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JEFFREY
LAURENTI: RICE IN LEBANON: HARD TO DIGEST: 07/11/2007 (MaximsNews Network)
UNITED NATIONS - / MaximsNews Network /
- 07 November 2007 --
(BEIRUT) A ghost is stalking Lebanese politicians struggling to agree on a
compromise candidate for president by this month’s deadline—the ghost of
John Foster Dulles.
President
Eisenhower’s secretary of state fifty years ago could see the Middle East only
through cold war lenses focused squarely on Moscow, and the United States aided
or undermined Arab leaders precisely in proportion to their claimed
anticommunist zeal.
Today,
Dulles’ monomaniacal heirs in the Bush administration view Middle East leaders
through the distorting lens of their fixation with Iran. Secretary of State
Condoleezza Rice, who surely should know better, is busy undermining Arab
leaders deemed insufficiently willing to sacrifice their own country’s
stability in order to support Washington’s confrontation with Tehran.
Lebanon
is today’s victim of Washington conservatives’ myopia.
Lebanese
society is famously fragmented along religious lines, but its kaleidoscopic
politics are even more complicated. Washington has pressed hard for a firmly
anti-Iranian government in Beirut, which by association means one that must also
be hostile to Syria and determined to dismantle Hizbollah, the home-grown Shiite
movement that the Bush administration sees as Iran’s proxy in Lebanon.
The
administration’s truculence has squandered the goodwill America had earned
among Lebanese by its welcomed assistance in freeing Lebanon from Syria’s
widely detested grip on Lebanese politics.
Three
years ago the domineering Syrians had overplayed their hand in forcing an
unwilling parliament to extend the expiring term of an unpopular but pliable
president till November 24 of this year. Lebanese resentment smoldered.
The
brutal assassination a few months later of Lebanon’s leading Sunni politician,
Rafiq Hariri, evidently masterminded by Syrian intelligence, ignited the
tinderbox of Lebanese anger, triggering massive demonstrations—the “Cedar
Revolution.”
Washington
and Paris skillfully leveraged the popular protest at the United Nations to
compel the complete withdrawal of Syria’s forces from Lebanon, where they had
remained long after helping extinguish Lebanon’s disastrous civil war in 1990.
But
having supplanted the Syrians as the dominant foreign power in Lebanese
politics, the Bush administration is at risk of overplaying its own hand
today.
It
alienated some of the most dedicated democratic reformers in Lebanese politics
when it cobbled together an anti-Iranian majority in parliament from traditional
political satrapies. It offended many Lebanese by its Dulles-like compulsion to
see the region in strictly binary terms—and by simple-mindedly working to
align Christians and Sunnis against Shiites attracted to Hizbollah.
Most
disastrously, the Bush administration not only resolutely supported prolongation
of Israel’s furious war against Hizbollah in July 2006, blocking all U.N.
measures to end it, but its senior officials were widely reported to have egged
on the Israelis to strike harder.
Administration
support for devastating blows to Lebanon’s painstakingly rebuilt
infrastructure deeply discredited the government in Beirut, and led the
traditionally pro-American Lebanese to become among the Middle East’s most
embittered critics of American leadership.
Washington
should have heard the warning bell after a parliamentary by-election this
August, when a dependably pro-Bush scion of a long-time Christian political
dynasty was trounced by Michel Aoun, an independent-minded Christian former
general who won 70 percent of the vote despite Washington’s charges of being a
stooge of the pro-Syrian opposition.
But as a
leader of the (mostly Christian) Change and Reform bloc in parliament, Ghassan
Moukheiber, told me over the weekend, “We’re not an opposition led by
Hizbollah, we’re an anti-Syrian opposition.”
With
Israeli attacks last year having failed to eliminate Hizbollah’s arsenal, the
Bush administration then insisted that the augmented United Nations force in
Lebanon dismantle it, an impossible task that the Italians leading the force
firmly refused. Now the administration wants a president installed in Lebanon
who will face down Hizbollah.
Yet most
Lebanese are convinced that, as Daoud Khairallah, an analyst of the country’s
byzantine politics, now at Georgetown University, wrote in Beirut’s Daily
Star last week, Hizbollah’s disarmament “is more likely to be achieved
by efforts of internal parties perceived as trusted friends and respected
nationalists than by politically discredited adversaries.”
Recognizing
that the country is at an impasse, Lebanese political leaders have sought to
build bridges across the internal divide that Washington has worked to widen.
Last week, Saad Hariri, son of the slain Sunni leader, met with Aoun for the
first time since last year’s war—tellingly, in Paris, since it was not safe
to meet in Lebanon.
Politicians
and presidential aspirants aligned with the American-backed government were
quick to hail the opening, but not Secretary Rice. “There is a lot of talk
right now about compromise,” she told journalists in Turkey on Friday. “But
any candidate for president or any president needs to be committed” to
Washington's check-list for Lebanon.
Rice may
gamble that playing hardball to install an unyieldingly anti-Hizbollah,
anti-Syrian, and anti-Iranian figure in the presidential palace in Beirut is
worth the risk of Lebanon having no president on November 24, or two competing
ones, or civil war. In this respect, too, she would replicate Dulles’s
blinkered vision.
It was
Dulles who whipped traditional Arab leaders into an anti-Soviet alliance, the
Baghdad Pact—only to see the linchpin of that brittle coalition, the monarchy
in Iraq, swept away in a violent Arab nationalist revolution. Americans are
still paying the price for the distorted lenses of Dulles—and his heirs.
JeffreyLaurenti@MaximsNews.com
Labels: United
Nations, U.N., Jeffrey
Laurenti, Secretary
Rice, Lebanon,
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