AntiWar
March 2 2005
Lebanon: Background and Forecast
by Juan Cole
It is often pointed out that presidents get too much praise and blame
for the economy, since the domestic economy has its own rhythms. We
are now going to see everything that happens in the Middle East
attributed to George W. Bush, whether he had much to do with it or
not (usually not).
What is now Lebanon consists of relatively hilly territory along the
eastern Mediterranean coast. The abrupt rise of the land from the sea
to the mountains is what led the French to refer to it as the Levant
(i.e., “the rising”). The mountains allowed small and often heterodox
religious groups to survive, since the mountain inhabitants were
relatively isolated and central governments had a difficult time
getting hold of them. On the broad plains of Syria, governments could
encourage conversion to Islam, then to Shi’ism, then to Sunnism, and
most of the population went along. In the mountains near the coast,
the population stuck to its guns. Thus, the Maronite Christians
resisted conversion to Islam, as did many Eastern Orthodox
Christians. The success the Ismaili government of medieval Egypt had
in converting Muslims to Shi’ite Islam was long-lived, though most of
these Shi’ites went over to the rival “Twelver” branch of Shi’ism
that is now practiced in Iraq and Iran. Likewise, Egyptian Ismailism
spun off an esoteric sect, the Druze, who survive in the Shouf
Mountains and elsewhere in Lebanon. In the coastal cities and in the
Bekaa valley near Syria, the population adopted Sunni Islam with the
Sunni revival of Saladin and his successors in the medieval period in
Egypt, which continued under the Sunni Ottoman Empire (1516-1918 in
Syria). (Egypt has been staunchly Sunni since the 1100s.)
In the 1600s and 1700s, the Druze were the most powerful community on
the Levantine coast. But in the 1800s, the Druze were eclipsed by the
Maronite Christians, both because the latter had a population boom
and because they grew wealthy off their commercial ties to France and
their early adoption of silk-growing and modern commerce.
When the French conquered Syria in 1920, they decided to make it
easier to rule by dividing it. They carved off what is now Lebanon
and gerrymandered it so that it had a Christian majority. In 1920,
Maronite Catholics were probably 40 percent of the population, and
with Greek Orthodox and others, the Christian population came to 51
percent. The Shi’ites were probably only about 18 percent of the
population then. Both under the French Mandate (1920-1946) and in the
early years of the Lebanese Republic, the Maronites were the dominant
political force. When Lebanon became independent in 1943, the system
was set up so that Christians always had a six to five majority in
parliament.
Lebanon had a relatively free parliamentary democracy 1943-1956. In
1957, I have been told by a former U.S. government official, the CIA
intervened covertly in the Lebanese elections to ensure that the
Lebanese constitution would be amended to allow far-right Maronite
President Camille Chamoun (1952-1958) to have a second term. As the
Library of Congress research division (“country studies”) notes:
“In 1957 the question of the reelection of Shamun [Chamoun] was added
to these problems of ideological cleavage. In order to be reelected,
the president needed to have the Constitution amended to permit a
president to succeed himself. A constitutional amendment required a
two-thirds vote by the Chamber of Deputies, so Shamun and his
followers had to obtain a majority in the May-June 1957 elections.
Shamun’s followers did obtain a solid majority in the elections,
which the opposition considered ‘rigged,’ with the result that some
non-Christian leaders with pan-Arab sympathies were not elected.
Deprived of a legal platform from which to voice their political
opinions, they sought to express them by extralegal means.”
This account agrees with what I was told in every particular except
that it does not explicitly mention the CIA engineering of the
election. Chamoun was unacceptable to the Druze and to the Sunni
nationalists newly under the influence of Gamal Abdul Nasser in
Egypt. A small civil war broke out. Chamoun lied to Eisenhower and
told him that the Druze goatherds were Communists, and Ike dutifully
sent in the Marines to save Chamoun in 1958. Thereafter, the
Maronites erected a police state with much power in the Deuxieme
Bureau or secret police. Since Washington had already overthrown the
democratically elected government of Iran in 1953, and is said to
have helped install the Ba’ath in power in Iraq, it may well be that
the Illiberal Age in the Middle East of the second half of the 20th
century was in important part the doing of Washington for Cold War
purposes. (Those namby-pamby democracies were just too weak to
forestall sly Communists.)
The Christian-dominated system of Lebanon fell apart for a number of
reasons. The Israelis expelled 100,000 or so Palestinians north to
Lebanon in 1948. The Christians of Lebanon refused to give the
Palestinians Lebanese citizenship, since the Palestinians were 80 to
85 percent Muslim and their becoming Lebanese would have endangered
Christian dominance. Over time, the stateless Palestinians living in
wretched camps grew to 300,000. (In contrast, the Maronite elite gave
the Armenians who immigrated citizenship so fast it would make your
head spin.)
In the second half of the 20th century, the Lebanese Shi’ites grew
much faster, being poor tobacco farmers with large families, than did
the increasingly urban and middle-class Maronites. Maronites
emigrated on a large scale (it is said that there are 6 million
Lebanese outside Lebanon and only 3 million inside), to North America
(think Danny Thomas and Salma Hayek) and to South America (think
Carlos Saul Menem of Argentina and Shakira of Columbia).
By 1975, the Maronites were no longer the dominant force in Lebanon.
Of a 3 million population, the Shi’ites had grown to be 35 percent
(and may now be 40 percent), and the Maronites had shrunk to a
quarter, and are probably now 20 percent. The Shi’ites were
mobilizing both politically and militarily. So, too, were the
Palestinians.
