Israel Matzav

Too late to save Lebanon?

Is it too late to save Lebanon's independence? Lee Smith says it might be, and that the Obama administration's fecklessness is to blame.

But the Obama administration may be too late to save an independent Lebanon. Hariri, the Lebanese Sunni leader, has shown by his journey to the citadel of Shia power that if you want to contest the fate of Lebanon, as with so much else in the Middle East these days, the doors to knock on are in Tehran.

This is an unhappy turn of events for Lebanon, which just celebrated the 67th anniversary of its independence. President Obama marked the day with a cursory promise to protect that independence, even as his policy ideas have undermined that goal since the earliest days of his candidacy. Unlike Bush, we were told, Obama would reach out to Syria and find common ground. After all, as the senator from Illinois explained on the campaign trail, talking to your enemies is not a reward for them. Maybe not in theory, but in practice, talking to Damascus meant selling out the anti-Syrian politicians of Lebanon’s Cedar Revolution.

Fearing that Washington was about to sacrifice its Lebanon policy in the name of entente with Syria, as it had done throughout the 1990s, the one-time pillar of Lebanon’s pro-democracy March 14 movement, Walid Jumblatt, changed sides, traveling to Damascus to kiss the ring of Bashar al-Assad. Perhaps more important, Saudi Arabia, patron of Lebanon’s Sunni community, actually chose friendship with Syria over its Lebanese partners.

Oddly enough, after all of this jockeying for Syrian favor, Damascus turns out to be a distraction. “Hariri’s trip highlights the fact that Damascus is no longer a central actor,” says Tony Badran, research fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. “The Syria-Saudi initiative is a sideshow, and the Iranians have been saying this for a while: The Saudis have to negotiate with [Tehran], but the Saudis don’t want to consecrate this fact.”

Iran is now the power on the ground in Lebanon, via Hezbollah’s arms. Its general secretary, Hassan Nasrallah has renewed his warning that Hezbollah will cut off the hands of anyone who tries to touch the weapons of the “resistance,” in part no doubt to scare off the Hariri assassination tribunal from issuing indictments of Hezbollah members. In the event of such indictments, the Party of God’s reputation would suffer another blow in the court of Arab opinion for murdering a Sunni leader.

The Obama administration has already shown that it cannot negotiate with Iran. And the odds of it taking any kind of military action to save Lebanon are somewhere between slim and none.

What could go wrong?

Read the whole thing.

The picture at the top is Beirut Airport on fire in 2006.

Labels: Hezbullah, Iran, Saad Hariri

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 2:42 PM