The Strong Horse: Power, Politics, and the Clash of Arab Civilizations (24 page)

The impact of Hariri’s murder can’t be overstated. On February 14, 2005, the former prime minister and twenty-two others were killed in a massive car-bomb explosion. The immediate verdict in Lebanon was that the Syrians were responsible, and that judgment
was seconded by the international community. A preliminary UN investigative team charged the Assad regime with creating the backdrop for the assassination. “The Government of the Syrian Arab Republic bears primary responsibility for the political tension that preceded the assassination of the former Prime Minister.”
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Before his death, Hariri was criticized for his business dealings, some questionable even by Lebanese standards. And until the very day of his murder the Christians, in characteristic intra-sectarian Lebanese fashion, cursed him for the enormous mosque he was building downtown, a blue-domed neo-Ottoman structure whose minarets were higher than the spires of the Maronite church next door. But after his death, the Christians bestowed on Hariri the honorific “martyr,” and took to the streets on his behalf as they had—even at the risk of imprisonment, torture, and murder—for other victims of the Damascus regime over the last fifteen years. The Druze community marched alongside the Christians as they had ever since their leader Walid Jumblatt broke with Damascus after more than two decades of Syrian tutelage. Strangely, Hariri’s own sect, the Sunnis, took no part in the huge, almost daily, demonstrations in Martyrs’ Square, where their leader’s corpse was laid to rest. That changed after Hezbollah, on March 8, held a massive rally at which its secretary-general, Hassan Nasrallah, expressed gratitude to Syria and defiance to the rest of the world, including most of Lebanon. “The resistance will not give up its arms,” said Nasrallah, “because Lebanon needs the resistance to defend it.”

The Sunnis were finally motivated. Incensed to see the Shia gather to thank the regime that had killed their leader, the Sunnis were ready to go to the streets. The next week, March 14, a month after the assassination, the Sunnis joined the Christians and Druze for the largest protest ever in Lebanon, and perhaps the largest non-compulsory political demonstration ever in the Middle East, with estimates running from 1.2 million to 1.5 million people, or one-third of the entire country, and the independence intifada took root.

Fawaz wrapped the red and white scarf of the Cedar Revolution around his neck and went downtown to march and chant for freedom, sovereignty, and independence, but remained suspicious about what many Lebanese meant by national unity. “Lebanon’s a democracy; we’re not supposed to all agree.” National unity sounded a little too much like Arab nationalism. “Anyway, all this stuff about Lebanese unity is folklore,” Fawaz said. “The Christian cross, the Muslim crescent, and the white skullcap symbolizing the Druze all in one tableau—what does it mean? Where is our unity? What do the Lebanese agree on? We agree on one thing; after fifteen years of civil war we agree to no longer settle our problems with violence.”

That was more than enough for the Americans. Against bin Ladenism, Lebanon offered a multi-sectarian coalition with more than a million Arabs who’d gone to the street to protest peacefully against an act of terrorism. Instead of justifying violence as a means to redress their grievances, and instead of murdering their opponents, Lebanon’s pro-democracy advocates were abiding by the rule of law, and investing their hopes for justice in international law, embodied by a series of UN Security Council resolutions demanding a Syrian withdrawal, disarmament of Hezbollah, and an investigation into Hariri’s murder that would “identify its perpetrators, sponsors, organizers and accomplices.”

All of this, not surprisingly, made Syria worried. Damascus feared that if indictments in the Hariri murder led up the chain of command as many suspected, the young Syrian president’s future was at best going to resemble Slobodan Milosevic’s last years as an international pariah. At worst, he, his brother Maher al-Assad, head of the Syrian Presidential Guard, and his brother-in-law Asef Shawkat, chief of military intelligence, would be toppled in an internal coup. And so, on April 26, twenty-nine years and two weeks after the Syrian army first entered Lebanon, it left. At the time it seemed like an extraordinary victory for democracy, and the Lebanese youth
who’d carried the weight of the Cedar Revolution exulted in the Syrian withdrawal.

Even as the youth celebrated, though, the elder generation remained circumspect. Walid Jumblatt, for one, wanted to know when the Americans were leaving Iraq.

