ROBERT FISK: US POWER GAMES IN THE MIDDLE EAST
The Independent – United Kingdom
Published: 19 March 2007
As the West looks anxiously at Iraq and Afghanistan, dangerous cracks
are opening up in Lebanon ­ and the White House is determined to
prop up Fouad Siniora’s government
The spring rain beat down like ball-bearings on the flat roof of
General Claudio Graziano’s office. Much of southern Lebanon looked
like a sea of mud this week but all was optimism and light for the
Italian commander of the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon, now
11,000 strong and still expecting South Korea to add to his remarkable
29-nation international army. He didn’t recall how the French battalion
almost shot down an Israeli jet last year – it was before his time –
and he dismissed last month’s border shoot-out between Israeli and
Lebanese troops.
No specific threats had been directed at Unifil, the UN’s man in
southern Lebanon insisted – though I noticed he paused for several
seconds before replying to my question – and his own force was
now augmented by around 9,000 Lebanese troops patrolling on the
Lebanese-Israeli frontier. There was some vague talk of "terrorist
threats … associated with al-Qa’ida" – UN generals rarely use the
word ‘terrorism’, but then again Graziano is also a Nato general —
yet nothing hard. Yes, Lebanese army intelligence was keeping him up
to date.
So it must have come as a shock to the good general when the Lebanese
Interior Minister Hassan Sabeh last week announced that a Lebanese
Internal Security Force unit had arrested four Syrian members of a
Palestinian "terrorist group" linked to al-Qa’ida and working for
the Syrian intelligence services who were said to be responsible for
leaving bombs in two Lebanese minibuses on 13 February, killing three
civilians and wounding another 20.
Now it has to be said that there’s a lot of scepticism about this
story. Not because Syria has, inevitably, denied any connection to
Lebanese bombings but because in a country that has never in 30 years
solved a political murder, it’s pretty remarkable that the local
Lebanese constabulary can solve this one – and very conveniently so
since Mr Sabeh’s pro-American government continues to accuse Syria of
all things bestial in the state of Lebanon. According to the Lebanese
government – one of those anonymous sources so beloved of the press –
the arrested men were also planning attacks on Unifil and had maps
of the UN’s military patrol routes in the south of the country. And
a drive along the frontier with Israel shows that the UN is taking
no chances. Miles of razor wire and 20ft concrete walls protect many
of its units.
The Italians, like their French counterparts, have created little
"green zones" – we Westerners seem to be doing that all over the Middle
East – where carabinieri police officers want photo identity cards
for even the humblest of reporters. These are combat units complete
with their own armour and tanks although no-one could explain to
me this week in what circumstances the tanks could possibly be used
and I rather suspect they don’t know. Surely they won’t fire at the
Israelis and – unless they want to go to war with the Hizbollah –
I cannot imagine French Leclerc tanks are going to be shooting at
the Middle East’s most disciplined guerrilla fighters.
But Unifil, like it or not, is on only one side of the border,
the Lebanese side, and despite their improving relations with the
local Shia population — the UN boys are going in for cash handouts
to improve water supplies and roads, "quick impact projects" as they
are called in the awful UN-speak of southern Lebanon – there are few
Lebanese who do not see them as a buffer force to protect Israel. Last
year’s UN Resolution 1701 doesn’t say this, but it does call for "the
disarmament of all armed groups in Lebanon". This was a clause, of
course, which met with the enthusiastic approval of the United States.
For "armed groups", read Hizbollah.
The reality is that Washington is now much more deeply involved in
Lebanon’s affairs than most people, even the Lebanese, realise. Indeed
there is a danger that – confronted by its disastrous "democratic"
experiment in Iraq – the US government is now turning to Lebanon to
prove its ability to spread democracy in the Middle East. Needless to
say, the Americans and the British have been generous in supplying the
Lebanese army with new equipment, jeeps and Humvees and anti-riot gear
(to be used against who, I wonder?) and there was even a hastily denied
report that Defence Minister Michel Murr would be picking up some
missile-firing helicopters after his recent visit to Washington. Who,
one also asks oneself, were these mythical missiles supposed to be
fired at?
Every Lebanese potentate, it now seems, is heading for
Washington. Walid Jumblatt, the wittiest, most nihilistic and in many
ways the most intelligent, is also among the most infamous. He was
deprived of his US visa until 2005 for uncharitably saying that he
wished a mortar shell fired by Iraqi insurgents into the Baghdad "green
zone" had killed then- Deputy Defence Secretary Paul Wolfowitz. But
fear not. Now that poor old Lebanon is to become the latest star of
US foreign policy, Jumblatt sailed into Washington for a 35-minute
meeting with President George Bush – that’s only 10 minutes less
than Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert got – and has also met with
Condi Rice, Dick Cheney, Defence Secretary Gates and the somewhat more
disturbing Stephen Hadley, America’s National Security Adviser. There
are Lebanese admirers of Jumblatt who have been asking themselves
if his recent tirades against Syria and the Lebanese government’s
Hizbollah opponents – not to mention his meetings in Washington –
aren’t risking another fresh grave in Lebanon’s expanding cemeteries.
