unimpeded ability to continue to land rockets deep inside Israel despite four
weeks of punishing assaults from the full force of the Israeli military.
The conflict showed that Israeli military operations were no longer immune to
casualties, both civilian and military. Yet even when Israel was willing to pay
the high cost of such military operations, it failed to achieve its political
objectives. Israel faced in Lebanon what the US is facing in Iraq, an erosion
of its image of military invincibility, a serious loss in a conflict where
political legitimacy has been based on the ability to prevail militarily on the
ground.
Indeed, with each passing day all through the conflict in Lebanon, the sight of
a small Arab militia in a politically fragmented country
hitting the powerful State of Israel with rockets won for Hezbollah awed
respectability and popular support across the entire Arab world and beyond.
That fact made further prolongation of the conflict a de facto confirmation of
defeat for Israel in its declared war aim of decisively disarming Hezbollah.
Given the icy US attitude toward Damascus, expecting Syrian cooperation as a
geopolitical free lunch for the US dilemma in the Israel-Hezbollah conflict is
unrealistic on Washington's part. Damascus is not likely to restrain Hezbollah,
which at any rate does not need any short-term help from Syria as it remains
quite well supplied for a short war. It is naive of the US to expect Syria to
neutralize for no strategic gain its strongest card not only in Lebanon but in
dealing with Israel.
Ironically, by forcing Syria to withdraw it troops from Lebanon last year, the
US and its allies diluted the direct leverage Syria might have had over
Hezbollah a year later. The consensus of most observers is that Iran, Syria and
Hezbollah, and indeed most of the world, were surprised by the Israeli
overreaction to the Hezbollah seizure of two Israeli soldiers, an incident well
within the unspoken rules of limited engagements with which Israel had had
ample experience in the past. It was an incident that would have been solvable
with a low-key exchange of prisoners. But US militaristic policy on Iraq seemed
to have encouraged Israel under an inexperienced and ultra-radical caretaker
leadership, with its seasoned leader Ariel Sharon lying in a coma in hospital,
to try to use the captive-soldiers incident as a pretext to destroy Hezbollah
with overwhelming force once and for all.
The ill-considered Israeli strategy on Lebanon failed in parallel to the
ill-conceived US strategy on Iraq, doing serious and perhaps long-lasting
damage to both governments in domestic politics and foreign policy. In the US,
the neo-con-dominated regime lost control of Congress to the anti-war Democrats
and has to stage a full retreat from its "moral clarity" unilateral approach to
foreign policy to a pragmatic multilateral approach. In Israel, the fiasco in
Lebanon may presage the rehabilitation of the peace faction that had in effect
been marginalized in Israeli politics for decades.
The experiences in Iraq and Lebanon show that military superiority no longer
translates automatically into political advantage in a new age of asymmetrical
warfare and that political solutions are now the only path to peace in a
complex world of tangled forces and overlapping interests.
Syria has long held that problems in the Middle East could be solved only
through a comprehensive plan to end the Arab-Israeli dispute. Syrian diplomats
stress the indispensable role of their country, pointing out that the exclusion
of Syria, Hezbollah and Iran from the diplomatic talks on the Lebanon crisis in
Rome rendered those discussions pointless.
The US maintains that Syria can and should restrain Hezbollah, hoping that
Washington's moderate Sunni Arab allies would separate Shi'ite but secular
Damascus from its de facto alliance with fundamentalist Shi'ite Iran and its
militant Shi'ite offspring in the region. Close ties with Iran have made Syria
more influential in the region in the context of new developments such as the
election of Hamas to control the Palestinian Parliament, and the increasing
chaos in US-occupied Iraq. But the Iranian link, fueled mostly by a year of
US-led economic pressure on and international isolation of Syria, is not well
supported in Damascus and lacks sustaining power as soon as US hostility toward
Damascus eases.
Investments in Syria from Arab oil states have basically dried up under US
pressure. Street demonstrations in Damascus vilify moderate Arab leaders, such
as King Abdullah II of Jordan and Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, who have
publicly criticized Hezbollah but who represent non-oil-producing states.
Ultimately, Syria aims to exploit the crisis to create an opportunity to
reassert itself as a key player that needs to be consulted, particularly when
it comes to Lebanese, Iraqi and Palestinian affairs.
The ruling Ba'ath Party in Syria aims to consolidate its rule by forging
alliances that will bring prosperity and development in the long term. The
recovery of the Golan Heights, taken by Israel in the 1967 war, is only an
immediate first-step objective.
Syria and Lebanon
The petty Arab states are like the petty Germanic states before German
unification, willingly allowing their competing parochial self-interests to be
exploited by the Holy Roman Emperor to keep German unification at bay. Until
pan-Arabism unites the Arab people, Arabs will be of little consequence in
determining their own destiny.
This is why Israel, a nation of 7 million with no oil revenue, whose people
returned to their undeveloped ancient homeland only six decades ago, can
outmatch the Arab nation of 323 million sitting on a quarter of the world's oil
supply, by making separate peace with disunited and competing separate Arab
states. Nowhere is this anomaly more clearly visible than the relationship
between Syria and Lebanon.
In return for Christians' promise not to seek French protection and to accept
Lebanon as an Arab state, the Lebanese Muslims agreed to renounce aspirations
for union with Syria and to recognize the independence and legitimacy of the
Lebanese state within its 1922 boundaries. This agreement took the form of the
National Pact of 1943 that allowed Shi'ites, Sunnis and Maronite Christians to
form an independent state in Lebanon. The pact also reinforced the sectarian
system of government begun under the two-decade-long French Mandate by
formalizing the confessional distribution of high-level posts in the government
based on the 6:5 ratio of the 1932 census favoring minority Christians over
majority Muslims.
