The Heartbreak of History
A quarter century ago, there was another grim Lebanon summer--the war of 1982 between Israel and the Palestinians played out on Lebanese soil. The anarchy on the Israeli-Lebanon frontier had raged for well over a decade then. The Palestinians had built a state within a state: For the Palestinian chieftains, that was the best of all worlds. They held Lebanon captive, belittled its people, trampled over the Shiite country in the south, and hid behind the trappings of Lebanon's sovereignty. No one wept when the Palestinian gunmen and their leaders were cast out of Lebanon. They boarded ships firing into the air, freeing the Lebanese to embark on a new history of their own.
History has cunning: Israel had shattered the Palestinian sanctuary, and this led to the rise of the Shiites. Israel had done for the Shiites--Lebanon's largest and most disadvantaged community--what they had been unable to do for themselves. In a chapter now long forgotten, those villages in the southern hinterland had welcomed Israel's push into Lebanon. But Israel had stayed on, and what began in promise ended with two decades of bitter war between Israel and the Shiites. Iran soon found its way into the fray, and Hezbollah, a movement of the disinherited and the underclass, rode its legend of resistance to power in the world of Lebanon.
History does not repeat itself in all details. This time, there will be no ships to take the men with guns from Lebanon to distant shores. Iran had armed and financed them; Syria had sheltered them. The state in Lebanon was a virtual fiction, and Hezbollah gave the Shiites schools and clinics and rid them of the self-contempt that a snobbish land had bred in them. In return, Hezbollah had asked for their loyalty. Eventually, however, the line between Hezbollah's writ in Lebanon and Iran's would yield to the needs of the Iranians.
"Les guerres des autres," the wars of others, was the way the most venerable of Lebanon's thinkers, Ghassan Tueni, the publisher of the country's influential daily An-Nahar, has described the wars of Lebanon. (Some months ago he lost his son, Gebran, a passionate critic of Syria, to a massive car bomb.) Yesterday, it was the Arab-Israeli war that blew through that country. Today, it is an Iranian bid for regional primacy. The Syrian regime, a reign of plunder and autocracy, aids this sordid Iranian bid.
Chits. The Arab world had disenfranchised the Shiites of Lebanon; Iran had picked them up as its allies. Iran was far away, its language and culture alien to the Lebanese Shiites, but Hezbollah's clerics and lay leaders would ride Iran's coattails, for no other ride was offered them. One day or the other, Iran was bound to call in its chits--it had not come to Lebanon, after all, out of charity and benevolence.
Syria's motives, its stakes in this little war, are similarly easy to read. There have settled upon the Syrians second thoughts about the wisdom of their withdrawal from Lebanon just over a year ago. That decision had been made when the Syrians believed that the Pax Americana--or, more precisely, George W. Bush--was determined to topple the tyrannies of the region and to use Iraq as a springboard for a wider effort to change the ways of Araby. But in recent days, the Syrian autocracy has come to greater confidence that the storm has blown over. The Syrians aim to do all they can to subvert Lebanon's independence, to pull the smaller country back into the big Syrian prison.
The cruelty of history--and Lebanon displays that cruel juxtaposition of nature's beauty and history's heartbreak--is that men and nations are doomed to suffer great bloodshed before they settle down to outcomes inevitable all along. When the dust settles, the Lebanese government will have to take up its duty on its frontier with Israel. No one contests Hezbollah's role in Lebanon's politics; no one would deny its place in the country's sectarian landscape. But the guns and the missiles are another matter. Demography works to the advantage of the Shiites, and a great deal of the country's wealth has shifted their way in recent years. The Shiites do not need a holy war on their own soil. The reining in of Hezbollah is something they owe their kith and kin. They needn't be enamored of Israel, and they won't be. Those Persians bearing gifts, those Syrians who keep their own frontier with Israel as quiet as a tomb while setting ablaze Lebanon's lands, are no friends of the Lebanese.
This story appears in the July 31, 2006 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.