Beware of Small States

Clean Break was a seminal document, an early authoritative expression of ideas and prescriptions - extreme, violent, simplistic and utterly partisan - originally intended for the Israeli leadership but eventually emerging as ‘a kind of US-Israeli neoconservative manifesto’. ² At the time, the neoconservatives were out of office. Not since President Reagan, and their enthusiastic backing for Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon, had they commanded serious influence from within the corridors of power. Ultimately disappointed by him, whom they considered too moderate, as well as by his two successors, they now constituted a very influential, ambitious, militant pressure group,³ mostly denizens of a plethora of interlocking, pro-Israeli Washington think tanks, impatiently awaiting the champion through whom they could put such ideas into effect. They found him in President George Bush; they entered his Administration en masse, some of them in positions of great power. But it was only when bin Laden’s nineteen kamikazes steered three of their hijacked aircraft into the Twin Towers and the Pentagon that they truly came into their own; only then that Bush, who, in his electoral campaign, had pledged himself to a ‘humble’ foreign policy imbued with the ‘modesty of true strength‘, became a convert to their millenarian vision, and the belligerence that came with it. In their speedy and well-orchestrated reaction to what they saw as the most providential of national emergencies,⁴ the neoconservatives succeeded in ‘hijacking’ the foreign policy of the world’s only superpower ; in persuading its leader to endorse a pre-existing plan of action which had little to do with the nature of the emergency itself, with bin Laden and al-Qaeda, but everything to do with their extravagant project for a future Middle East.⁵ It was quite as much an Israeli as an American one. The Jerusalem Post described its authors as ‘Arik’s [Sharon] American front‘,⁶ and a high American official told the Washington Post that the ‘Likudniks are really in charge now’.⁷ Bush himself was said to be ‘mesmerized’ by Sharon.⁸ As for the degree of influence, steadily rising from administration to administration, which the Israeli protégé had now attained over its American patron, this - wrote scholar Anatole Lieven - was no longer ‘a case of the tail wagging the dog‘, but of ‘the tail wagging the unfortunate dog around the room and banging its head against the ceiling’.⁹

What the Americans and Israelis envisaged was a transformation - strategic, political, economic, religious, cultural - of the entire Middle East. In place of tyranny, extremism, social oppression, corruption and economic stagnation - basic maladies which, in their view, had thrown up 9/11 and turned the region into a menace both to itself and the world - would come freedom and democracy, human rights, the rule of law, pluralism and market capitalism. Of key importance was the notion that since - or so they argued - democracies tend by nature to be more peace-loving and good-neighbourly than despotisms, democratization would contribute mightily to that abiding American quest in the region, an Arab-Israeli peace settlement.¹⁰

These blessings of Western civilization were, however, to be delivered to the people of the region by force. In a departure from the principles of ‘containment’ and ‘deterrence’ which, officially at least, had guided US defence and security policies for the past half-century, the neo-conservatives adopted ‘pre-emption’ instead. Andrew Bacevitch, a professor of international relations, described the National Security Strategy of 2002, in which these principles were formally enshrined, as a ‘fusion of breathtaking utopianism with barely disguised Machtpolitik. ... the product of an unlikely collaboration between Woodrow Wilson and the elder Field Marshal von Moltke’.¹¹ Armed with their radical new doctrine, they would forestall any emergent, potential, or merely hypothetical threat to the US or its allies long before it had a chance to become a real and imminent one; they would bring about ‘regime change’ in the Middle Eastern ‘rogue states’ which, in America’s judgement, posed such threats to Israel or itself. It all bore an obvious resemblance, writ large, to the long-established Israeli theory - and practice - of the ‘chosen war‘, of military force in the service of strategic and political goals. And it was clear: the chief of these goals, that elusive Arab-Israeli settlement, was to be achieved less through democracy - that was just an idealistic, one might almost say ‘missionary’, window-dressing - than through a far greater level of external coercion than had ever been brought to bear before. Essentially the Likudnik version of a Middle Eastern ‘peace’, it would constitute a drastic regression from the two-state solution which, during decades of international diplomacy, the world, the US included, had come to regard as a reasonable and practicable one.

