Waiting for Godot in Beirut
By: Joseph Hitti
Boston, Massachusetts
December 10, 2006
Downtown Beirut: “… Why are we here, that is the question. And we are blessed in this, that we happen to know the answer. Yes, in this immense confusion one thing alone is clear. We are waiting for Godot to come.”
From the vantage point of Lebanon’s internal politics, the opposition’s onslaught on the Saniora Government has all the hallmarks of a Lebanese revolution by the politically-disenfranchised Christians and the economically-disenfranchised Shiites against a corrupt political establishment. For those of the Lebanese who support reform, want a secularization of the system, a weakening of the religious and business elites, and who want to rid themselves of the corrupt traditional political class in Lebanon, this is a moment of opportunity, the likes of which don’t present themselves often. The opposition, consisting primarily of Hezbollah and of the Free Patriotic Movement, is demanding:
- A National Unity government which failed to materialize in the post-Hariri assassination aftermath in 2005.
- A revamped and more representative electoral redistricting (including the right to vote for the Lebanese Diaspora) than the Syrian-concocted redistricting of Ghazi Kanaan behind the rushed May 2005 parliamentary elections, which brought the current false majority to Parliament, and which the American administration unwisely pushed for in its hurry to declare a puny victory for democracy.
- New parliamentary elections on the basis of that law, leading to the election of a new President to replace the pro-Syrian puppet Emile Lahoud.
In its drive to achieve these demands, the opposition makes a number of claims and propositions. One is that the current government is corrupt. This is a fair argument since the Saniora government descends from a long lineage of traditionalist governments led by Sunni traditionalists (Karame, Hoss, etc.) and money-whales (Hariri) whose management of Lebanon has always been bereft with rampant corruption, patronage, political vindictiveness (primarily against the Maronites), cronyism, and corruption at all levels of the administration – and which made them a perfect fit for the mode of government during the Syrian occupation.
Second, Saniora’s anti-Syrianism is only skin deep. The switch by Saniora’s government and its supporters from tenacious puppets of the Syrian occupation into ardent anti-Syrian sovereignists was caused only by the assassination of Rafik Hariri and the threat it presented to themselves, and not out of principle or for the national interest. For decades, Saniora and his predecessors Hariri, Hoss etc. worked in tandem with the Syrian regime against their own people, only to turn against Syria once they themselves became the target of Syrian violence. In Lebanese politics, it would not be surprising if Saniora suddenly re-discovers the road to Damascus if the US administration decides to engage Syria in dialogue and softens its tone vis-à-vis the Syrian regime.
Third, the Saniora government has been impotent at improving the lives of the Lebanese people. Granted that the Hezbollah-triggered July Way did not help, but the government had more than a year to act. Instead, the government has been without a budget for 2005, 2006 and now, 2007. It has engaged in a vendetta against its opponents and repeatedly violated the constitution (by, for example, castrating the Judicial Council, the ultimate arbiter of political disputes to deny the opposition this last resort in seeking redress). Saniora cannot lay the blame entirely on Hezbollah because, lest we forget, the government adopted Hezbollah’s platform in toto as detailed in the government’s Ministerial Statement. After all, Hezbollah was still part of the government up to one month ago, and its liberationist and violent ideology were those of the Saniora government. Any changes that may have happened over the past few months are perceived, and for good reason, as caving in to American pressure and becoming American puppets instead of the Syrian puppets they used to be. Indeed, the Saniora government is doing Washington’s bidding in the thrust to eliminate Hezbollah, in exchange for maintaining the traditionalists’ grip on power and denying the country any real change towards democracy and economic prosperity.
Fourth, the claims to “majority” of the Saniora government are very weak (since it was elected on the basis of the electoral law of Ghazi Kanaan, the former Syrian pro-Consul in Lebanon who preferred to commit suicide rather than read the Mehlis report on Syria’s role in the Hariri assassination), and its legitimacy derives solely from serving as an interlocutor with a West eager to set up the International Tribunal and move forward with the UN inquiries and, from the narrow perspective of the US administration, to brandish Lebanon as a success story in the Middle East, even if this success is only superficial and has nothing to do with the true health of the democratic system there.