Jumblatt is head of Lebanon’s Druze community, which—thanks in part to the legacy of Fakhr ad-Din, the Druze emir who is thought of as the founder of modern Lebanon—wields more power in the country’s sectarian system than would seem to be warranted by its numbers (approximately 300,000). Scattered elsewhere throughout the Levant—Syria, Jordan, and Israel—the Druze, a Muslim minority sect dating back to eleventh-century Egypt, have around a million adherents. A community with such small numbers, and that does not accept converts, owes its long existence to two factors: the martial skills of its people, and their unerring ability to discern a real strong horse from an impostor. For instance, in Israel, many Druze aligned themselves with the Zionists before the 1948 war of independence against the Arabs, and since then have continued to produce some of the Jewish state’s most valued warriors. And so Jumblatt, despite his well-documented history of anti-Americanism, didn’t want the Americans to leave Iraq. His question was designed to gauge the level of Washington’s commitment to the region so that he could figure out how far he could afford to stick his neck out without having the Syrians cut it off.

Fawaz and I visited Jumblatt at Mukhtara, his family’s Ottoman-era stone palace in the Shouf Mountains. He was sitting in his living room beside a large golden Buddha, a souvenir of his father, Kemal, a Buddhist as well as a warlord. Like his father, whom he replaced as Druze leader after Kemal was assassinated by the Syrians in 1977, Jumblatt embodied contradictions—an aristocratic leftist and a tribal chieftain, the owner of a vineyard and a battle-hardened military tactician, whose study and library were decorated with trinkets from the former Soviet Union, like a Soviet naval officer’s uniform,
mementos from when Moscow trained his militia and was his main weapons supplier during the civil wars. Jumblatt’s chief rival then had been the Maronites, against whom he waged a brutal campaign in the Shouf during the 1980s, but now he was allied with them, as well as with the Sunnis. And after the murder of Hariri, he had become the public face of the pro-democracy movement that took the name of March 14, and was clearly galvanized by the democratic currents sweeping through the region.

“It’s a good thing Saddam was brought down,” Jumblatt said, smoothing his mustache and the famous shock of wiry gray hair sticking out from his balding head. “It should’ve happened thirty years ago. And the Americans shouldn’t have stopped with Saddam, but should’ve brought down the dictator in Damascus, too.”

Jumblatt hadn’t always been opposed to the Syrians. After the assassination of Kemal, Jumblatt kept the peace with his father’s killers, while profiting from their occupation. That changed in 2000, when the Israelis withdrew from the south and Jumblatt decided it was time for the Syrians to depart as well. “I defended Syrian interests,” Jumblatt said. “Now I’m fed up. I am following my father, and I feel free for the first time in my life. I have a free conscience now, and I can sleep at night. We want our system, freedom of speech, freedom of the press. Let the Syrians have the system they want, but let them leave us free. We’re the only country in the Arab world that has freedom of press and speech. If we succeed in preventing Lebanon from becoming a police state, and set up a democracy like it used to be, we’ll be an example in the region. The liberals in the region are waiting for us. If we fail, it will return to the status quo. But in the long term, these regimes cannot stay.”

It was inspiring to hear a man who knew so much about the violence and authoritarianism of the region express hope that democracy might actually triumph. But for Jumblatt’s vision of the future to have been realized, the United States would have had to support it with strong horse tactics. Instead, it flinched. A little more than a
month after the withdrawal of Syrian troops, Damascus and its local allies renewed their campaign of terror against Lebanese democracy. Bombs were set off in commercial and residential areas, and a series of assassinations targeted civil society activists, government ministers, parliamentarians, and journalists, with writers like Samir Kassir and Gebran Tueni killed in car-bomb explosions, and May Chidiac maimed in another. Washington castigated the Syrians for their actions, but did nothing to correct them, and the combination of words without actions only pointed to Washington’s lack of resolve.

“The Americans,” Jumblatt later told an American audience, “should send car bombs to Damascus.” Jumblatt said he had only been joking, but the point was a crucial one: without deadly American reprisals for the Syrian regime’s violence, Lebanese democracy was vulnerable. A hundred and thirty thousand American troops stationed close to Syria’s border had helped embolden the Cedar Revolution. But without their help, the Lebanese were without a strong horse of their own, and left alone to face one of the most ruthless regimes in the region.

