In its precarious position in the middle of the great upheaval of the Middle East, Lebanon faces four serious threats.
(1) ISIS, ubiquitous and brutal, on its eastern border and infiltrating its cities. The Lebanese Army has already faced it. Soldiers have been captured, some have been beheaded. To make this really complicated, ISIS is a Sunni movement, and the majority Muslim community in Lebanon is Sunni. As many as 400 people missing from northern Lebanon are suspected to have joined ISIS or a similar extremist group.
Meanwhile Lebanese Shiite and their milita Hizballah are pro-Syrian and supported by Iran. They fight ISIS, boasting daily of their exploits, claiming to defend Lebanon.
For Lebanon this threat is a two-edged sword, because the warring factions throughout the area are not lined up neatly into friends and foes. ISIS has participated in the revolution against the Assad regime in Syria, which is already an enemy of the Lebanese government. The ISIS militants on Lebanon’s border are in Syrian territory. Fighting them appears to help Assad.
ISIS will be there a long time. Lebanon is patient.
(2) Israel, at Lebanon’s southern border. Israel can always find a reason to invade: something that happened, something that didn’t happen, something that was said. The last time in 2006, she faced international condemnation afterwards because such a high percentage of Lebanese casualties were civilians. So the other day Israeli military officials made a public announcement—“next time” they invade they will evacuate a million Lebanese, giving them a day’s warning to flee. (in case we needed a heads-up—not “if” but “next time”)
Can you imagine this? Another million people with no shelter flooding into cities already inundated with refugees from Syria and Iraq.
Hizballah, which is good with rhetoric as well as with weapons, needed only a few hours to respond that when the day comes Hizballah will evacuate a million Israelis from their homes. This sounds to me like the very excuse Israel needs to attack and do it while Hizballah is busy on another front.
At the same time the talk all works as a smokescreen, obscuring the fact that Israel is still occupying parts of southern Lebanon from which it has not withdrawn since 1982. A couple of days ago my news from Lebanon included pictures of a road they have built in it, illegally of course, and the barbed wire they have stretched. Local citizens went out and erected a Lebanese flag. The Israelis took it down.
(3) Interference from other powers. Aggressive interference has always been part of the Lebanese experience. Its geography, its diversity, its potential all make it of great concern to other countries. Everybody cares, everybody wants an influence. This coin has another side: dependence on others is always a part of the small country syndrome; there is a genuine need for alliances with bigger, stronger governments. What makes this so dangerous in Lebanon is the way its diversity attracts conflicting elements. Saudi Arabia courts the Sunnis; Iran naturally sides with the Shiites; America relates well to the Christians; France has historic ties. What begins as support from outside becomes divisive inside.
Meanwhile, two major powers, Saudi and Iran, now battle for control of the whole Middle East. They fight with ideology. They fight with money, often doing great good with it, sometimes just buying favor. They take sides, draw lines, make promises, create fear, sometimes even assassinate opposition. In Lebanon they deliberately divide one community from another.
(4) Internal weakness.
Something is wrong in Lebanon itself. Lebanon is supposed to have a president. The president is supposed to be a Christian, elected by the Parliament. For more than a year the office has been vacant. The previous president’s term expired, and the Parliament failed to elect a successor.
Two men want to be president, and they have been enemies for maybe 30 years. They once led their militias in bloody conflict against one another.
Iran openly backs one of those candidates, Saudi the other. The Parliamentarians are divided. One of the candidates controls a bloc of votes and forbids his bloc from attending meetings so that there will be no quorum, whenever he fears he is going to lose. Recently an Iranian official made a pronouncement that it was this candidate or no one. Anyone unwilling to vote for him just did not want a solution to the problem.
The situation is difficult, of course, for an American to understand. Even David Hale, our ambassador to Lebanon, told some Lebanese leaders a few weeks ago—Ignore Saudi, ignore Iran, ignore Russia and France and the U.S. and just elect a president. But somehow they can’t.
Of the four threats hanging over Lebanon, the latter seems to me the most serious.
As a consequence of this stalemate, the only M.E. country that is able to have a Christian president has no president, and this has paralyzed the government in those functions assigned to the president. It has weakened Christian influence in the entire Middle East as well as made Lebanon more vulnerable to spillover from surrounding civil wars.
The many-sided blame game is Lebanese as well as foreign. The Sunnis and most Christian leaders blame Hizballah; Hizballah blames the Future Movement and its Sunni leader Saad Hariri; the Druze leader, Walid Jumblatt apparently sees that the initiative belongs to the Christians. He urges supporters of both candidates to overcome their selfishness for the sake of the country. He asks them not to miss the historic opportunity to back away from the nominees and choose a centrist president.
As an outsider looking in, I tend to agree with Jumblatt. I can despise or ridicule the men at the center of the situation, but I have to see that the problem is bigger than these two men. Where are the other men who could step into this situation and do something drastic? Why should Lebanon be stuck with the same old worn out personalities, when Lebanon is full of men, Christian men, with brains and creativity and skills and charm? Why is the community unable to choose one of them and push him forward?
Has the whole way of governing become unworkable? If so, why doesn’t someone name the issue and then do something?
Or is there just a leadership crisis in the Christian community? The answer seems to be yes, though a reason for such a crisis is hard to produce. My inability to explain why a vacuum exists does not make the truth go away, but it does have a hopeful meaning. The people of Lebanon are too strong and resourceful to let this continue. I believe in the Lebanese and expect them to show up and take charge of their destiny.
The departing British ambassador, Tom Fletcher, said what I’m thinking and said it best: “I have often spoken about a vision of Lebanon 2020, the Lebanon you are building. I predict that people will look back in 2020 and ask themselves how it was possible for Lebanon to have come through these years of regional meltdown. The answer will be clear: never underestimate the resilience of the Lebanese people.”