Fifth, the opposition claims to bridge a communitarian divide by assembling the secular Christians of Michel Aoun’s Free Patriotic Movement (FPM), the Iranian-inspired and funded radical fundamentalist Hezbollah Shiites of Hassan Nasrallah, the Communist Party, the Pan-Syrian Social Nationalist Party (SSNP), the pro-Syrian Marada militia of the northern Maronites of the Franjieh clan, and the Lebanese Baath Party. Although all of these political parties, except perhaps the FPM, were – and still are – vicious pro-Syrians, some of whom (SSNP and Baath) do not even recognize Lebanon’s distinct identity and right to be an independent nation, the value of bringing together the Christians (represented by the FPM) and the Shiites (represented by Hezbollah) is undermined by the fact that the pro-Saniora government loyalists also constitute a Christian, Sunni and Druze coalition that bridges a communitarian and sectarian divide.
On the whole, therefore, there is an undeniable appeal to the opposition’s demands since they represent the first ever real attempt at reform from decades of a corrupt political system that is the primary reason for the weakness of the Lebanese State, the destruction of Lebanon and its holding as hostage to a resolution of the elusive Israeli-Arab conflict, and for having drained the country of its resources, including the millions of Lebanese who abandoned the country over the past 30 years.
However, and this is where the appeal turns into nausea and where the opposition begins to look like the whore preaching virtue, especially when one looks at the situation from the vantage point of the region and the international contexts in which Lebanon operates. Those calling for reform are in fact themselves a part of the problem, and they really do not have a much higher moral ground than the Saniora government. Here is an attempt at deconstructing the opposition’s narrative.
Lebanon is a small country with a genetic predisposition to centrifugal forces that is exacerbated by the neighborhood’s ability to draw small countries into endless warfare. Lebanon is not Switzerland or Lichtenstein or Monaco, surrounded by neighbors that respect treaties and the sovereignty of neighbors. Lebanon is surrounded by a historic anomaly called Israel and by the false nation-monstrosities that call themselves the Arab states. This is a neighborhood of malignant invasive cancers that spread rapidly, political regimes with auto-immune tendencies since they know no boundary between true self (their people) and foreign (real enemies), and teratogenic hybrid political-religious outgrowths from the monotheistic era with self-proclaimed exclusive messages and destinies from God or such inanities.
As the historic shelter for runaway tribes from this neighborhood, Lebanon too is an anomaly since it exhibits features (diversity, coexistence, openness, etc.) of an advanced society (more by necessity than by choice) on a background of tribal-primal allegiance and minority defense mechanisms. It has always been, and will likely continue to be, subject to outside influences. The failure of Lebanon as a country over the past few decades is not due to the inability of its people to unite in the abstract, which the Lebanese have shown they are capable of, but to unite tangibly over how to manage their existence in the midst of a storm of surrounding centrifugal forces. At this specific moment of their history, the goal of any unity among the Lebanese should be to disengage Lebanon from the vortex of the Israeli-Arab conflict (since it has been the major driving force of the past 30 years) and align the interests of their small and weak country on the interests of those countries most likely to win on the long term in the ongoing battle between East and West. The opposition fails in these two aspects: Hezbollah rejects any disengagement from the Israeli-Arab conflict and, in fact, continues to push for making its own liberationist political platform that of the entire country (as inspired by Iran), and the entire opposition coalition rejects any alignment of Lebanon’s interests on those of the West, as seen from the harsh anti-American, anti-European sentiments of Hezbollah and the FPM.
The opposition says that the novelty it brings to the Lebanese arena is that it overcomes a sectarian divide in a push for national unity. The fact that the secular Christians of the FPM stand side by side with veiled Shiite supporters of Hezbollah against the government is offered as proof. The Memorandum of Understanding signed between the FPM and Hezbollah is also thrust forward as the model for unifying policies between otherwise disparate groups. But the problem is not sentimental abstract unity. It is operational unity, unity on things that matter in the real world, for objective purposes and achievable goals, particularly on what national model is more likely to protect Lebanon on the long term: A Western model of decentralized political governance and economic prosperity in which the individual human being – and not the tribe or the sect or the clan or the family or the class or the religion – is the unit of governance, or any of the other existing centralized, dictatorial, totalitarian, ideologically- or divinely-inspired models around the world that range from the utterly failed, the experimental or the artificially-maintained by force, dissuasion and repression. Unity for the sake of unity is in principle sound, but history shows us that there are also suicidal and self-destructive forms of unity. The unity exhibited by the Lebanese at the time of signing the Cairo Accord with the PLO in 1969, or the signing of the Taif Agreement in 1989, were such moments of collective Lebanese suicide. And the unity shown today between the FPM, Hezbollah and the others has all the hallmarks of a suicidal unity.
