The Strong Horse: Power, Politics, and the Clash of Arab Civilizations (27 page)

  A
ll throughout June 2006, in the streets of Beirut you could find the flag of any of the thirty-two nations playing in that summer’s World Cup. Shop owners, of course, tailored their stock to their clientele—there were no Iranian flags to be found in the Christian areas, no star-spangled banners in the Shia regions. And yet partisan sympathies did not always follow sectarian lines. One of Hezbollah’s MPs declared that he was for the Brazilians, even if they wound up facing the Party of God’s Iranian patron, which was fielding a side in the tournament for the first time in years. Fawaz had an Italian passport and his sister lived in Paris, but he supported the Germans, as did most of the Sunnis, turning their noses up at the weak Saudi team. My Saudi neighbor affixed a Brazilian flag to his car antenna.

I saw the championship final at a country club high in the mountains, where the crowd was split evenly between France and Italy, the two European powers playing for the cup. France is the historic protector of the Christian community, but Lebanese regard themselves as temperamentally more similar to their stylish northern Mediterranean cousins, the Italians. There were several big screens in the
banquet hall, where long rows of cafeteria tables were loaded with hamburgers, fries, hummus, and other Lebanese dishes. It was cool in the mountains that night, so whenever a group of teenagers opened the doors to the balcony looking out on the stars and the capital below sparkling in the bay, a strong gust whipped through the room, and the elders clutched their French and Italian flags to themselves like blankets. With France’s chances for victory all but lost in the closing minutes after the star midfielder Zinedine Zidane was sent off for head butting a trash-talking opponent, a middle-aged woman with dyed blond hair and the French tricolor draped over her shoulders puffed on her cigarette and sighed. “What do you expect?” she seemed to ask no one in particular. “He’s an Arab.”

Thanks to Italy’s victory, the next morning Lebanon woke up Italian. The following morning, Hezbollah fired rockets on Israeli villages and kidnapped two Israeli soldiers while killing another eight, and Lebanon was again divided.

In the year and a half after the Hariri assassination and the withdrawal of Syrian troops, the Lebanese political class and ordinary citizens alike pointedly ignored their country’s own problems. For instance, very few Lebanese thought to look to Hezbollah as a possible culprit in the Hariri assassination, even though the group had pioneered the use of the car bomb. It was impossible to the majority of Lebanese that the Party of God had had anything to do with the murder of the former prime minister—the resistance that had liberated Lebanese lands from Israel wouldn’t dare turn their weapons on fellow Lebanese, they thought. When they were not laying blame for everything at the feet of Syria or Israel, they were worrying local details as though the world outside merely reflected what was happening in their particular corner of Lebanon—in a country the size of Lebanon, too small to field a superior national football team, politics is the national obsession.

Saturday mornings I sat in the ABC mall in Ashrafiyeh, the heart of Christian East Beirut, with a group of Lebanese who debated
Maronite politics and the Maronite presidency, as if Washington and Riyadh, Tehran and Paris, Jerusalem and Damascus were beholden to the machinations of this ancient yet tiny community. Fawaz drew on his long cigar and shook his head in disagreement. “Our problem,” he said, “is with the Islamist organization in the south that is courting war with a powerful enemy.”

It was difficult not to recognize what Hezbollah was up to. In the months leading up to the eruption of open hostilities, Hezbollah had made several unsuccessful attempts to kidnap Israeli soldiers on the border. That winter, one of the party’s Palestinian affiliates operating out of southern Lebanon had fired at Israel, which had countered by attacking Hezbollah positions. The Israelis had warned that the next flare-up on their northern border would bring much more severe retaliation. But Syria needed its allies in Lebanon to keep fostering conflict in order to distract the international community’s attention from the Hariri investigation, and by the summer it had become clear that a major confrontation was coming. In June, Hamas kidnapped an Israel Defense Forces (IDF) soldier on Israel’s southern border, a provocation that tested the resolve of Ehud Olmert’s politically insecure Israeli government, and one, most importantly to the Israeli public, that had no military credentials. When, a month later, Hezbollah decided to join the fray, only the Lebanese were surprised by Israel’s response, including Hassan Nasrallah, as he later disclosed.
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When I first felt the reverberations of the Israeli bombs falling on the Beirut airport ten minutes away from my apartment, I thought of Kristina, a DJ at a club in my neighborhood. One night after her set had ended, we sat quietly and chatted at the bar while the crowd was emptying into the night.