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yria’s war against Lebanese democracy left the Bush White House torn. Even though the Americans had come to recognize that Lebanon was a strategic interest in its own right, because it was a way to push back against Iran and push the freedom agenda forward, the administration’s overriding interest was Iraq. While some in the White House argued for punishing Damascus, the military saw a strike against the Syrians as opening another front in the war on terror, and it already had its hands full in Iraq. The civilians responded that deterring Damascus would also make the military’s job easier in Iraq, where the Syrians were helping insurgent groups kill U.S. soldiers. And while Washington had leverage on the Syrians with the international tribunal for the Hariri assassination, international law meant nothing unless someone was willing to enforce it through force of arms. If the Americans wanted to empower democratic energies in the region, they would have to show they were willing to protect the few genuine and useful allies they had, and continue to go after the groups and regimes that were doing all they could to crush any genuine liberal upsurge in the region, regimes like the one in Damascus. If Washington
was unwilling to do that work, it should have refrained from supporting a popular uprising and then turning and effectively handing the palace hangman the noose.

In the end, of course, the White House refused to go after Syria and thus declined to shield Lebanon. In doing so, the United States guaranteed that Lebanon’s experiment in popular liberalism would become a short-lived one. While American diplomats worked with the Lebanese government to extend the power of the state over all its territory and disarm Hezbollah, Syria and its Lebanese allies were using violence to bring the government down. And as the American military was struggling to put down an insurgency in Iraq and help build a state, its efforts were subverted by a state sponsor of terror. In short, what Syria proved was that in the Middle East today, there is no substitute for the strong horse. Or, rather, it proved that the only way a democratic alternative can survive is through strong horse means.

Damascus is the beating heart of Arabism, which in the Syrian version is a revivalist movement meant to reprise the first Arab empire, the Umayyads, memorialized in the city’s most famous landmark, the Great Umayyad Mosque. The dynasty began in 661, when Mu‘awiya, the governor of Syria, overthrew Ali, the last of the
rashidun
, and moved the caliphate here to Damascus. Nearly a century later, the political malcontents whom the Syrian rulers had exiled to Iraq eventually brought down the Umayyads in 750, ushering in the rise of the Baghdad-based Abbasids. This relationship was reversed after the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, when Damascus became the headquarters of exiled Iraqi Baathists, who fomented turmoil and violence in their old country in an attempt to kick out the Americans. The Syrians were more than happy to help the insurgency—both the Baathist and the Al Qaeda branches—since doing so solidified Damascus’s role as the self-described capital of Arab resistance, where resistance is terrorism that serves Syrian interests.

For thirty years, Damascus has been a warehouse of resistance,
hosting the leaders of the Palestinian rejectionist front, Hezbollah, the Iraqi insurgency, and the global jihad, some of them openly, like Hamas chief Khaled Meshaal, others clandestinely, like the late Hezbollah legend Imad Mughniyeh, and others more secretly yet, behind bars. It is an apt metaphor for the Syrian terror state that prison is its workshop and iron forge, where the mukhabarat tortures Syrian oppositionists and cultivates the agents of worldwide resistance.

Ghassan al-Mufleh spent twelve years in Syrian jails. The forty-eight-year-old writer and opposition activist was imprisoned for communist activities but styles himself after the iconography of American rebellion—long black hair, an upturned collar of his black leather jacket, and a squint like James Dean even when he isn’t chainsmoking. We met in the European city that he’s made his home in exile, and he explained how the Syrian mukhabarat recruits its terrorist assets in prisons, a process he saw firsthand.

“Remember that Syria is a proudly Arab nationalist state, and it requires no visas from Arab visitors,” says Mufleh. “So almost every Arab fighter heading off to do jihad comes through Syria. If they return from jihad alive and want to head home—Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Morocco—they just say that they were in Syria, working, vacationing, and their record is clean. But when they are heading through the Damascus airport, Syrian security detains some of the ringleaders in prison to see if they can use them. They give them a choice—either they can agree to work for the Syrian services, or they will be turned in to their own home intelligence agency. It is an easy choice.”