A New Lebanon? A Brief Geostrategic Overview
Levant Update 1
June 2008
By: Antony T. Sullivan
President, Near East Support Services
After 18 months, Lebanon has a new President. A new government is now beginning to function. However, large threats have not been exorcised, most especially in the realms of possible invasion and domestic civil war. For more on that larger reality, see Antony T. Sullivan, "Wars and Rumors of War: The Levantine Tinderbox," Middle East Policy, Spring, 2008.
For the near term, the winners from the May confrontation in Beirut are clearly Hizbullah and Iran. The March 14th movement suffered a major setback as a result of Prime Minister Fouad Siniora's challenge to Hizbullah, as did such supporters of the Siniora regime as the United States and Saudi Arabia. When push came to shove, Siniora and Sa'ad al-Hariri came to understand that they could not count on U.S. intervention on their behalf.
However, the present correlation of forces inside Lebanon may not outlast September, when Israel may well decide that Hizbullah veto power in Beirut constitutes precisely the sort of provocation that cannot be tolerated.
The opposition now has veto power in the Lebanese cabinet. It has eleven members in the thirty-member cabinet, i.e. one third plus one. In the future, Shiites will be able to elect their two deputies from Beirut without being under the Umbrella of Sa'ad al-Hariri. Shiite areas in West Beirut have been designated a separate electoral district. Hizbullah has been permitted to retain its arms. Hizbullah got what it wanted after showing its muscle, and regards this outcome as a major victory.
A basic rule of thumb is to avoid confrontations that one cannot win. One question, therefore, is why acting Lebanese Prime Minister Fouad Siniora, a sane man, chose to dismiss Wafic Choucair, the Shiite security chief at the Beirut International Airport, and to propose taxation of Hizbullah's vast landline communication network. Predictably, Hizbullah understood Siniora's actions to be a declaration of war. Why do sensible people do foolish things, things which in this case resulted in Hizbullah extracting precisely the veto power that it had long sought?
Many explanations for Siniora's actions have been offered. But not the simplest, and perhaps most likely one.
A highly credible source in the Middle East, who has personally known Prime Minister Siniora for a quarter century, offers an interesting explanation for Siniora's gamble.
That source writes: "The fateful decision to move against Hizbullah…was not the product of a grand plan to corner Hizbullah and create the conditions for an Israeli invasion. Israel will create its own preconditions for its rematch with Hizbullah. Siniora was simply behaving as an accountant. Over the past years, he has been innovative in generating revenues for the government by raising new taxes. Some bureaucrats told him that the Hizbullah landline communication network had major commercial potential because the Hizbullah system is able to accommodate about one million telephone lines. Siniora did not want to miss the chance for generating additional revenues. This was the motivation for Siniora's behavior: it was not at all ideologically driven. This is how Siniora operates. He usually pays far too much attention to details, and fails to think beyond them."
Today, President Suleiman's new government has at least one significant center of power that has the capability to strike an important blow against Hizbullah, a blow that Syria, if not Iran, may not find entirely displeasing.
That power center is the Internal Security Forces (ISF). The ISF is heavily pro al-Hariri and may be released soon to go after Hizbullah's significant opium and hashish agriculture in the northern Bekaa Valley. ISF action against the Hizbullah narcotics industry does not require a cabinet decision and is therefore not subject to the new Hizbullah veto power. Hizbullah allegedly makes at least $500 million every year from exporting narcotics. Without that source of income Hizbullah would be significantly weakened. Moreover, widespread negative reaction to Hizbullah's takeover of West Beirut in May might persuade it, despite any new "provocation," not to take up arms against other Lebanese again.
At the same time, the Lebanese government itself would be unlikely to inherit the poppy fields. Who would? Syria, of course, which has significant experience itself in the narcotics industry. In a sense, ISF action would likely result only in the exchange of one narcotics master for another. But since Syria is now seriously attempting to make peace with Israel, as well as to make money and to exert renewed political influence in Lebanon, the clipping of Hizbullah's wings might well be an action that would cause little ire in Damascus. If the non-Shiite community in Lebanon were asked to choose, it would undoubtedly choose domination by Damascus rather than by Teheran.
Even leaving Israel aside, enduring peace is not likely in Lebanon soon. Hizbullah's demonstration in May of the weakness of the Sunni community and the ineffectiveness of the Lebanese army is likely to push more young Sunnis in the direction of al Qaa'ida. Any new military confrontation between the Lebanese government and Hizbullah is likely to be far bloodier than the last. The al-Hariri name may already have lost much of its magic.
Contrary to the impressions of some, al-Qaa'ida and other Jihadist groups do have a significant presence in Lebanon. These groups include Fatah al Islam of Nahr al Bared refugee camp fame, Jund al-Shaam, and Asbat al-Ansar. All of these groups are located in Palestinian refugee camps, which the Lebanese army is legally precluded from entering. However, all are penetrated by various Arab intelligence services. The good news is that these groups are forever required to protect their flanks from their handlers, and do not enjoy the independence of action of al-Qaa'ida in Iraq.
For some time, Syria has been directing some Jihadists into Lebanon, rather than into Iraq. Now, Damascus appears to be attempting to foster a new Sunni Jihadism in Lebanon as a response to Hizbullah's recent humiliation of the Sunni community. Of course, to the extent that a new Sunni Jihadism takes root, the traditional moderate Sunni community centered in West Beirut will be discredited. To make a full comeback in Lebanon, and to satisfy Israel's certain price for any peace agreement, Syria will need Sunni muscle to deploy against Hizbullah in the coming Syrian-Hizbullah confrontation. Of course, Syria is playing a dangerous game here, since it is reviving a fundamentalist movement that posed a serious threat to the al-Asad regime some 30 years ago.
Currently, Hizbullah needs to be very concerned about waning Syrian support. The ebb tide of Syrian backing was perhaps first revealed by the February assassination in Damascus of Imad Mughniyyah, Hizbullah's military field commander. Not coincidentally, that was exactly the time when the pace of Syrian-Israeli peace negotiations was beginning to pick up. Might Mughniyyah's assassination have been a down payment by Syria to Israel to demonstrate its seriousness about peace?
In sum, the great game in Lebanon has now entered a new stage. None of the underlying geopolitical realities in Lebanon or elsewhere in the region have fundamentally changed. The unending geopolitical saga in the Levant continues.
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