With the malady of a nuclear armed Islamic Republic of Iran looming on the 2011 horizon (to take the low end of Secretary of Defense Robert Gates’ estimate), there is a stubborn ontology afflicting both the “bomb Iran” and the “containment” strategies for dealing with the Iranian nuclear program: Both put the US and Israel in a dangerous spiral towards confrontation with Iran’s Lebanese proxy Hezbollah, the “most technically-capable terrorist group in the world,” according to the State Department. Bomb Iran’s nuclear reactors, and Hezbollah will attack Israel with three times its 2006 rocket supply. Opt for containment, and brace for a Hezbollah theocracy-within-a-state with startling leverage.
General James Mattis walked back this cat in his July CENTCOM confirmation hearing, advocating a boost to Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF) funding, “to balance the influence of Syria and Hezbollah.” Yet just days later, an Israeli battalion commander was fatally sniped not by Hezbollah, but by the LAF. And after the clash, Lebanese MPs were inviting Hezbollah to join the LAF’s resistance to Israeli aggression.
What is this strange country, Lebanon? Who are the Lebanese? What will we wish we had known about Hezbollah’s Lebanese hosts when the inevitable happens in Iran?
Michael Young gives us some of the answers before we ask the questions. In a country where memory is bad manners, Young turns his own memories of assassinated friends and humbled dreams into an emotional tale of Lebanon’s meanderings through politics and war since 2005. Lebanon has spent the last five years delaying the answers of the UN-backed Special Tribunal for Lebanon investigating the February 2005 assassination of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri. But as the Iran showdown nears, the world needs answers quickly. What is the secret to a stable Lebanon? What can be done about Hezbollah? Where does Lebanon start and Syria and Iran end? The Lebanese prefer to forget, but Americans, fond memorizers of their own republic’s founding, would do well to learn.
The good news, Young argues, is that Lebanon’s perplexity is a function of its liberalism. Whereas the region’s autocrats are easy to read, Lebanon thrashes around with a “paradoxical” liberalism, in which “illiberal institutions tend to cancel each other out in the shadow of a sectarian system that makes the religious communities and sects more powerful than the state – to me, the main barrier to personal freedom in the Middle East.” Lebanese politics, in other words, may be the haunt of swindlers and their stomach churning deals with devils. But there is an invisible hand at work here: Yes, it was this hand that ferried the Aounists, for example, away from their opposition to Syrian chauvinism. But it is the same hand that slaps away totalitarian creepings of all confessions.
Ambition counteracting ambition, faction offsetting faction? Young, a self-described “American libertarian” and contributor to Reason magazine, must know his American audience will not be able to help but fancy him some sort of Lebanese James Madison. Why not embrace the role and invoke the Federalist Papers? He has said “I did not set out to write a political science text,” but his book’s republican theme does beg the slightest tipping of his hat to the American constitution. Or perhaps a bow to Alexis de Tocqueville, who praised the “happy land” of American federalism, “where man’s vices are almost as useful to society as his virtues!” and warned “If freedom is lost in America, that will be due to the omnipotence of the majority.”
But this is a book about Lebanon, not America, and therein lays the bad news: Whatever the lure of internal political theories, Lebanon is a small state in a shady neighborhood, where the invisible hand is no match for the foreign hand. Young describes a dazed Lebanon in the fresh ruins of “Pax Syriana.” He invites the reader to join him in marveling over Syrian President Bashir al Assad’s shameless threats to “break Lebanon” – even, in so many words, to the Secretary General of the United Nations. And he reels in the fables of the idolized Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, who, it turns out, is only as great as his Iranian patrons wish. For even Hezbollah cannot resist “the ease with which outsiders have been able to exploit Lebanon’s divisions to assert their power over the country.”
Would that it were so “easy,” America’s diplomats will say. Young’s book comes at a time of crisis for US policy towards Lebanon and its Syrian and Iranian puppeteers. President Obama’s validation of the “Islamic Republic” and appointment of an ambassador to Syria have made for a one-sided affair. As American power in the region wanes with a withdrawal of US troops from Iraq, so too does the “Bush-era fervor” of the Lebanese in the face of Syrian hegemony. That phrase will strike many American readers as ironic. But Young, who supported the Iraq War, gives President Bush his due: “the Lebanese, like the Iraqis, used America to help create a new order – whether America was appreciated or not, thanked or not.” Here he echoes another Lebanese writer, with whom he shares a poetically wistful way of historiography. Fouad Ajami, author of “The Foreigner’s Gift,” a story of Americans in post-Saddam Iraq, might have added the Lebanese to the list of that gift’s recipients. Then again, perhaps not, given the “Independence Intifada’s” flickering out amidst the cheers of “condescending and deterministic” Western elites, who say “what Arab societies needed was the time to develop democratic habits.”
Indeed, the sluggish STL, which Young has probed extensively as an editor for the Beirut-based Daily Star, has bought five years. Only upon Nasrallah’s August announcement of “evidence” of Israeli involvement in the assassination – which Young’s account of Syrian meddling with the STL quickly dispels – has the STL indicated urgency. Detliv Mehlis, the first commissioner of the UN investigation and the subject of trendy “I love Mehlis” t-shirts roaming Beirut, is a tragic hero in Young’s story; one who tried to break the memory taboos, but failed. In another parallel to Iraq, just as the international community preferred the time-buying of Hans Blix to the proven inspection record of Rolf Ekeus, so too is the UN content to let Mehlis’ efforts go to waste under the failed tenures of Serge Brammertz and Daniel Bellemare. For the STL and the sectarian Lebanese system, Young writes, “Hariri was a page best turned.”
The Hezbollization of Lebanon and its army, however, is a page that the world cannot turn. What is the Lebanese Army? Young knows its dance. In the weeks after Hariri’s assassination when the LAF deployed with the delicate task of quelling popular protests, Young and fellow-protestors refused to yield: “the soldiers murmured to us to push, because the quicker we pushed, the quicker the absurdity would end for them. And as we pushed, they gave way, making it seem like a struggle.” UNIFL may be forgiven for its clumsy rendition of the same dance last month, when it allowed a Hezbollah-friendly south Lebanese village to disarm it and smash its vehicles. But the August 3 border clash indicates the army’s dance may be over.
Young is not immune from Lebanon’s selective amnesia. Where in his book is the Lebanon where the most common reaction to seeing Israeli civilian casualties, according to Zogby’s 2010 poll, is “Israelis brought it upon themselves,” “empathy” not even registering a percentage? And where is the Beirut that closed the shutters as journalist Christopher Hitchens was nearly beaten to death last year for defacing a swastika? All in all, though, Young sees Lebanon for the liberal wonder on a rough street that it is. We are lucky to have Young’s account to guide us through this confusing country, with little time to spare before the dark curfews return.