As Clean Break intimated, the great transformation was to begin with ‘regime change’ in Baghdad. Within hours of 9/11 Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld - though not himself a neoconservative - was ordering his staff to look for ‘things related and not’ that could furnish ‘good enough’ reasons to ‘hit S.H. [ Saddam Hussein] at the same time [as] UBL [Osama bin Laden]’.¹² His deputy, Paul Wolfowitz - who was a neoconservative - went so far as to suggest that America should first attack Iraq, not Afghanistan, bin Laden’s sanctuary, because Iraq was ‘doable’ where Afghanistan was ‘uncertain’.¹³ Richard Clarke, the official in charge of counter-terrorism, protested that ‘for us to go bombing Iraq in response would be like invading Mexico after the Japanese attacked us at Pearl Harbor’.¹⁴

RIDDING THE WORLD OF EVIL¹⁵

In the event, the US did first attack Afghanistan, overthrowing the Taliban, but failing to capture bin Laden. However, its attention quickly reverted to Saddam Hussein. And the neoconservatives lost no time in developing a rationale for attacking their principal villain. This grew out of the deliberate elasticity of the global ‘war on terror’ which Bush now launched. Terrorism was the new form of ‘evil’. America had the ‘responsibility to rid the world of evil’. Iraq was a member of the ‘axis of evil’, along with Iran, North Korea and ‘other states like these and their terrorist allies’. It was ‘evil’ that linked Saddam to al-Qaeda and the whole shadowy realm of ‘Islamic terror’. More particularly, the neoconservatives injected into Bush’s discourse a commitment to target not just the terrorists but ‘those who harbour[ed] them’. Saddam - most brutal of Arab despots and arch-practitioner of terrorism though he was - actually had nothing to do with al-Qaeda and 9/11. But the neo-conservatives were extraordinarily successful in persuading the American public that he did, and that, in consequence, ‘war on terror’ and war on Iraq were joined at the hip. They set up their own ad hoc secret agencies, within the Administration, whose business was to prove by any means possible this Iraq/al-Qaeda connection which the regular intelligence community could not, as well as to conjure up that other non-existent casus belli, the weapons of mass destruction capable of inflicting ‘massive and sudden horror’ on the US, which Saddam was supposedly still developing. In Israel, Sharon set up a similar unit that fed fake intelligence to the American ones.¹⁶ Indeed, say professors John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt in their ground-breaking study of ‘the Lobby’, were it not for Israel and the ‘friends of Israel’ in the US there would probably have been no invasion of Iraq at all. The vigorous fashion in which these confederates agitated for it was, however, a taboo subject in US political discourse, ‘the proverbial elephant in the room’ which ‘everybody sees‘, but - for fear of being branded anti-Semitic - ‘no one mentions’.¹⁷

On 17 March 2003 US and British forces invaded Iraq. It was not far from the ‘cakewalk’ that leading neoconservative and Pentagon insider, Kenneth Adelman, had famously predicted.¹⁸ Within three weeks the Americans were in Baghdad; on 9 April, with help from the Marines, an exultant throng toppled the statue of Saddam Hussein in Ferdus Square; the Baathist tyranny was no more. But for the neoconservatives this was only the first, albeit ‘seismic,’ step¹⁹ in the ‘reshaping’ of the whole region. For the ultimate possible dimensions of their grand design were truly extraordinary. They were all set forth, in their most comprehensive, well-nigh megalomaniac form, by Norman Podhoretz, the movement’s veteran intellectual luminary, in the September 2002 issue of his magazine Commentary. Changes of regime, he proclaimed, were ‘the sine qua non throughout the region’. And those that ‘richly deserve [d] to be overthrown and replaced [were] not confined’ to the two officially designated members of the ‘axis of evil’. ‘At a minimum the axis should extend to Syria and Lebanon and Libya, as well as “friends” of America like the Saudi royal family and Egypt’s Husni Mubarak, along with the Palestinian Authority, whether headed by Arafat or one of his henchmen.’ Such an all-encompassing purge might ‘clear a path to the long-overdue reform and modernization of Islam’. It was a formidable task, he conceded, but an achievable one, ‘provided that America has the will to fight World War IV - the war against militant Islam - to a successful conclusion, and provided that we then have the stomach to impose a new political culture on the defeated parties’.

