CAN THE LEBANESE AGREE ON A DEFENSE STRATEGY?
By Marc J. Sirois

Daily Star
Nov 26 2008
Lebanon

In two recent articles about Lebanon’s efforts to define a suitable
strategy for national defense, I have attempted to explain the
importance of first laying down stable foundations. I have argued
that this must include Lebanese leaders’ agreeing on what diplomatic
space this country should seek to hold, and on how public support
for that position can be built and maintained. Obviously, these two
elements are inextricably linked, and the details of getting them in
synch will be where the proverbial devil takes up residence.

The greatest single challenge is how to manage some truly massive
differences about the concept of "resistance" and Lebanon’s
obligations, if any, thereto. A small sampling of the facts that must
be considered in this effort offers some idea of the complexity of
this process:

The United Nations Charter of 1945 does not just enshrine resistance
against occupation – including the use of armed force – as a legal
right; it also imposes a duty on neighboring states to facilitate that
resistance until such time as the UN Security Council gets the occupier
to leave. Unfortunately, however, there is nothing like the rule of
law when it comes to the interactions between states and peoples,
and one result is that the Security Council has consistently been
prevented – primarily by the United States – from taking useful action
against Israel’s continuing occupation and colonization of Arab land.

In addition to preventing UN intervention, the United States has also
acted in various ways to ensure that Israel retains decisive advantages
– including nuclear weapons – over its neighbors in any military
confrontation. One by one, therefore, most of the Arab countries have
walked way from the struggle because the price in blood and treasure
was simply too high. Some have made peace with the Jewish state, but
most have simply retreated to the safer ground of sullen refusal to
have any truck with it, and the occasional rhetorical outburst.

With all of the heavyweights out of the game, it has paradoxically
fallen to Lebanon, one of the smallest and weakest Arab states,
to bear most of the load when it comes to resistance. The great
majority of Lebanon’s own occupied land has been recovered, thanks
almost exclusively to Hizbullah, but some pockets remain under the
boot, and here the disagreements are multiple and at least outwardly
irreconcilable. This is not to mention the fact that Palestine remains
occupied, including the all-important city of Jerusalem.

Lebanon is an Arab country with most of the sympathies generally to
be found among the populations of such countries, many of which have
to do with undoing the historical wrong done to the Palestinians by
the creation of the state of Israel in 1948. Large numbers of Lebanese
Muslims, especially Shiites, feel a strong sense of responsibility to
contribute to the liberation of Palestine – and, understandably, to
ensure that all Lebanese territory is also free of foreign occupation.

However, many Lebanese are not Muslims, and even outside the small
Armenian community, there are some who do not consider themselves to
be Arabs, either. There is a school of thought among some Lebanese
Christians, for instance, that feels no connection at all – let alone
any sense of duty – to the Palestinian cause, and in fact many of the
same people regard much of the heavily Shiite South as an artificial
appendage to a "real Lebanon."

These and related dichotomies, reinforced by a sectarian political
model, have written much of Lebanon’s painful history since
independence in 1943, and they threaten to do so again.

The foregoing facts are relatively unambiguous, but how to manage
them is anything but. Hizbullah and its allies argue that further
armed action will be necessary to retrieve the Shebaa Farms, the
Kfar Shuba Hills and the northern part of the border village of
Ghajar. In addition, the party has alluded to additional struggle
for what are known as the "Seven Villages" – and even to soldiering
on until Occupied Jerusalem is freed.

This is all noble stuff, to be sure, but as the summer war of 2006
demonstrated with murderous clarity, the price of entering into combat
with the Israeli military can be exorbitant, and the Israelis have
threatened to be even more merciless if and when there is a next time.

For Hizbullah’s opponents in the March 14 Forces, anything that risks
another clash is (Iranian- and Syrian-orchestrated) madness. Some of
these have backed away from their earlier denials that the Shebaa
Farms are Lebanese, but none thinks the area worth fighting for,
certainly not against an enemy who can slaughter civilians at will,
as the Israelis did in 2006, and still escape any form of meaningful
censure. On the contrary, the United States made sure Israel was
richly rewarded for its crimes that year.

In a nutshell, then, however righteous its position (a few Security
Council resolutions flouting the UN Charter notwithstanding), Hizbullah
is asking all Lebanese to be willing to make heavy sacrifices –
including, possibly, their lives and those of their love ones – for
the sake of a project that many of them disdain. If there is to be
any progress on formulating a workable strategy of national defense,
therefore, some headway must be made on bridging this enormous gap.

Lebanon has faced a similar riddle before, during the 1990s, and solved
it with surprising ease. But that was a very different era in more
ways than one. For one thing, the South remained under full-fledged
foreign occupation, amplifying the resonance of Hizbullah’s insistence
on the necessity of action. For another, Lebanese politicians were
operating under Syrian "tutelage," and Damascus saw the slow bleeding
of the Israeli Army in South Lebanon as something that might be an
effective inducement for the Jewish state to quit the Golan Heights –
or, failing that, a suitable punishment for its ongoing refusal. It so
happened that those most resolutely opposed to resistance were also
those most resentful of the Syrian presence, so by dint of their own
boycotts and Damascus’ gerrymandering of the Lebanese electoral system,
they had little say in policy.

The result was that successive Lebanese governments – most of them
led by the late Prime Minister Rafik Hariri – supported Hizbullah’s
resistance activities but kept the organization and its work entirely
separate from the state as a means of keeping the latter and the
country’s civilians from being made targets. There were too many
Israeli attacks on bridges and power stations – not to mention too
many wanton killings of women and children – to declare this approach
anything like a blanket success, but in the end, it worked. In May
2000, the Israelis decided that they had had enough and decamped
from most of the South, blasting away at civilians and journalists
as they bugged out to vent their frustration at not being able to
stop Hizbullah fighters from harrying them all the way to the border.

Both games in question have changed in dramatic fashion.

The Syrians don’t make the rules in Lebanese politics anymore, so
the consensus that prevailed in the 1990s is gone – and has not been
rebuilt. Since his assassination in 2005, Hariri’s political heirs have
gone over to those who oppose resistance, while Christian loyalists
of MP Michel Aoun, long a vociferous foe of Syria, have formed an
unlikely but apparently unshakable alliance with Hizbullah. All told,
these two camps are just about evenly matched, so neither has the
ability to impose its will on the other.

In addition, 2006 saw the Israelis abandon any pretense of respecting
the rules that previously governed their exchanges with Hizbullah,
usually keeping the fighting within levels known as "low-intensity"
conflict. This – and subsequent threats to be even more profligate
with their firepower in the future – have helped to reinforce the lack
of agreement in Lebanon. Israel’s deadly messages haven’t been pretty
(extortion via collective punishment and promises of more to come never
are), but they have been brutally effective in blackmailing a good
portion of the Lebanese and their political leaders into submission.

These are not small obstacles that can be easily avoided and then
quickly forgotten. They must be dealt with before any defense strategy
can be agreed to, much less implemented. Even the comparatively
cut-and-dry circumstances of the 1990s required that several issues
be finessed, and doing that can only be more difficult this time.

Marc J. Sirois is managing editor of The Daily Star. His email address
is marc.sirois@dailystar.com.lb.