The Maronite elite found the newly assertive Muslims of the south
intolerable, and a war broke out between the Maronite party-militia
the Phalange (modeled on Franco’s and Mussolini’s Brown Shirts) and
the PLO. The war raged through 1975 and into 1976 (I saw some of it
with my own eyes). The PLO was supported by the Druze and the Sunnis.
They began winning against the Maronites.
The prospect of a PLO-dominated Lebanon scared the Syrians. Yasser
Arafat would have been able to provoke battles with Israel at will,
into which Syria might be drawn. Hafez al-Assad determined to
intervene to stop it. First he sought a green light from the Israelis
through Kissinger. He got it.
In the spring of 1976, the Syrians sent 40,000 troops into Lebanon
and massacred the Palestinian fighters, saving the Maronites, with
Israeli and U.S. approval. Since the Ba’athists in Syria should
theoretically have been allies of the Palestinians, it was the
damnedest thing. But it was just realpolitik on Assad’s part. Syria
felt that its national interests were threatened by developments in
Lebanon and that it was in mortal danger if it did not occupy its
neighbor.
The Druze never forgave the Syrians for the intervention, or for
killing their leader, Kamal Jumblatt. Although the Palestinians were
sullen and crushed, they declined as a factor in Lebanese politics
once they were largely disarmed, since they still lack citizenship
and face employment and other restrictions. The UN statistics show
almost 400,000 Palestinians in Lebanon, half of them in squalid
camps. But some social scientists believe that because of massive
out-migration to Europe, there are actually less than 200,000 in the
country now.
In 1982, the Israelis mounted an unprovoked invasion of Lebanon as
Ariel Sharon sought to destroy the remnants of the weakened PLO in
Beirut. He failed, but the war killed nearly 20,000 people, about
half of them innocent civilians. Ziad Jarrah had a long-term grudge
about that. The Israelis militarily occupied southern Lebanon,
refusing to relinquish sovereign Lebanese territory.
The Shi’ites of the south were radicalized by the Israeli occupation
and threw up the Hezbollah party-militia, which pioneered suicide
bombs and roadside bombs and forced the Israeli occupiers out in
2000.
One foreign occupation had been ended, but the Syrians retained about
14,000 troops in the Bekaa Valley. The Israeli withdrawal weakened
the Syrians in Lebanon, since many Lebanese had seen the Syrians as a
bulwark against Israeli expansionism, but now Damascus appeared less
needed.
Over time, the Maronites came to feel that the Syrians had outstayed
their welcome. So both they and the Druze wanted a complete Syrian
withdrawal by the early zeroes.
In the meantime, Syria had gradually gained a new client in Lebanon,
the Shi’ites, and especially Hezbollah. Likewise, many Sunnis
supported the Syrians.
The Syrians made a big mistake in growing attached to Gen. Emile
Lahoud, their favorite Lebanese president. When his six-year term was
about to expire last fall, the Syrians intervened to have the
Lebanese constitution amended to allow him to remain for another
three years. Across the board, the Lebanese public was angered and
appalled at this foreign tinkering with their constitution.
Rafik al-Hariri resigned over the constitutional change. He was
replaced as prime minister by another Sunni, Omar Karami of Tripoli
in northern Lebanon.
The assassination of Rafik al-Hariri, the popular multi-billionnaire
Sunni prime minister (1992-1998 and 2000-2004), angered a broad swath
of the Sunni community, convincing them it was time for the Syrians
to go. Despite the lack of any real evidence for the identity of the
assassin, the Lebanese public fixed on the Syrians as the most likely
culprit. The Sunnis, the Druze, and the Maronites have seldom agreed
in history. The last time they all did, it was about the need to end
the French Mandate, which they made happen in 1943. This
cross-confessional unity helps explain how the crowds managed to
precipitate the downfall of the government of PM Omar Karami.
If Lebanese people-power can force a Syrian withdrawal, the public
relations implications may be ambiguous for Tel Aviv. After the U.S.
withdrawal from Iraq, Israeli dominance of the West Bank and Gaza
will be the last military occupation of major territory in the Middle
East. People in the region, in Europe, and in the U.S. itself may
begin asking why, if Syria had to leave Lebanon, Israel should not
have to leave the West Bank and Gaza.
I don’t think Bush had anything much to do with the current Lebanese
national movement except at the margins. Walid Jumblatt, the
embittered son of Kamal whom the Syrians defeated in 1976 at the
American behest, said he was inspired by the fall of Saddam. But this
sort of statement from a Druze warlord strikes me as just as
manipulative as the news conferences of Ahmed Chalabi, who is also
inspired by Saddam’s fall. Jumblatt has a long history of
anti-Israeli and anti-American sentiment that makes his sudden
conversion to neoconservatism likely a mirage. He has wanted the
Syrians to back out since 1976, so it is not plausible that anything
changed for him in 2003.
The Lebanese are still not entirely united on a Syrian military
withdrawal. Supporters of outgoing PM Omar Karami rioted in Tripoli
on Monday. Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah still supports the
Syrians and has expressed anxieties about the Hariri assassination
and its aftermath leading to renewed civil war (an argument for
continued Syrian military presence).
Much of the authoritarianism in the Middle East since 1945 had
actually been supported (sometimes imposed) by Washington for Cold
War purposes. The good thing about the democratization rhetoric
coming out of Washington (which apparently does not apply to Algeria,
Tunisia, Jordan, Yemen, Uzbekistan, and other allies against
al-Qaeda) is that it encourages the people to believe they have an
ally if they take to the streets to end the legacy of
authoritarianism.
But Washington will be sorely tested if Islamist crowds gather in
Tunis to demand the ouster of bin Ali. We’ll see then how serious the
rhetoric about people-power really is.