Yasser Arafat and his Palestinian Authority (PA) fell into a category of their own. The PLO leader - mainstay of the American-led ‘peace process’, principal architect of the Oslo accord, Nobel prize winner, habitué of the White House, harsh critic of Iran and chastiser of its Hamas protégé - had long been an official, if never very trusted, ‘friend’. But with the collapse of the 2000 Camp David summit, which America and Israel blamed entirely on him, and the outbreak of the second Intifada, described as his handiwork too,²² the tide was turning strongly against him. And 9/11 was Sharon’s God-given chance to portray his brutal pacification of a subject people as an integral part of America’s global ‘war on terror’, with Arafat as ‘our bin Laden’.²³ Secretary of State Colin Powell and the more balanced and reasonable, but weaker, wing of the Administration now and then balked at this highly tendentious definition of a popular uprising and the excesses of repression which it justified. Morality aside, the Arab indignation that Israeli actions engendered were obstructing Bush’s already uphill struggle to build an Arab coalition in favour of war on Iraq. But then came the ‘Karine-A affair’, the alleged, Hizbullah-assisted shipment of arms to Arafat and his Palestinian Authority. Many, even in the Administration itself, suspected that it was all a very timely Israeli hoax.²⁴ Nevertheless, on the strength of it, Bush now anathematized Arafat in person; his ‘ordering weapons that were intercepted on a boat [was] not part of fighting terror; it [was] enhancing terror’.²⁵ Thereafter, every time Powell and his ‘moderates’ sought to curb Sharon’s excesses they came under concerted public attack from Israel, the neo-conservatives, ‘the Lobby’ and its new-found friends - till recently condemned as anti-Semites - of the Evangelical Christian ‘right’;²⁶ always they - and on one occasion Bush himself - had to beat a humiliating retreat.

On this, as so much else, Colin Powell and the State Department favoured a much less belligerent approach; they drew up a plan under which, in return for ending its support for Hizbullah, Hamas and Islamic Jihad, the US would offer Iran a new, constructive and long-term strategic relationship. The weaker, ‘reformist’ wing of the Islamic regime, centred round President Khatami, was more than interested and, with the crucial backing of the Wali, Ayatollah Khamenei, Iranian diplomacy offered, and handsomely delivered, what the Americans themselves acknowledged to have been indispensable assistance in the establishing of the post-Taliban new order in Afghanistan.