What does the opposition have to offer the Lebanese people beyond superficial unity, toppling the government, ending corruption, and defeating American interests in Lebanon? Nothing in the opposition’s narrative indicates that the opposition has any idea, let alone any internally-agreed upon program about what it will do after toppling Saniora, changing the electoral law, and electing a new Parliament and a new President, assuming all go as planned. The fact is that the current show of unity is one giant hugging fiesta that has no economic, strategic, ideological or social underpinnings, and that is where those who may support the opposition on the short-term lose confidence: The opposition’s main demands are short-term and tactical, and do not address the regional, international or long-term strategic interests of the country. Theirs is merely a tactical marriage of convenience to defeat an immediate enemy, lacking any assurances of success for the longer term. This hugging fiesta may indeed falter like the fiesta of the 1943 National Pact, or that of the 1989 Taif Agreement, once the Arabs, Americans, or others resume their interfering in Lebanese politics.
Some in the opposition are openly allied with Syria and Iran, and therefore their integrity in the drive for reform is simply suspicious and difficult to believe. Unless, that is, Hezbollah makes public the severance of its ties with Iran, something that the FPM allies of Hezbollah will assure you has already happened, but for which all evidence points to the contrary. The fact remains that Hezbollah’s Nasrallah has not publicly declared his distancing from Iran, nor has he explained where do the millions of dollars he buys the Shiite community with come from. So what guarantees do I have, as an ordinary Lebanese, that once in power Nasrallah will not make Lebanon a satellite of Iran dedicated to making Lebanon the ultimate battlefront against Israel? If Hezbollah managed this past July to drag the country into war with one foot in the government and one foot in the opposition, can you imagine what it will do if it has both feet in the government? Therefore, if I have to choose between an alignment with the pariah couple of Iran and Syria on one hand, and an alignment with the international community (everybody else) on the other, I will choose the latter because on the long term it is safer to assume that Lebanon will be better off on the side of the international community than on the side of Syria and Iran. Free Patriotic Movement apologists are either naïve optimists or idiotic simpletons since they are unable to admit the immense conflicts that are inherent to their alliance with Hezbollah once, and if, the immediate goal is achieved. Though they labor to tell you that theirs is not an alliance with Hezbollah, but an “understanding”, they have, since signing the Memorandum of Understanding with Hezbollah, adopted all the political platforms of the latter and in so doing changed their own political construct and discourse of the past 15 years: From appealing to the West for help for 15 years against Hezbollah and Syria, they now have adopted Hezbollah’s anti-Western, anti-American nativist hostility: The Saniora government is, in their eyes, [US Ambassador to Beirut] Feltman’s puppet government.
Then, there is the timing of the demonstrations that could turn into riots and street violence. The timing is simply too obvious to be ignored. Why were these protests not held after the second or third or fourth post-Hariri assassination? Or after the failure of the first Dialogue roundtable in the Spring of 2006? Or at any other time during 2005 and 2006? Why is the timing so coincidental with the impending decision on the International Tribunal that Syria is trying hard to scuttle? Why did the July War happen almost to the day with Iran’s nuclear file nearing a decision by a united international community? These are not coincidences, and refusing to see the timing as anything less than suspicious is disingenuous at best. Why did General Aoun sign his Memorandum of Understanding with Hezbollah in January 2006, 1 month after returning from a visit to the US? Why wasn’t the Memorandum of Understanding signed between the two sides while Aoun was still in exile, prior to the Hariri assassination and prior to the forced extension of the Lahoud mandate? Obviously, Aoun could not do that then because he was still calling Hezbollah a terrorist organization acting at Syria’s behest. Since the July War, Hezbollah’s “victory” has meant greater limits on its freedom of action in the south with resolution 1701 and a 20,000-strong UNIFIL force patrolling the south next to Lebanese army units. Therefore, Iran can no longer hold Lebanon hostage to the missiles it sends Hezbollah and to its false pretense of liberation of the south. It has lost the leverage it used to have, like Syria did when Israel withdrew in 2000. Iran has therefore to come up with something new, and while Syria invented the Shebaa Farms to maintain its grip through Hezbollah, Iran is now using Hezbollah to try for a power grab before the Lebanese take a breath and start thinking. Meanwhile, the Hezbollah’s supplies of missiles continue to pour in across the Syrian border, notwithstanding UN resolution 1701, UNIFIL, and steady progress on the mediated border disputes between Lebanon and Israel. Time and options are running out for Hezbollah, which is why it is going for the jugular of the Saniora government.
