US power games in the Middle East
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.
By Robert Fisk
03/19/07 "The
Independent" -- -- 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!"
© 2007 Independent News and
Media Limited
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