But the Israelis were so incensed at these efforts to win Iranian cooperation that one of their leading strategists, Moshe Sneh, said that by ‘courting the terrorists in Tehran’ the US and Britain were ‘stabbing Israel in the back‘,²⁹ while in Washington forty-one leading neo-conservatives, including Pentagon insider Richard Perle, delivered a virtual ultimatum to President Bush: target Hizbullah as well as al-Qaeda, summon Iran and Syria to ‘immediately cease all military, financial and political support’ for the organization, and, if they demur, ‘consider appropriate measures of retaliation’ against them.³⁰ Thereafter the neoconservatives sabotaged every attempt at American-Iranian détente. Repeatedly snubbed, the ‘reformist’ camp repeatedly tried again, till finally, after the fall of Iraq, they came forward with an ‘offer that America couldn’t refuse’, but, to disbelief in the Powell camp, peremptorily did. It had been fear that induced Khamenei and his clerical hierarchy to go along with this ‘stunning’ initiative, fear of the strategic encirclement which, with American forces already installed in the Gulf, Afghanistan and Central Asia, the establishment of an American client regime in Baghdad would complete.³¹ The offer put just about everything on the table, including the disarming of Hizbullah and its transformation into a purely political party, an end to Iran’s support for Hamas and Islamic Jihad and its opposition to the Middle East ‘peace process’, and the opening up of its nuclear programme to intrusive international inspection. Unfortunately for the mullahs, however, their moment of grave existential anxiety coincided with the Bush Administration’s moment of glory, and - for the president - of such personal hubris that he staged a triumphal landing, all got up in fighter-pilot gear, aboard the aircraft-carrier Abraham Lincoln in order to proclaim ‘Mission Accomplished’ and the end of ‘major combat operations’ in Iraq. It was not surprising that in such an atmosphere the neoconservatives, interpreting the offer as a mark of desperation, opposed any deal, however advantageous, on the ground that the US could eventually get everything it wanted by engineering ‘regime change’ in Tehran - military planning for which was already under way. Vice President Cheney and Defense Secretary Rumsfeld’s words on the subject were final: ‘We don’t speak to evil.’³²

It was a similar story with Syria. In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, it had, like Iran, been very helpful to the US, furnishing valuable intelligence about al-Qaeda. Powell and the State Department, even Bush himself, had openly appreciated it.³³ But not the neoconservatives. For them, Syria had always been the most intransigent and extreme of Israel’s neighbours, its Baathist regime a last bastion of diehard, secular Arab nationalism that was, in its way, as inimical to Zionism as Iran and the new-wave Islamists were in theirs. Syria had been manifestly shaken by the swift collapse of its Baathist counterpart in Iraq, and neither the neoconservatives nor their Israeli confederates disguised their hopes and expectations of achieving a similar outcome in Damascus. ‘War on Iraq’, said the Israeli ambassador to the US, was ‘not enough’; ‘regime change’ in Syria and Iran must come next. The US, said Sharon, should ‘disarm’ Syria, or Israel would ‘deal with’ this matter itself.³⁴ In Washington, the leading neoconservative Frank Gaffney wrote in the Washington Times that the US ‘should use whatever techniques are necessary - including military force - to effect behavior modification and/or regime change in Damascus’.³⁵ In October 2003, Sharon ordered the first Israeli air-raid on Syrian territory in nearly thirty years, hitting a deserted Palestinian training camp, ostensibly in retaliation for a suicide bombing in Israel and what he claimed was Syria’s role in sponsoring it. Bush called this gross provocation an act of ‘self-defence’. Two months later it was reported - shades of Clean Break- that Rumsfeld was considering an attack, with air strikes and ‘special forces snatch squads’, on Hizbullah targets in the Beqa’a Valley, with the object of drawing Syria into a conflict that would lead to the downfall of the Asad regime.³⁶

It very much looked, therefore, as if, instead of just waiting for the other dominos to fall of their own accord, the US and Israel were going to expedite the process by force. If they actually had done that, it would, to begin with at least, have been largely hubris that inspired it. But before very long the motivation would have been heavily inter-fused with something quite otherwise: the incipient fear of failure. Everything is interconnected in the Middle East. So the moment the US began to falter in Iraq, intended fulcrum of the neoconservative grand design, would have been the moment it began to falter in the region as a whole - and the region itself to strike back, inside Iraq, against its neo-imperial tormentor.

