Fisk on the Lebanon situation

As usual Fisk is interesting. Not much attention is being paid to Lebanon at the moment but the US supported government is still in danger of collapsing or civil conflict breaking out again.

US power games in the Middle East

As the West looks anxiously at Iraq and Afghanistan, dangerous cracks are opening up in Lebanon ­ and the White House is determined to prop up Fouad Siniora's government.

By Robert Fisk

03/19/07 "The Independent" -- -- The spring rain beat down like ball-bearings on the flat roof of General Claudio Graziano's office. Much of southern Lebanon looked like a sea of mud this week but all was optimism and light for the Italian commander of the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon, now 11,000 strong and still expecting South Korea to add to his remarkable 29-nation international army. He didn't recall how the French battalion almost shot down an Israeli jet last year - it was before his time - and he dismissed last month's border shoot-out between Israeli and Lebanese troops.

No specific threats had been directed at Unifil, the UN's man in southern Lebanon insisted - though I noticed he paused for several seconds before replying to my question - and his own force was now augmented by around 9,000 Lebanese troops patrolling on the Lebanese-Israeli frontier. There was some vague talk of "terrorist threats ... associated with al-Qa'ida" - UN generals rarely use the word 'terrorism', but then again Graziano is also a Nato general -- yet nothing hard. Yes, Lebanese army intelligence was keeping him up to date. So it must have come as a shock to the good general when the Lebanese Interior Minister Hassan Sabeh last week announced that a Lebanese Internal Security Force unit had arrested four Syrian members of a Palestinian "terrorist group" linked to al-Qa'ida and working for the Syrian intelligence services who were said to be responsible for leaving bombs in two Lebanese minibuses on 13 February, killing three civilians and wounding another 20.

Now it has to be said that there's a lot of scepticism about this story. Not because Syria has, inevitably, denied any connection to Lebanese bombings but because in a country that has never in 30 years solved a political murder, it's pretty remarkable that the local Lebanese constabulary can solve this one - and very conveniently so since Mr Sabeh's pro-American government continues to accuse Syria of all things bestial in the state of Lebanon. According to the Lebanese government - one of those anonymous sources so beloved of the press - the arrested men were also planning attacks on Unifil and had maps of the UN's military patrol routes in the south of the country. And a drive along the frontier with Israel shows that the UN is taking no chances. Miles of razor wire and 20ft concrete walls protect many of its units.

The Italians, like their French counterparts, have created little "green zones" - we Westerners seem to be doing that all over the Middle East - where carabinieri police officers want photo identity cards for even the humblest of reporters. These are combat units complete with their own armour and tanks although no-one could explain to me this week in what circumstances the tanks could possibly be used and I rather suspect they don't know. Surely they won't fire at the Israelis and - unless they want to go to war with the Hizbollah - I cannot imagine French Leclerc tanks are going to be shooting at the Middle East's most disciplined guerrilla fighters.

But Unifil, like it or not, is on only one side of the border, the Lebanese side, and despite their improving relations with the local Shia population -- the UN boys are going in for cash handouts to improve water supplies and roads, "quick impact projects" as they are called in the awful UN-speak of southern Lebanon - there are few Lebanese who do not see them as a buffer force to protect Israel. Last year's UN Resolution 1701 doesn't say this, but it does call for "the disarmament of all armed groups in Lebanon". This was a clause, of course, which met with the enthusiastic approval of the United States. For "armed groups", read Hizbollah.

The reality is that Washington is now much more deeply involved in Lebanon's affairs than most people, even the Lebanese, realise. Indeed there is a danger that - confronted by its disastrous "democratic" experiment in Iraq - the US government is now turning to Lebanon to prove its ability to spread democracy in the Middle East. Needless to say, the Americans and the British have been generous in supplying the Lebanese army with new equipment, jeeps and Humvees and anti-riot gear (to be used against who, I wonder?) and there was even a hastily denied report that Defence Minister Michel Murr would be picking up some missile-firing helicopters after his recent visit to Washington. Who, one also asks oneself, were these mythical missiles supposed to be fired at?

Every Lebanese potentate, it now seems, is heading for Washington. Walid Jumblatt, the wittiest, most nihilistic and in many ways the most intelligent, is also among the most infamous. He was deprived of his US visa until 2005 for uncharitably saying that he wished a mortar shell fired by Iraqi insurgents into the Baghdad "green zone" had killed then- Deputy Defence Secretary Paul Wolfowitz. But fear not. Now that poor old Lebanon is to become the latest star of US foreign policy, Jumblatt sailed into Washington for a 35-minute meeting with President George Bush - that's only 10 minutes less than Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert got - and has also met with Condi Rice, Dick Cheney, Defence Secretary Gates and the somewhat more disturbing Stephen Hadley, America's National Security Adviser. There are Lebanese admirers of Jumblatt who have been asking themselves if his recent tirades against Syria and the Lebanese government's Hizbollah opponents - not to mention his meetings in Washington - aren't risking another fresh grave in Lebanon's expanding cemeteries. Brave man Jumblatt is. Whether he's a wise man will be left to history.

