Hirst - Beware of small states : Lebanon, battleground of the Middle East

Table of Contents

Oil and Public Opinion in the Middle East
Sadat
The Gun and the Olive Branch

For Ted and Mimi

The people are all charming to me. They are not really Eastern, or anything: just a poor fringe of a people between Islam and the sea, doomed to be pawns in whatever politics are played here ... I havent yet come across one spark of national feeling: it is all sects and hatreds and religions. I read the Maronite mass book the other day, and felt the prayer to be saved from bloodshed take on a particular meaning in this country of massacres. And it is a grand country, too.

Freya Stark, Letters from Syria (John Murray London, 1942) p. 59

Among those who helped me with this book, I would particularly like to thank the Institute for Palestine Studies, its staff and library, in Beirut, and two other excellent institutions: the London-based Middle East Mirror, source of many of the newspaper quotations in Arabic, Farsi and Hebrew, and the Middle East Reporter, Beirut. In addition I owe a very special debt to Karsten Tveit, and Peter Scott-Hansen, who translated Tveits book Nederlag: Israels Krig i Libanon, from the Norwegian on my behalf.

Lebanon, a mountainous country on the Eastern Mediterranean no bigger than Wales or the American state of Connecticut, has long attracted an international attention disproportionate to its size and, one might at first think, its importance. The attention has generally come in dramatic spasms provoked by crises apt to subside as quickly as they erupt, but whose underlying causes never go away. Rarely, however, did it reach such a pitch of sustained intensity as during the event that inspired the writing of this history those thirty-three days in July and August 2006, which Arabs have called the Sixth [Arab-Israeli] War. And rarely have pundits and partisans ascribed such great, such well-nigh cosmic significance to a war that was limited in scope and, in any immediate military sense at least, inconclusive in its outcome.

On the one hand, so passionate a devotee of Israel as the controversial American celebrity lawyer Alan Dershowitz could say that it was the first major battle of a third world war between terrorist armies and democracies, the first instance since the Holocaust in which Jews, as Jews, are targeted by an international organization that seeks recognition as a legitimate power, by Islamic extremists who want to liberate all Islamic land, which includes all of Israel proper, including Tel Aviv, from the crusaders. On the other, the Islamic Republic of Iran, Dershowitzs polar opposite and chief sponsor of Hizbullah, found it richly meaningful too. Those people and groups, said the newspaper Kayhan, who are trying to scare Tehran out of its support for the Lebanese people, Hizbullah and Hamas, are like a little kid who is trying to create a big wave in the ocean by throwing a small stone into it. The evil triangle of America, Israel and reactionary Arabs has been defeated in the four weeks since the crisis began, and this triangle will cease to exist in the Middle East that lies ahead.

Pronouncements of the kind did at least, in their very grandiloquence, serve to dramatize what had long established itself as Lebanons pre-eminent role in the world. Beware of small states, wrote Mikhail Bakunin, the Russian anarchist, to a friend in 1870. What he meant, in that era of European war and geopolitical upheaval, was not only that such diminutive polities were peculiarly vulnerable to the machinations of greater ones, but that they were a source of trouble for their tormentors too. He had in mind Belgium, for example, or Latvia, trapped on the Baltic between the rival ambitions of Czarist Russia and a Germany undergoing its unification and aggrandizement at the hand of Prussia and its Iron Chancellor, Otto von Bismarck. Lebanon, by this geopolitical criterion, undoubtedly qualifies as the small state of the Middle East. Not for nothing have its ancient, biblical name, and that of its capital, Beirut, now entered the worlds political vocabulary as bywords for a certain type of modern conflict. Not for nothing has the term libanisation (Lebanonization) become an official part of the French language, defined in the latest editions of Larousse as a process of fragmentation of a state, as a result of confrontation between diverse communities, and tending to replace balkanisation.

But it is not simply Lebanons small size, sensitive location between East and West, or the special interest European powers have always taken in this largely Christian country, which accounts for its susceptibility to outside interference. It is, above all, its unique internal composition. For as an amalgam of religious communities and their myriad sub-divisions, with a constitutional and political order to match, Lebanon is the sectarian state par excellence. The condition from which it suffers is chronic; or, at the very least, it is surely bound to endure so long as the whole Middle East also remains what it is: the most endemically unstable region in the world. Lebanon, it seems, was almost designed to be the everlasting battleground for others political, strategic and ideological conflicts, conflicts which sometimes escalate into their proxy wars. These others are first and foremost, of course, the larger states of the region. But they are also America, Europe, Russia, or any great power, actual or aspiring, that takes an interest in the regions affairs. And great powers always have taken such an interest, on account of its importance, historically, as a hub of international politics, and, in recent times, as the repository of vast reserves of oil, life-blood of the modern world, and the locus of its longest-running, most implacable and dangerous conflict, the struggle between Arab and Jew. If the Middle East habitually interferes in Lebanons affairs, the outside world habitually does so in those of the Middle East.

Nor is it just states, and their official agencies, to whose designs, public or clandestine, Lebanon is uniquely exposed. It is no less exposed, at the popular level, to every new idea or ideology, every religious, political or cultural current that arises and spreads across the region. That is because it is, and always has been, a more open, liberal and democratic society than any of its Arab neighbours. In this respect, its vulnerability to domestic dissension, its chief flaw, has become, as it were, its chief of virtues. For the sectarian state just could not function at all unless its constituent parts agreed, at least in principle, that respecting the rights, interests and sensibilities of each was indispensable to the welfare of all. That amounted to a built-in prophylactic against the dictatorship of one group, usually ethnic or sectarian, over others that has blighted the rest of the Arab world.