The Taif Agreement signed on October 22, 1989, in Taif, Saudi Arabia,
restructured the 45-year-old National Pact by transferring equal power to the
Muslim Arabs from the controlling Maronite Christians, who had been given a
privileged status in Lebanon under French colonial rule. The agreement
stipulated domestic political compromise, the ending of the Lebanese Civil War,
the establishment of special relations between Lebanon and Syria, and a
framework for the beginning of complete Syrian withdrawal from Lebanon. Taif
stipulated that the prime minister answers to the legislature, as in a
conventional parliamentary system, instead of the Sunni Muslim prime minister
being appointed by and responsible to the Maronite president as before Taif. At
the time of the Taif negotiations, Maronite president Amine Gemayel appointed
Maronite General Michel Aoun as prime minister, putting the government in total
control of the Christians, in violation of the National Pact.
Pierre Gemayel, founder of the fascist Kataeb (Phalangist) Party, advocated a
Lebanon separate from the other Arab states and linked geopolitically to France
and the West. He opposed the accommodation of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon.
His son, Amine Gemayel, was elected to the presidency by Parliament on
September 21, 1982, to succeed his brother Bachir Gemayel who had been elected
the previous month but was assassinated before taking office. Amine's son,
Pierre Gemayel Jr, was elected to Parliament in 2000, and established his
reputation as an opposition politician to a pro-Syrian government.
Pierre Gemayel Jr was assassinated by unidentified assailants in Jdeideh, a
Beirut suburb, on November 21 this year. Amine Gemayel accused Syria of being
responsible for the death of his son. Political assassinations have not been
rare events in the Gemayel family or in Lebanese history.
The Taif Agreement identified the abolition of political sectarianism in
Lebanon as a national priority but without a time frame. The Chamber of
Deputies was enlarged to 128 members, shared equally between Christians and
Muslims, rather than keeping to the 6:5 ratio in favor of Christians as
stipulated in the National Pact or by universal suffrage that would have
provided a Muslim majority. A cabinet was established that was similarly
divided equally between Christians and Muslims, who were divided among Sunnis,
Shi'ites and other sects.
Emile Lahoud, a Maronite Christian and outgoing commander-in-chief of the
Lebanese armed forces, ran for the presidency in 1998, after having the
constitution amended to allow a military leader to run for office within three
years of holding that post. Under the constitution, the presidency is limited
to one six-year term. However, under pressure from Alawi-ruled Syria, which was
uncomfortable with the prospect of a Sunni-dominated Lebanon, the Lebanese
Parliament voted in 2004 to amend the constitution to extend Lahoud's term for
an additional three years to 2007, as did his predecessor, Elias Hrawi.
Lebanese opposition forces and Western critics claimed that the extension was
illegal because the constitution was amended under foreign duress.
Prime minister Rafik Hariri, a Sunni who had enjoyed guarded Syrian support,
clashed with Damascus over the extension of Lahoud's term and resigned in
protest. After resigning in October 2004, he was killed by a truck bomb on
February 14, 2005. Lebanese opposition members blamed Syria for the
assassination, while Syria denied responsibility with the argument that it
gained no political advantage from Hariri's death.
The tortuous history of Lebanon reveals that no political allegiance is sacred
in this complex arena of power struggle in which players have been conditioned
by century-long realities resulting from a Western divide-and-rule political
culture. Lebanese politicians have long since learned that survival is a
requisite prerogative in the protracted struggle for national liberation
carried out through fleeting alliances of expediency. Survival allows the
survivor a chance to rise above temporary setbacks to fight another day toward
final victory. Arab politicians have long learned that honor does not exist in
the lexicon of Western manuals of politics, particularly when it comes to
agreements made to Arabs, and that deals of expediencies are made to be broken
by new expediencies.
Lebanese politicians and sectarian militia leaders, notwithstanding their
impassioned grandstanding of solidarity with the Palestinian struggle early in
Lebanon's 1976-90 civil war, ended up cutting embarrassingly awkward deals with
invading Israeli forces in 1982 just to ensure their own political survival and
to avoid heroic yet tragic fates at any cost.
Lebanon's largest wartime Christian militia had fought Syrian forces for more
than a decade, only to watch cynically from the sidelines as Syrian troops
crushed the Lebanese army and marched into the capital in 1990. Pro-Syrian
ministers who vowed a decade ago to place their bodies before Syrian tanks to
prevent a withdrawal of Syrian forces from Lebanon remained conspicuously
silent when Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, facing mounting domestic and
international pressure led by the US and France, pulled them out of Lebanon on
April 25, 2005.
Lebanese prime minister Omar Karami's unexpected resignation on February 28,
2005, the latest in a series of defections by Syrian-backed politicians since
the assassination of former prime minister Rafik Hariri two weeks earlier, was
a political setback for Syria, even though the range of suspected assassins
extended beyond Syria conceivably to include Iran and even Israel. Hariri, a
self-made Sunni billionaire, could have molded a coalition of Christian
Phalangists, Druze warlords and Muslim militias into a pro-Syria functioning
state that would not have been exactly a good neighbor to Israel or Iran. Thus
both Israel and Iran benefited from Hariri's assassination, a fact that
underscored a painful