“Do you think it’s strange,” she asked, “that the Lebanese party so much when we have all these problems in the country?”

No, I told her. I said it was one of the things I loved most about the Lebanese, that despite all their hardships they pushed on and
enjoyed their lives to the fullest as though nothing else mattered. It was only now, thinking back, that I understood the look in her eyes: she thought I was as delusional as her countrymen.

 I
srael’s July war of 2006 with Hezbollah was by some accounts the ninth Arab-Israeli war, including the two wars of 1948 (one against the Palestinians and another against the combined Arab armies), Suez in 1956, the Six Day War of June 1967, the October 1973 war, the First Lebanon War from 1982 to 2000, the first intifada from 1987 to 1990, and the second intifada, 2000–2003. But it was more than this. What the Israelis call the Second Lebanon War should also be seen as the first salvo in a much larger, region-wide cold war that would eventually encompass the entire Middle East, bringing in marginal players like Sudan and non-Arab actors like Turkey, and of course Iran, whose push for hegemony in the Middle East was driving the conflict.

On one side of this conflict was the Iranian-led resistance bloc, which also included Syria, Hezbollah, and Hamas; on the other was the U.S.-backed regional order, comprising the Sunni powers Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf Arab states, and Israel. When Israel’s 2007 attack on the Syrian nuclear facility and subsequent assassination of the Hezbollah legend Imad Mughniyeh were received by these Arab states with silence, that further clarified the battle lines. And by December 2008, when Israel laid siege to Gaza and the Egyptians insisted that Hamas could not come out of the conflict victorious, it was obvious that this war was different from any other in the modern Middle East—for Israel was not just reestablishing its deterrence against its Arab enemies but also playing strong horse on behalf of Washington’s Arab allies, even if the Arabs were loath to admit it.

Critics of U.S. Israel policy—at least those who are not constitutionally anti-Zionist—tend to fault Israel as a strategic liability. Their argument is that because the Arabs and the Muslim world generally
dislike the policies or even the fact of a Jewish state in the Middle East, U.S. support for Israel means that we are unnecessarily antagonizing hundreds of millions of people, many of whom live on the world’s largest known reserves of oil. Leaving aside the dubious wisdom, never mind the moral clarity, of choosing allies and making policy based on the emotions of other countries’ citizens, for whom by definition U.S. interests are not paramount, the reality is that Israel is the United States’ greatest strategic asset in the region.

Consider the history: in 1970 the Israelis stopped the Syrians from making a move on the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan at a time when the United States was too busy in Vietnam to commit troops to protect an Arab ally. In 1981, the Israelis attacked Iraq’s nuclear reactor at Osirak, an operation that at the time met with opprobrium from the entire world, including the Reagan administration, but made it possible a decade later for U.S. troops to take action against Saddam and liberate Kuwait and protect Saudi Arabia without fear of an Iraqi nuclear response. In June 1982, Israel destroyed Syria’s Soviet-made surface-to-air missile battery in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley—an event that reverberated throughout Moscow defense circles when they realized that Israel’s U.S.-made technology was far superior to their systems. And hence some analysts believe that this battle, effectively a proxy war, was part of the “cascade of events” that led to the fall of the Soviet Union.
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To be sure, there are other features that bind the U.S.-Israeli relationship—intelligence sharing, joint projects between the two countries’ defense industries, and of course the overwhelming support of American voters, Jewish and non-Jewish alike, for Israel—but for more than thirty-five years, the core of the alliance has been cold strategic calculation.

