The Strong Horse: Power, Politics, and the Clash of Arab Civilizations (23 page)

Lebanon’s status as a forward base for non-state actors was formalized in 1969, when, under the auspices of Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser, the Lebanese, some reluctantly, granted the Palestinians the right to attack Israel from Lebanese territory. The Palestine Liberation Organization used that prerogative after it was thrown out of Jordan in 1971—the Palestinians set up shop in
Lebanon and quickly renewed their campaign against Israel. Eventually, this provoked Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon to drive the PLO out of southern Lebanon. The inhabitants of the region were happy to be rid of the Palestinians, whose resistance had goaded Israeli retaliation against Lebanon in the first place. Shia laborers found employment in northern Israel, and they also fought for Israel’s proxy force, the South Lebanon Army.

Other Lebanese Shia, though, were not so enamored of Israel. And so in June 1982, with Syrian permission, Iran sent a large group of Iranian Revolutionary Guards to the Bekaa Valley, where they trained Lebanese Shia to field the militia that would become Hezbollah. The Party of God’s motto at the time was “The Islamic Revolution in Lebanon,” and Hezbollah was one of the few early successes Iran’s clerical regime had in exporting its revolution. (Tehran’s ambitions were stalled in the 1980s when Saddam Hussein waged his decadelong war against Iran in the name of Sunni Arab honor.) In seeding Hezbollah, and preparing the ground to become regional hegemon, Iran demonstrated that it could bridge the Persian-Arab divide. Hezbollah’s fight against Israel won the hearts of the Sunni Arab masses and provided Arab cover for Iran’s grander project to overthrow the Sunni order. Hezbollah was equally valuable to Syria, since with the PLO and the stubborn Arafat gone, Syrian president Hafez al-Assad was now co-holder of the exclusive franchise for resistance in Lebanon.

Assad’s task was made easier by the fact that once the Reagan administration withdrew the remainder of U.S. troops from Lebanon in 1984, Washington effectively contracted Lebanon policy out to the Syrians. Despite (or perhaps because of) Hezbollah’s bombing of the Marine barracks, the United States had no appetite for confronting the group. American policy makers rationalized this decision by citing experts who told them Hezbollah was nothing to worry about.
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It was not an Iranian-backed militia, academics explained, or Damascus’s Praetorian Guard, but a “national resistance” movement
steadily integrating into Lebanon’s national fabric and in the process of becoming a regular political party. Sympathetic, or gullible, journalists highlighted the “social services” that Hezbollah provided for the Shia, and ignored the fact that Hezbollah forced the government out of Shia areas in order to build its own state within a state.

There was little that Rafiq al-Hariri could do about Hezbollah’s growing power during his three terms as prime minister, for like the rest of Lebanon’s political class, outside of a small group of Christian leaders, he was under Syria’s thumb. And so, while Hezbollah fed the resistance against Israel with Shia martyrs, Hariri rebuilt Beirut with Sunni money from the Gulf states and weaned the Sunni community off of perpetual war with the Zionist state by refocusing its energies elsewhere. (Incidentally, Hariri’s experience as an Arab expat in Riyadh and his return to Lebanon as a moderate influence are enough to disprove the notion that it is Saudi Arabia alone that is responsible for radicalizing Arab societies.) And Hariri tried to foster better relations between Arabs and the West, especially after 9/11. His private foundation sent tens of thousands of students off for college and advanced studies in Europe and the United States.

Lebanon’s two different Muslim communities took two radically different paths. In reshaping the Sunni community, Hariri left resistance to Hezbollah and the Shia, and paved the way for a rapprochement with the Christians and the Druze. Implicitly, at least, he was pushing the idea that Lebanon was a nation with a distinct character and destiny, and not merely a cog in the wheel of the Arab nation.

Damascus, however, was ill disposed to see the rules change in Lebanon, and as Hariri began to challenge Syrian president Bashar al-Assad and move ever closer to the opposition, he was in increasingly greater danger.

