Lebanon on the Brink
The international community is proving feckless in restraining the influence of Hezbollah and thus Iran in Lebanon.
Has Lebanon, one of the few states in the Arab world with a free press, free elections, and a broadly pro-Western orientation, finally plunged into the abyss of an Islamofascist dictatorship? It looked very like that last week as Hezbollah gunmen, well-armed and well-trained, poured into the streets of Beirut and for a while controlled the city and much of the country. Lebanon appeared about to resume the civil war that ravaged it between 1975 and 1990. More than fifty people died in clashes between rival militias.
But, if anything, the manner in which the near-confrontation between militias was resolved was even more ominous for Lebanon’s future. Hezbollah, the powerful Islamist political party composed of Lebanon’s Shiite Muslims, the county’s largest ethnic group, agreed to withdraw its gunmen from the streets. But the price it demanded for this concession was humiliating for the pro-Western government of Lebanon’s Prime Minister, Fouad Seniora. The government was forced to reverse decisions it had made to fire the chief of security of Beirut’s international airport and to order the dismantling of an ultra-sophisticated fiber-optic private communications network connecting Hezbollah’s strong-points in south Lebanon, its headquarters in southern Beirut, and even its bases in the Bekaa valley. Even worse, all the pro-government militia groups were ordered not to confront Hezbollah. The crowning insult was that Lebanon’s army, the Lebanese Armed Forces, supposedly neutral and sworn to the defense of the institutions of state, refused to do anything to challenge Hezbollah gunmen roaming the streets.
More than three years ago, in March 2005, it seemed for a while that Lebanon had successfully broken free from the status of being a satrapy of Syria. The Syrian army had occupied the country since first intervening in 1976 to save, ironically enough, the besieged Lebanese Christian community. In February 2005, a powerful car bomb in downtown Beirut had taken the life of former Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri. The crime, which most people doubted could have been implemented without Syrian logistical and intelligence assistance, provoked a massive series of street demonstrations against Syria which outsiders dubbed “the Cedar Revolution” (an analogy to the pro-Democratic “Orange Revolution” in the Ukraine and the “Rose Revolution” in Georgia). Pro-Western, anti-Syrian political parties that benefited from this mood in parliamentary elections in April 2005 called themselves the March 14 group, and a government representing this viewpoint and led by a Sunni Muslim pro-Westerner called Fouad Seniora has governed Lebanon since then. After the international community took notice of the anti-Syrian and pro-democratic mood in the country, Syria’s 14,000 troops were ordered by the UN to leave the country. They had done this by the end of April 2005.
But Syria had an ace up its sleeve in the heart of Lebanon. This was the pro-Iranian Shiite Islamist group called Hezbollah, a disciplined political party and a terrorist fighting force that had been blamed for blowing up the U.S. embassy in Beirut in 1982 and the U.S. marine barracks in the city in 1983. Hezbollah is officially designated a “terrorist” organization by the U.S. and five other states, because, in addition to having blown up U.S. marines and the U.S. Embassy in Beirut, it is believed to have been behind several other terrorist incidents both in Lebanon and overseas. But in Lebanon itself and in much of the Arab world, Hezbollah’s willingness to confront Israel and its occasional ability to score some tactical military successes against Israeli troops, has led to its being admired as a leader of “resistance” against Israel.
In July 2006, Hezbollah launched an unprovoked attack upon Israel, kidnapping two of its soldiers (whom it either still holds or has killed). This led to a 34-day war with Israel in which Israeli troops failed either to destroy Hezbollah as a fighting force or to halt a rain of rockets that have descended on communities in the north of Israel. Because Hezbollah fighters have in many ways held their own against Israel and because Israel deployed massive airpower to bomb many targets in Lebanon, Hezbollah is looked upon favorably by many Arabs.
If Hezbollah were unconnected with any major regional power, observers of Lebanon might feel concern for Lebanon’s overall population—in imminent danger of falling under the control of Islamists—but not necessarily alarm. Hezbollah, however, has received massive amounts of financial and military aid from Iran. Its emergence as the overwhelmingly dominant political power in Lebanon means that Iranian political power has now reached the coast of the Mediterranean and that Israel itself is squeezed between Islamist political forces in the south (with Hamas in control of Gaza) and Islamist political forces in the north (Hezbollah).
As he prepared to head over to Israel to celebrate the sixtieth anniversary of its independence and to meet with leaders of America’s Arab allies, Saudi Arabia and Egypt, President Bush voiced a sentiment that many both inside and outside Lebanon must feel. “It is critical,” he said, “that the international community come together to assist Lebanon in their [sic] hour of need.”
The problem is that the “international community” in the form of the UN has proved itself demonstrably feckless in standing up to Hezbollah’s ambitions for Lebanon. UN Security Council Resolution 1701, passed in August 2006 in the wake of the thirty-four-day war with Israel, was supposed to guarantee that southern Lebanon adjacent to Israel was clear of Hezbollah weaponry and personnel. Reports from Lebanon in the past few months, however, have suggested not only that Hezbollah now has more rockets to fire at Israel than it had in 2006, but that it is possibly preparing for a new outbreak of war.
There is a sense of déjà vu in Lebanon grimly familiar to the Palestinian Authority headed by Mahmoud Abbas that rules the West Bank. It was murderous Islamist gunmen from the organization Hamas who took over Gaza from the Palestinian Authority in June 2007. Back then, the U.S. and European countries had poured massive amounts of aid and weaponry into the Palestinian Authority in the hope that it could resist takeover by radical Islamists.
As of today, the U.S. has provided the Lebanese Armed Forces with some $250 million in equipment since 2006. But the LAF appears to have neither the stomach nor the resources, even today, to challenge Hezbollah. In a sense, Western backing for the LAF in an effort to keep Lebanon pro-Western has manifestly failed. The Lebanese army is too frightened of its own fragile ethnic composition to range itself against any one ethnic group within Lebanon, particularly as well-trained, well-armed, and proven a military force as Hezbollah.
Has the West “lost” Lebanon? This may well be happening. If Lebanon’s non-Islamist and non-Shiite elements are not prepared to do their own “resisting” of a Hezbollah takeover, it’s exceedingly unlikely any outside power can do it for them. It’s not 1958 anymore, when U.S. marines landed on the coast of Lebanon and saved Lebanese democracy. Or 1983, when they tried to do the same thing and were driven out by a powerful suicide bomb. For better or for worse, Lebanon seems to be entirely on its own.
Dr. Aikman, a Senior Fellow of the Trinity Forum, was for many years senior correspondent for Time.
Columns, David Aikman, Good and Evil, War and Peace, Thu 15 May 2008
