Losing Lebanon

By P. David Hornik

Israel’s month of fighting Hezbollah last summer in Lebanon combined some effective air attacks on missile installations with confused, inconclusive actions on the ground. On August 11, around when Israel appeared to have learned lessons and was set to launch a serious ground campaign against Hezbollah, the UN Security Council imposed Resolution 1701 and stopped the offensive in its tracks.

I wrote at the time: 

Allowing Israel to take a few more weeks and rout Hezbollah—preferably also with some sobering strikes against Syria—would have created a different scenario and, most important, perceptions of a Western victory and humiliating jihadist defeat. That may have allowed the truly moderate Christian, Druze, and Moslem forces in Lebanon to start trying to retake control of their country while leaving the Iranian-led jihad axis reeling.

Instead the United States and the world community have chosen with this dire Security Council resolution to create a powerful scenario of perceived, and to some extent real, jihadist victory...It is a moment that will come back to haunt America and the West.

It didn’t take long for it to come back and haunt it. Already on November 24 Time magazine reported that Hezbollah had replenished “its war chest with over 20,000 short-range missiles—a similar amount to what they had at the start of the conflict.” The effectiveness of the Lebanese and enhanced UNIFIL units that deployed after the war was limited to “forcing smugglers to use mountain passes instead of the heavily monitored crossing on the main Beirut-Damascus road.”

Tuesday’s harsh, Hezbollah-led agitation against the Siniora government was another ominous episode in a rapid deterioration. Lebanon’s Daily Star called it “a nationwide protest that paralyzed the country and left its capital engulfed in barricades of blazing tires and bloodied by clashes that left at least three dead and over 130 wounded...unverified reports [said] at least seven had perished in street clashes.”

The Star quotes Siniora in a televised address Tuesday night: “We are at a dangerous crossroads: Either we are heading to a civil war, or heading to dialogue.”

His hope for dialogue appeared naive, as Hezbollah MP Amin Cherri declared: “This was a warning to the government…. The government has to respond to our demands, and if it doesn’t, then it should expect even greater escalation, far worse than today’s.”

Since Hezbollah’s demand is basically that the government dissolve itself, further strife seemed assured. It continued Thursday with a Shiite-Sunni riot at Beirut’s Arab Universitythat left four dead.

The situation found the West doing little but looking on and hoping for the best. In President Bush’s 2903-word January 11 speech on Iraq, the word Lebanon appeared only once: “From Afghanistan to Lebanon to the Palestinian Territories, millions of ordinary people are sick of the violence. . . .” The speech devoted a few sentences to Iran and Syria’s destabilizing role—in Iraq, while saying nothing about their effort, through their Hezbollah proxy, to convert Lebanon from a moderate, struggling, pluralist democracy to an outpost of fanaticism.

And Bush’s State of the Union address Tuesday night managed only to recount Lebanon’s recent troubles—“assassins took the life of Pierre Gemayel...And Hezbollah terrorists, with support from Syria and Iran...are seeking to undermine Lebanon’s legitimately elected government”—without even hinting that anything might be done about it.

On Thursday at a donors’ conference for Lebanon in Paris, Western and Arab parties pledged $7.6 billion to assist Lebanon with damages from the summer’s war and an enormous national debt. But with the country’s future in imminent peril, the idea of a gradual, assisted economic recovery has a surreal slow-motion quality to it.

Like—to a large extent—the imbroglio in Iraq, the crisis in Lebanon stems from having allowed Iran, with Syrian help, to foment radicalism and instability in the Middle East for close to three decades with little response other than warnings. Last summer the near-universal allergy to Israeli military action led the United States and other Western countries to save Hezbollah and ensure Lebanon’s descent into graver plight. Israel’s neutralization means there is no pro-Western force left to counter the radicals on the ground.

The fall of the Siniora government would constitute a major victory for the Nasrallah-Assad-Ahmadinejad axis, make war with Israel a certainty, and further galvanize Shiite and other extremism in the Middle East. The only remaining hope is that eventual Western military strikes on Iran and possibly Syria would take the geopolitical sting out of such a dire development, apart from Lebanon’s own tragedy.

CFPA: If Hezbollah and its allies are allowed to take over governmental control in Lebanon it would mark the end of democracy in that country. Eventually that dictatorship would begin its persecution of the Christians and others who have been opposed to Hezbollah. So the freedom loving Lebanese would be under another oppressive dictatorship after just being released from the slavery of Syria. Under no circumstances should the United States and Israel allow this to happen. Lebanon must be a free nation now and in the future at any cost.

Posted: 26 Jan 2007