Brave man Jumblatt is. Whether he’s a wise man will be left to history.
But it is America’s support for Fouad Siniora’s government –
Jumblatt is a foundation stone of this – that is worrying many
Lebanese. With Shia out of the government of their own volition,
Siniora’s administration may well be, as the pro-Syrian President
Emile Lahoud says, unconstitutional; and the sectarian nature of
Lebanese politics came violently to life in January with stonings
and shooting battles on the streets of Beirut.
Because Iraq and Afghanistan have captured the West’s obsessive
attention since then, however, there is a tendency to ignore the
continuing, dangerous signs of confessionalism in Lebanon. In the
largely Sunni Beirut suburb of Tarek al-Jdeide, several Shia families
have left for unscheduled "holidays". Many Sunnis will no longer shop
in the cheaper department stores in the largely Shia southern suburb
of Dahiya. More seriously, the Lebanese security forces have been
sent into the Armenian Christian town of Aanjar in the Bekaa Valley
after a clump of leaflets was found at one end of the town calling on
its inhabitants to "leave Muslim land". Needless to say, there have
been no reports of this frightening development in the Lebanese press.
Aanjar was in fact given by the French to the Armenians after they
were forced to leave the city of Alexandretta in 1939 – the French
allowed a phoney referendum there to let the Turks take over in the
vain hope that Ankara would fight Hitler – and Aanjar’s citizens
hold their title deeds. But receiving threats that they are going
to be ethnically cleansed from their homes is – for Armenians –
a terrible reminder of their genocide at the hands of the Turks in
1915. Lebanon likes its industrious, highly educated Armenians who are
also represented in parliament. But that such hatred could now touch
them is a distressing witness to the fragility of the Lebanese state.
True, Saad Hariri, the Sunni son of the murdered ex-prime minister
Rafik Hariri, has been holding talks with the Shia speaker of
parliament, Nabi Berri – the Malvolio of Lebanese politics – and
the Saudis have been talking to the Iranians and the Syrians about
a "solution" to the Lebanese crisis. Siniora – who was appointed
to his job, not elected – seems quite prepared to broaden Shia
representation in his cabinet but not at the cost of providing them
with a veto over his decisions. One of these decisions is Siniora’s
insistence that the UN goes ahead with its international tribunal
into Hariri’s murder which the government – and the United States –
believe was Syria’s work.
Yet cracks are appearing. France now has no objections to direct talks
with Damascus and Javier Solana has been to plead with President
Bashar Assad for Syria’s help in reaching "peace, stability and
independence" for Lebanon. What price the UN tribunal if Syria agrees
to help? Already Assad’s ministers are saying that if Syrian citizens
are found to be implicated in Hariri’s murder, then they will have
to be tried by a Syrian court – something which would not commend
itself to the Lebanese or to the Americans.
Siniora, meanwhile, can now bask in the fact that after the
US administration asked Congress to approve $770m for the Beirut
government to meet its Paris III donor conference pledges, Lebanon will
be the third largest recipient of US aid per capita of population. How
much of this will have to be spent on the Lebanese military, we still
don’t know. Siniora, by the way, was also banned from the United States
for giving a small sum to an Islamic charity during a visit several
years ago to a Beirut gathering hosted by Sayed Hussein Fadlallah,
whom the CIA tried to murder in 1985 for his supposed links to the
Hizbollah. Now he is an American hero.
Which is all to Hizbollah’s liking. However faithful its leader,
Sayed Hassan Nasrallah, may be to Iran (or Syria), the more
Siniora’s majority government is seen to be propped up by America,
the deeper the social and political divisions in Lebanon become. The
"tink thank" lads, as I call them, can fantasise about America’s
opportunities. "International support for the Lebanese government
will do a great deal for advancing the cause of democracy and helping
avoid civil war," David Shenker of the "Washington Institute for Near
East Policy" pronounced last week. "… the Bush administration has
wisely determined not to abandon the Lebanese to the tender mercies
of Iran and Syria, which represents an important development towards
ensuring the government’s success," he said.
I wouldn’t be too sure about that. Wherever Washington has supported
Middle East "democracy" recently – although it swiftly ditched Lebanon
during its blood-soaked war last summer on the ridiculous assumption
that by postponing a ceasefire the Israelis could crush the Hizbollah
– its efforts have turned into a nightmare. Now we know that Israeli
prime minister Olmert had already pre-planned a war with Lebanon if
his soldiers were captured by the Hizbollah, Nasrallah is able to hold
up his guerrilla army as defenders of Lebanon, rather than provokers
of a conflict which cost at least 1,300 Lebanese civilian lives. And
going all the way to Washington to save Lebanon is an odd way of
behaving. The answers lie here, not in the United States. As a friend
put it to me, "If I have a bad toothache, I don’t book myself into a
Boston clinic and fly across the Atlantic – I go to my Beirut dentist!"