Lebanon’s Future: Bending Toward Hezbollah or Leaning to the West?
Interesting how this is framed, as an ‘either-or’ prospect with inferred limitations of mutual exclusivity. One of Lebanon’s strengths is surely that it is at the crossroads of cultures, inhering into one national entity. Its future will be an interesting place to watch as the political landscape is being re-negotiated. For a critical Lebanese perspective on Hezbollah’s posturing, see Beirut Spring’s Huffing and Puffing.
The latest maneuver in that fight is Hezbollah’s vociferous call for a national unity government that would threaten the slim majority held by pro-Western parties, known as the March 14 movement after a huge demonstration on that date in 2005. [Hezbollah has scheduled what is expected to be a huge rally on Friday in Beirut.]
“The political map now is different,” said Ahmad Malli, a member of Hezbollah’s politburo, sitting beneath a white tent erected amid the rubble of southern Beirut’s bombed-out Dahiya district. “March 14 doesn’t represent the real majority in Lebanon anymore.”
The struggle is first and foremost about the shifting alliances of Lebanese domestic politics, and it is still too early to say which side will win. But the surge in popularity and power that Hezbollah has enjoyed since this summer’s war has alarmed those who are trying to pull Lebanon more securely into the American orbit, since they fear that political gains for Hezbollah translate into political gains for Iran.
Pro-Western Lebanese politicians have watched with dismay as Iranian influence has spread across the region, largely with the help, they say, of American foreign policy. Iran extended its reach into western Afghanistan and has secured a deep hold in Iraq.
It has cemented its standing among the Shiite population of Lebanon with Hezbollah’s perceived success in the recent war. It has even begun playing a larger role in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, having publicly offered the fiscally squeezed Palestinian party, Hamas, financial support.
“There is an Iranian empire slowly but surely being erected,” said Walid Jumblat, a weary, aging Druze warlord cloistered in his ancestral castle deep in the mountains of the Shuf region.
Mr. Jumblat has emerged as Hezbollah’s most vocal opponent among the American-backed pro-democracy movement that holds a slim majority in Parliament today. But that majority is being challenged by Hassan Nasrallah, the young, charismatic Iranian-backed leader of Hezbollah, hiding somewhere in the devastated southern suburbs of Beirut. He has forged an alliance with Michel Aoun, a former general who controls the largest bloc of Maronite Christian seats in the Parliament.
“A government of national unity will introduce people like Michel Aoun, who is pro-Hezbollah, and maybe others, and we will lose the majority,” Mr. Jumblat said earlier this week in the richly decorated confines of his castle.
Even if the current government remains in power, its influence has suffered severely. Members of the March 14 group worry that without making peace with Hezbollah, they will not be able to get anything done. Hezbollah and other Shiite ministers paralyzed the government for seven weeks earlier this year with a boycott to protest the government’s call for an international tribunal to judge suspects in the assassination of the former prime minister, Rafik Hariri. Syria, a Hezbollah backer, is widely believed to have been involved.
Before the war, talks with all major political forces in Lebanon had begun to address the delicate and complex issue of disarming Hezbollah, the final obstacle in the government’s effort to recover full sovereignty over Lebanese territory since the withdrawal of Syrian forces a year earlier.
But the war interrupted all of that.
Sheik Nasrallah has emerged as a hero of defiance against American influence and Israeli might for many people across the Middle East.
Iran, too, won an added measure of respect for both its wartime support and its post-war aid. Portraits of the Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, hang in some villages of southern Lebanon, while highways across Lebanon have Hezbollah-paid billboards showing the destruction by Israeli bombs, emblazoned with the words, “Made in the U.S.A.”
Now, Hezbollah is trying to turn its perceived military successes into greater political power.
Mr. Malli, 51, a calm man in a gray suit over an open-necked blue-gray shirt, dismisses the worries about Iranian influence and casts Hezbollah’s maneuvers instead as an effort at national reconciliation in the face of an Israeli threat.
Hezbollah has successfully portrayed the war here as an inevitable, pre-planned attack that Israel launched at the first opportunity, rather than as an unexpected reprisal for its kidnapping raid.
In that context, it has depicted itself as Lebanon’s only effective defender. The group has made much of an incident in the southern town of Merj ’Uyun where the Israeli Army occupied a Lebanese Army barracks and detained the soldiers inside without resistance. Lebanese television aired a videotape of the Lebanese general in charge having tea with Israeli Army officers.
“If we follow that strategy, there will be no defense of Lebanon,” Mr. Malli said.
Now, rather than talk of disarming its militia, the group wants instead to discuss a national defense strategy in which the militia plays a part.
Left on the defensive over the war, the March 14 group has focused attention on pressing for an international tribunal to eventually try those suspected of roles in the February 2005 assassination of Mr. Hariri.
The pro-Western group hopes that such a tribunal would revive the anti-Syrian, anti-Iranian sentiment that dominated Lebanese politics before the war and help swing the country back toward the West.
“The tribunal, if it is formed according to our wishes, might give us a weapon,” Mr. Jumblat said.
But sending suspects to a tribunal requires legal maneuvers by the Lebanese government that it can only hope to manage if the March 14 group maintains its majority.
“This balance of power is quite fragile, with Iran on one side and Europe and the U.S. on the other,” Mr. Jumblat said, his conversation punctuated by heavy sighs and bitter chuckles. “Now our independence is at stake.”
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