But it is America's support for Fouad Siniora's government - Jumblatt is a foundation stone of this - that is worrying many Lebanese. With Shia out of the government of their own volition, Siniora's administration may well be, as the pro-Syrian President Emile Lahoud says, unconstitutional; and the sectarian nature of Lebanese politics came violently to life in January with stonings and shooting battles on the streets of Beirut.

Because Iraq and Afghanistan have captured the West's obsessive attention since then, however, there is a tendency to ignore the continuing, dangerous signs of confessionalism in Lebanon. In the largely Sunni Beirut suburb of Tarek al-Jdeide, several Shia families have left for unscheduled "holidays". Many Sunnis will no longer shop in the cheaper department stores in the largely Shia southern suburb of Dahiya. More seriously, the Lebanese security forces have been sent into the Armenian Christian town of Aanjar in the Bekaa Valley after a clump of leaflets was found at one end of the town calling on its inhabitants to "leave Muslim land". Needless to say, there have been no reports of this frightening development in the Lebanese press.

Aanjar was in fact given by the French to the Armenians after they were forced to leave the city of Alexandretta in 1939 - the French allowed a phoney referendum there to let the Turks take over in the vain hope that Ankara would fight Hitler - and Aanjar's citizens hold their title deeds. But receiving threats that they are going to be ethnically cleansed from their homes is - for Armenians - a terrible reminder of their genocide at the hands of the Turks in 1915. Lebanon likes its industrious, highly educated Armenians who are also represented in parliament. But that such hatred could now touch them is a distressing witness to the fragility of the Lebanese state.

True, Saad Hariri, the Sunni son of the murdered ex-prime minister Rafik Hariri, has been holding talks with the Shia speaker of parliament, Nabi Berri - the Malvolio of Lebanese politics - and the Saudis have been talking to the Iranians and the Syrians about a "solution" to the Lebanese crisis. Siniora - who was appointed to his job, not elected - seems quite prepared to broaden Shia representation in his cabinet but not at the cost of providing them with a veto over his decisions. One of these decisions is Siniora's insistence that the UN goes ahead with its international tribunal into Hariri's murder which the government - and the United States - believe was Syria's work.

Yet cracks are appearing. France now has no objections to direct talks with Damascus and Javier Solana has been to plead with President Bashar Assad for Syria's help in reaching "peace, stability and independence" for Lebanon. What price the UN tribunal if Syria agrees to help? Already Assad's ministers are saying that if Syrian citizens are found to be implicated in Hariri's murder, then they will have to be tried by a Syrian court - something which would not commend itself to the Lebanese or to the Americans.

Siniora, meanwhile, can now bask in the fact that after the US administration asked Congress to approve $770m for the Beirut government to meet its Paris III donor conference pledges, Lebanon will be the third largest recipient of US aid per capita of population. How much of this will have to be spent on the Lebanese military, we still don't know. Siniora, by the way, was also banned from the United States for giving a small sum to an Islamic charity during a visit several years ago to a Beirut gathering hosted by Sayed Hussein Fadlallah, whom the CIA tried to murder in 1985 for his supposed links to the Hizbollah. Now he is an American hero.

Which is all to Hizbollah's liking. However faithful its leader, Sayed Hassan Nasrallah, may be to Iran (or Syria), the more Siniora's majority government is seen to be propped up by America, the deeper the social and political divisions in Lebanon become. The "tink thank" lads, as I call them, can fantasise about America's opportunities. "International support for the Lebanese government will do a great deal for advancing the cause of democracy and helping avoid civil war," David Shenker of the "Washington Institute for Near East Policy" pronounced last week. "... the Bush administration has wisely determined not to abandon the Lebanese to the tender mercies of Iran and Syria, which represents an important development towards ensuring the government's success," he said.

I wouldn't be too sure about that. Wherever Washington has supported Middle East "democracy" recently - although it swiftly ditched Lebanon during its blood-soaked war last summer on the ridiculous assumption that by postponing a ceasefire the Israelis could crush the Hizbollah - its efforts have turned into a nightmare. Now we know that Israeli prime minister Olmert had already pre-planned a war with Lebanon if his soldiers were captured by the Hizbollah, Nasrallah is able to hold up his guerrilla army as defenders of Lebanon, rather than provokers of a conflict which cost at least 1,300 Lebanese civilian lives. And going all the way to Washington to save Lebanon is an odd way of behaving. The answers lie here, not in the United States. As a friend put it to me, "If I have a bad toothache, I don't book myself into a Boston clinic and fly across the Atlantic - I go to my Beirut dentist!"
© 2007 Independent News and Media Limited