 I
t’s a curious fact that many of those who had typically blamed the West for all the problems of the Middle East also argued,
after 9/11, that it was laughable for the Bush administration to try to impose democracy on the region from without. In their view, apparently, foreign powers are all-powerful in the Middle East when they’re pursuing evil ends. But when they’re trying to bring about positive change—like creating democracy—they’re impotent. This makes little sense, as Lebanese history makes clear. In fact, in Lebanon’s history, outside forces have had both positive and negative legacies. There were the Ottomans, whose five centuries in the region had a deep impact on every aspect of the Levant, including relations between the sects. France had been a political and cultural force in the Christian community dating back to the sixteenth century, when the Catholic kings anointed themselves protectors of the Maronites in a region often hostile to Christians. France’s decision to send forces in 1982 was a reprise of 1860, when it dispatched a contingent to defend its wards against the Druze. This earlier civil war led to the creation of Mount Lebanon, a semiautonomous Ottoman region, leaving France the dominant Western nation in Lebanon for another century. The French built schools and universities, and under the yoke of France’s post-World War I mandate for Lebanon, French administrators influenced some of the country’s democratic political institutions, most importantly Lebanon’s constitution, modeled after that of the French Third Republic. The Francophone era effectively ended in 1983 with an attack by Hezbollah on a squad of French paratroopers (a bombing simultaneous with that on the Marine barracks), an attack that ushered in the Iranian moment, pushing Lebanese Shia toward radicalization. Within the space of a few decades the Iranians turned Shia precincts in the south, the Bekaa Valley, and the southern suburbs of Beirut into outposts of the Khomeinist revolution, where portraits of the late ayatollah hung alongside posters of Lebanon’s Shia martyrs.

Granted, what the Americans offered was different from what other foreign powers had brought to Lebanon—not guns, or money, or political institutions, but something less concrete, a political
order. Moreover, imposing democracy from the outside seemed to contradict the essence of consensual politics. However, the Lebanese already had a tradition of democracy. There was also a long-standing relationship between Lebanon and the United States. In 1866, the American missionary Daniel Bliss founded the Syrian Protestant College, on a cliff overlooking the Mediterranean, “the finest site in all Beirut.”
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That school later became the American University of Beirut, the second-oldest U.S. institution of higher education in the Middle East, and, oddly, a famous petri dish for Arab nationalism.

Relations with the United States had helped foster other intellectual trends as well, including a liberal nationalist current, named after the ancient seafaring people of the Mediterranean from whom the Lebanese claimed descent, Phoenicianism (much like the Egyptians’ Pharaonism). That notion of a continuous, distinct, and historical Lebanese identity was possible largely thanks to Lebanon’s early relations with America. Or consider the example of Kahlil Gibran (1883–1931): the author of
The Prophet
is Lebanon’s most famous writer, a distinction that only makes sense because he and others helped define the idea of a Lebanese national identity, constructed not only in the hills of Gibran’s native Lebanon but also in the immigrant enclaves of New York and Boston, where he spent a large part of his life with other Lebanese exiles.

At the turn of the twentieth century, refugees from the Ottoman Empire—mostly Christians and other minorities—started pouring into America, seeking shelter from persecution and famine as the empire was veering toward its violent demise. This created a peculiar problem: since there were no nation-states under the Ottomans, no national identities as such, most of these Middle Easterners had little sense of identity outside of their religious or sectarian affiliations, and therefore did not know how to describe themselves in American terms. When they were asked upon their arrival at Ellis Island what they were, there was no ready definition at hand. Until 1899, the U.S. Bureau of Immigration usually labeled them “Turks from Asia.”
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But
they were not Turks, for, among other reasons, they did not speak Turkish. They spoke Arabic, but at the time few Arabic-speaking Middle Easterners thought of themselves as Arabs. So, what were they?

In the anti-immigration mood of the early twentieth century, some American politicians wanted to limit immigration of “undesirable races.” The Ottoman immigrants wanted to show that they were useful and Western oriented, meriting a place in America, and so they claimed kinship with one of the founding nations of Western civilization, the Phoenicians, ancient forefathers of the Lebanese.
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In fighting for space and privilege among other newly hyphenated Americans—the Germans, Italians, Irish, and Jews—they came to ask, if the family next door is Italian-American, then what kind of American am I? They deliberated about their identity long before their compatriots at home were doing the same, and forged an identity separate from the Ottomans and more expansive than the one they’d known from town, sect, and tribe. In a sense, Lebanese-American identity preceded a purely Lebanese one. This American/Lebanese interdependence cuts to the heart of both peoples’ self-image—one as a land of immigrant opportunity, the other as a separate and distinct nation in a region where it is often fatal to be different.

