.
With the increasing number of players on the Lebanese stage making
it very difficult to envision a solution that satisfies everyone on
the short term, and with the synopsis of history just presented
above, the outlook for Lebanon is as follows:
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September 11, 2001 has radically altered the
Western attitude vis-à-vis the threat embedded in Islamic
fundamentalism from one of benign tolerance to a rabid will to use
preemptive force.
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The West – since 2003 (Syria Accountability
Act), 2004 (UN Resolution 1559), 2005 (post-Hariri assassination
involvement and the eviction of Syria), and 2006 (Enlarged UNIFIL
per resolution 1701, and the growing challenge raised by the
Lebanese Christians to the Taef Agreement and its emasculation of
the Christian President) – has now made a quantum leap in how it
plans to manage its relations with the East, particularly where its
interests are threatened by Islamic fundamentalism.
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Therefore Lebanon is increasingly the scene
of Western intervention and is likely to benefit on the long term as
the confrontation between the West and Islamic radicalism heats up.
Clearly, the confrontation has the potential of taking apocalyptic
qualities (nuclear weapons and such), but everything else being
equal, a mounting intervention of the West in Lebanon will weaken
Islamic ascendancy, encourage a defeated and “moderated” Moslem
leadership to re-enact a balanced Pact with the Christians to
restore the implicit neutrality of a small, diversely constituted,
Lebanon and the balance of political power between the communities,
and put Lebanon back on the track of an age of prosperity and
stability.
The trends of our world today, namely globalism, technology,
secularism and the fundamentally universal desire by human beings
for live-and-let-live type of governance, are not likely to be
defeated by Islamic fundamentalists who romanticize and yearn for 9th
century traditions. Islamic fundamentalism – regardless of what one
hears from “angry” Moslem and Arab streets – cannot take hold in
this enlightened age where all religions are in retreat in direct
proportion to the advances of science and technology, except when
they are imposed by force, which itself is a self-destructive recipe.
The only serious threat posed by Islamic fundamentalism is not as
much the attractiveness of its ideology as the potential it has – in
our time – to use very destructive means to try and impose itself on
the world. Therefore, the battle that some in the West want to wage
as a substitute for war, the so-called battle of “winning the hearts
and minds” of Moslems worldwide is a useless battle because average
people, including the vast majority of Moslems, would not want to
live under Islamic fundamentalist rule anyway. They may not be
wholesale attracted to the West either, but we all know where
average common-sense people will go if given a choice. The real
battle is, unfortunately, fundamentally a military one more so than
an ideological or economic one. So long as Islamic fundamentalists
are denied the capability of wrecking wholesale massacres and
annihilations on the scale of September 11 and beyond, there is
little to fear of the future.
And so, to my fellow Lebanese, the hot air that Hassan Nasrallah was
spewing last week as he celebrated his “victory” of having brought
even more “Crusading” Westerners into the country under the guise of
UNIFIL than existed before his July war, instead of allowing the
Lebanese Army to take over without all this destruction, bloodshed
and renewed humiliation, is just a petty, miserable and desperate
last attempt by this suicide-bomber manqué. He is an anti-Christian
anti-Western gangster-hoodlum who is paid by Iran, who has bought
the allegiance of 90% of the Lebanese Shiite population with Iranian
petrodollars, and who is trying to cloud over the eyes of the
Lebanese people (who are at heart much more perspicacious than he
gives them credit for) by lying to them through his nose. His
Islamic fundamentalist cause is a lost one by definition. So there
is no fear on the long term.
But he can still cause a lot of harm on the short-term, though,
especially as he and his naïve nouveaux-liberal
let’s-change-things-overnight wide-eyed Christian allies of Aoun’s
FPM continue to badger the international community for its
intervention in Lebanon, because this is setting the stage for a
future confrontation between Hezbollah and this new Crusading Force
of Western Christians. Imagine how happy Nasrallah must be today:
Here are his own men, trained on everything from high end long-range
missiles to the best of the best pioneering methods of suicide
bombings, intermixed with a potpourri of Westerners armed to the
teeth: French, Germans, Russians, Italians, etc…Ok, there are no
prized Americans on the menu, but their European poodles will do
just fine. Just wait and see: He has started psychologically
mounting the Lebanese population against UNIFIL under such pretexts
as “denying the strong Lebanese State” (which he declared he intends
to usurp) from fighting Israel over some bald patch of 10 Square
kilometers of land called the Shebaa Farms, or any of many
variations on the theme. Nasrallah’s predecessors in Hezbollah did
exactly the same thing in the 1980s: They bombed and they bombed,
and they hijacked and they kidnapped, and they shelled and they
massacred, under the pretext that the Multi-National Force was
“supporting the isolationist Lebanese government of Amine Gemayel”.
Nothing has changed since in the ideology. What has changed are two
“victories” Nasrallah scored against Israel, one in 2000 and one in
2006, plus 20,000 rockets and missiles and he is flush with millions
of dollars from Iran. All bets are that he is intent on doing it
again in 2007. So everyone, brace yourselves.
Dr. Joseph Hitti
*Joseph Hitti, President of New England Americans for
Lebanon
E.mail
joehittimass@yahoo.com
Boston, Massachusetts
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