Soon after the constitution of the Saniora government in 2005, a balanced electoral law commission was set up to draft such a new law. Six months later, the commission resigned because its members failed to agree on common ground. What makes a balanced government of national unity more likely to succeed in enacting such a new law? What guarantees can anyone give the Lebanese people that dialogue would work once the opposition is inside the government with veto power, when it failed twice over the past year with the opposition on the outside? With the veto power of the opposition inside the government, the likelihood is for greater paralysis rather than getting things done, as the opposition claims.
The danger of the FPM’s reform platform being used by Hezbollah to promote Iranian interests is all the more dangerous since any failure of the opposition in its current drive for reform will be a huge setback for any real reform in the future and a big victory for the traditionalists who will be seen as heroes and therefore refractory to any change. FPM apologists will admit to you that Hezbollah is nothing to be proud of, and that it is indeed a dangerous alliance. But they hurry to add that it is a temporary necessity, a mere tactical maneuver to counter the Hariri-Saudi-Sunni plot aiming at implanting the Palestinian refugees in Lebanon and giving the Sunnis a demographic advantage. If that is not a sectarian scare tactic, then what is? They will tell you that they asked the Americans (probably when Aoun was in the US in November 2005) what plans they have to get rid of Hezbollah, but the Americans had none: No plans to send in the Marines, and no plans to send in the Israelis. However, the FPM and Hezbollah have argued that the July War between Hezbollah and Israel was such an American plan to get rid of Hezbollah using the Israelis. Which means that the FPM has either lied about the information it had about the US plans, or that it was given the wrong information. In any case, the argument goes that the decision by the FPM to engage Hezbollah as an ally was more a last resort, a fallback option, the defeatist realization that since there is nothing that can be done to get rid of Hezbollah, then perhaps we should work with them and modify our principles to accommodate the situation “on the ground”. This is otherwise known as “pragmatism” or “realpolitik” of the kind that James Baker and George Bush Senior used in 1990 to surrender Lebanon to Syria, and this pragmatic realpolitik is now making a comeback with none else other than James Baker advising Bush Junior to talk to Syria and Iran, and make a deal on Iraq.
Another contention by Hezbollah and the FPM is that they are cleaner than the government because they are the only ones not to have engaged in internecine warfare during the 1975-1990 war, a point that is highly debatable at best: Then Prime Minister Aoun ordered the Lebanese Army to fight and defeat the Lebanese Forces militia in a bloody and very costly battle in 1990, and Hezbollah massacred more Palestinians and fellow Lebanese Shiites in the mid 1980s to secure its exclusive domination of the south by fighting to death the Palestinian militias and the Amal Shiite militia.
On the whole, therefore, it is better for the Lebanese people to put aside – temporarily – their fight for reform until such time as the country has any backbone to withstand the convulsions of impending regional change. It is hypocritical for the opposition, the FPM in particular, to talk about a drive for reform and ignore the more worrisome regional issues and the Syrian-Iranian shadow looming very large across the landscape in Iraq, in Lebanon and with the rest of the world. Ironically, the only way to shield Lebanon from regional conflict is for the country to reconcile itself with, and not obstruct, the desires of an international community which is on a collision course with Syria and Iran. The opposition’s vision beyond bringing down the government is inexistent, and the juxtaposition of secular Christians in alliance with fundamentalist Shiites is simply odd and inherently fraught with risk, and just too dangerous to trust. Meanwhile, the only thing the Lebanese people can do with any certainty right now is “wait for Godot”.
Joseph Hitti
Boston, Massachusetts
December 10, 2006