During the 1973 Arab-Israeli war, for instance, the United States airlifted tens of thousands of tons of munitions to Israel to ensure its victory, and awe the Soviets, but those arms shipments were delayed by Secretary of State Henry Kissinger in order to show the Israelis who pulled the strings. And the shipments served U.S. interests in other ways, too—by arming Israel to the teeth, the Americans were
signaling to the Arabs that there was no way for them to defeat the Jewish state, and that if they ever wanted concessions from the Israelis, they would have to come through Washington to get them. The strategy worked: Anwar al-Sadat got the picture and jumped sides, from Moscow to Washington, and with Egypt now in its portfolio the United States’ regional position was further augmented, allowing it to go from Great Power to power broker. This also set in motion the Arab-Israeli peace process, which earned Israel treaties with Egypt and Jordan and negotiations with the Palestinians, and neutered Syria, leaving it with no option, as the former Syrian vice president Khaddam had explained, but resistance. There has been no full-scale Arab-Israeli war since 1973, which is the direct result of Israeli strength and American support. And yet for all the complaints that the United States is too pro-Israel, Washington does not embrace Israel at the
expense of
the Arabs; rather, it is allied with them both, funding and/or protecting every Arab state, except for Syria.

When the government of Ehud Olmert decided to make war against Hezbollah in the summer of 2006, all of Washington’s Arab allies, as one former senior administration official explained to me, were overjoyed. With the Americans having taken down a Sunni security pillar—Saddam—and then getting tied down in Iraq, Riyadh, Cairo, and the rest sensed the Iranians were gaining ground and that they were vulnerable. Even though they were incapable of doing anything about it themselves, the Sunni powers as much as anyone wanted to see the resistance bloc rolled back.

The Arab masses felt differently. A week into the war, I crossed over the mountains and found Damascus in full party mode, engaged in an orgiastic carnival celebrating the blood sacrifice of the Lebanese and the bloodletting of the Israelis. Young Syrians packed together in their cars, flying yellow Hezbollah flags and shouting martial slogans to other passersby. This was one Arab state where the regime and the people were in sync, at least when it came to resistance.

Dalia’s blood ran thick with resistance against the Zionists. She
was a reporter with Syrian TV whose father had been the Syrian ambassador to London during the Hindawi affair, which occurred in 1982, when a pregnant Irish woman boarding a London flight to Tel Aviv was found by El Al security to be carrying a bomb in her carry-on bag, packed by her boyfriend, Nezar Hindawi.
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After the plot was discovered, Hindawi hid at the Syrian embassy, which, he later testified, had directed the operation. The British briefly broke off diplomatic relations with Syria, and Dalia’s father was sent home. “All Syrians support the resistance,” said Dalia.

We were sitting in a café in the Christian quarter of Damascus’s Old City set up as a kind of shrine to the great Lebanese singer Fairuz. Posters of her were everywhere, and all her CDs and DVDs were on sale. Dalia said she loved Fairuz but was more ambivalent about Lebanon. “It feels cheap to me,” she says. “It doesn’t have any authentic Arab culture, like we have in Syria. They’ve gone too far; it’s too Western. I don’t think they care about their ties anymore to Arab culture, to the Arabs.”

I pointed out that her neighbors across the mountains were dying on behalf of Arab causes, whether they supported those causes or not. She seemed surprised or perhaps embarrassed when I said that at least half of Lebanon did not support the resistance and was furious with Nasrallah for dragging them to war. “If you think that the U.S. or anyone can offer the Syrian government a deal to abandon its support for Nasrallah, you are crazy,” she said. “They are fighting Israel.”

Resistance is the political discourse of insatiable grievance, and it seemed that those grievances blinded Syrians like Dalia to the possible consequences of the pact that their regime had signed them up for. If Iran was glad to spill Lebanese blood in its pursuit of regional hegemony, why wouldn’t it use Syrian blood as well?

After Israel’s 2009 siege of Gaza, the Sunni powers made precisely this point, that Iran was shedding Arab blood to advance Persian causes. But something more than this was happening: the
Iranians had tapped into deeper, and darker, Arab emotions. The Bush administration thought that what the Arab masses really wanted was democracy and representative government. Iran, though, gambled that what the Arabs really wanted was not reform but resistance. And Tehran’s hunch was right. In its proxy war against the U.S. regional order, Iran was succeeding where the Americans had failed: it was driving a wedge between the Arabs and their rulers.