 T
he Americans had a reason to fight for Lebanon, but ironically it took the French—and in particular Jacques Chirac—to show them why. The French president’s opposition to the Americans’ plans to invade Iraq seemed so extraordinary in its pitch and intensity that U.S. opinion makers were forced to conclude that our good ally’s histrionics was nothing less than a keening index of the Bush administration’s recklessness; in reality, Chirac’s position was characteristic of French Middle East policy. For almost fifty years, ever since the loss of its Algerian colony and throughout the Cold War, France’s regional policy was to offer a “third way”—neither
American nor Soviet—a strategy that, since Paris lacked the military and economic weight of a superpower, required a soft touch. Chirac, a major figure in French politics for many decades, mastered the personalized style of Arab diplomacy, where length of tenure is at least as important as competence, and befriended regional leaders, like Arafat, Saddam, and Hafez al-Assad. The late Syrian president’s son Bashar made Paris the first Western capital he visited when he came to power, but he crossed the French president several times on financial matters and bullied the Arab leader Chirac liked most, Rafiq al-Hariri.

Chirac knew that Washington was furious with Damascus for interfering in Iraq and saw ganging up on Syria as an opportunity to mend fences with the Americans. After all, with Saddam out, and Arafat and Hafez dead, the United States had virtually run the board in the Middle East, and the only way for France to project power in the region was to stay close to the Americans. And so when Bush visited Normandy for the sixtieth-anniversary commemoration of D-day in June 2004, Chirac proposed Lebanon as a focal point of joint action against Syria.

The White House was hounded for its unilateralism in Iraq, and going against the will of traditional friends, like Paris, but Bush’s Lebanon/Syria policy was a model of multilateral consensus, built in partnership with France, regional players like Saudi Arabia, and the United Nations. UN Security Council Resolution 1559, demanding the withdrawal of Syrian forces from Lebanon and the disarmament of Hezbollah, was co-sponsored by Paris and Washington.

“The U.S. and France seized on Lebanon,” said Elliott Abrams, the Bush administration’s deputy national security adviser for global democracy strategy. We spoke in his office a few weeks before the end of the Bush administration’s term. “The overall relationship between the two countries was bad,” Abrams said. “And this was something to do together to crawl out of the hole of Iraq. We recognized Lebanon as a building block for Franco-American relations, and finally the
two presidents could speak about something. Chirac was personally sad and infuriated about Syrian interference in Lebanon. For us, there was Lebanon as a long-term interest and also in the short term—the war on terror, Iran, and Hezbollah. And obviously there was the freedom agenda, too.”

Abrams is a controversial figure in American politics owing to his role in the Reagan administration’s Iran-contra affair. But many Lebanese saw him as their champion in Washington. In Lebanon, ordinary media consumers know the name of the Lebanon desk officers at the State Department, the Pentagon, and the National Security Council staff; and U.S. embassy officials out for a coffee or glass of wine in downtown Beirut are treated like celebrities. That’s partly due to the esteem so many Lebanese have for the United States, as well as their residual fear that Washington is going to sell out Lebanon as it did in the 1990s when the George H. W. Bush White House green-lighted Syrian hegemony in Lebanon in exchange for Hafez al-Assad’s agreeing to send troops for Operation Desert Storm. Accordingly, the Lebanese read every small sign out of Washington as if it meant the United States was preparing to let the Land of the Cedars once again become a Syrian satrapy.

Abrams thought that these fears were overblown. He argued that the United States has always had a pro-Lebanon policy. “It goes back to 1958,” he said. “It’s based on idealism, and geopolitics. It didn’t change with the Bush administration; it deepened and intensified with the setting. The conditions were ideal. The brave and courageous Lebanese were trying to take their country back and they went to the street. How could that not elicit support from the U.S.? And then the other context was the war on terror. The murder of Rafiq al-Hariri looms very large in the annals of terror.”