Sure enough, within a few short months America was thus faltering; the proud practitioners of ‘shock and awe’ - of Blitzkrieg in its ultra-modern form - simply could not master the more prosaic business of occupying, controlling, administering and reconstructing this very important Arab country, this latest addition to the American imperium that was also supposed to serve as a model of American ‘values’, of freedom and democracy, for all its brethren. For this there were local reasons - the Iraqis’ resistance, their often atrocious violence, the Americans’ arrogance and ineptitude - in plenty. But external actors could intensify it. Iran and Syria, threatened with the full-scale Iraqi treatment themselves, were naturally, if discreetly, the readiest to do so. At various stages, Syria openly helped, encouraged, turned a blind eye to, or simply could not stop, the volunteers who crossed its territory in search of jihad and martyrdom against the infidel invader, making Iraq, which was supposed to have become the bane of Islamist terror, into an ideal new front for the practice of it. ‘The body count of US soldiers‘, said a Western diplomat in Damascus, ‘[became] the most accurate barometer of Syria’s morale.’³⁷

In Iran, the arch-conservative zealots, profiting from America’s contemptuous spurning of their ‘reformist’ rivals, could only rejoice. Their idol, Khomeini, had fought, and lost, a gruelling, eight-year war to turn Saddam’s Iraq into the world’s second Islamic republic. Now - with the destruction of its Sunni minority rule and the political emancipation of the long-oppressed Shiite majority - the Great Satan itself had furnished Khomeini’s heirs with a unique opportunity to try again, or at least to secure for themselves that ascendancy in Iraq, stepping stone to vastly increased influence in the region as a whole, which the US, Israel and ‘moderate’ pro-Western, Sunni Arab states were so very anxious to deny it. To be sure, the Islamic Republic still worried about American strategic encirclement. But it was emboldened by it too. For even if it was more vulnerable, so - over-extended and already floundering - was the invader. ‘US forces [in Iraq]’, exulted Revolutionary Guards commander Ali Shamkani, ‘won’t be an element of strength, but our hostage.’ In the event, the US and Israel blustered, threatened, or sought to undermine from within, but they neither would, could nor dared to attack head-on. There was, however, to be a war - the war which, in July and August 2006, pitted Israel against Hizbullah. Although Hizbullah was a formidable adversary in its own right, this was to be very much a proxy war as well; for rather than Iran or Syria, state components of the Islamo-nationalist camp, Americans and Israelis decided to take on - and destroy - a lesser target, its principal non-state actor, instead. In fact, it was to be the first such large-scale military encounter since Israel had come into being in which no Arab state took part. But it became such a very considerable, and deeply significant, affray that the Arabs were quickly to dub it the Sixth (Arab-Israeli) War.

Of course, the US had its own motives for turning on Hizbullah, including the 1983 truck-bombing that killed 241 Marines at Beirut airport.⁴² Imad Mughniyah, its presumed organizer, was one of three Hizbullah members who now figured prominently on America’s refurbished list of ‘most wanted’ men. Yet some Americans were prepared to argue that this butchery of sleeping men, and the bombing of the US embassy that preceded it, had been more Iranian than Hizbullahi; that, atrocious though such exploits were, they had been, if not legitimate, at least predictable responses to the Israeli/US invasion of Lebanon; or even that, with the CIA-ordered car-bombing which killed eighty-five Lebanese civilians in the Dahiya two years later, the US could be said to have already exacted more than adequate retribution.⁴³ To be sure, the hijacking to Beirut of a TWA airliner in 1985 - though itself, at least in part, retaliation for the CIA atrocity - and the murder of an American navy diver on board did constitute anti-American terrorism by any standard, as did the subsequent seizure and occasional killing of American hostages.

However justified they might or might not have been, such historical grievances now found a new lease of life. Yet they were not, in the final analysis, the real reason why the US decided to put Hizbullah so high on, if not at the very top of, its latest, expanded list of foreign terrorist organizations. The real reason lay in the same mind-set and agenda that took the American army so ill-fatedly into Iraq. ‘It [was] a political issue here [in Washington]’, said Robert Baer, the former CIA agent who, according to his own account, once came very close to arranging the assassination of Mughniyah, ‘because the Israelis want[ed] the Americans to go after Hizbullah.’⁴⁴ And what the Israelis wanted, their neoconservative allies in the Administration automatically wanted too. It was ‘a big fight’,⁴⁵ apparently, which pitted them against Colin Powell’s State Department. Nonetheless, as usual, they won it. Appropriately enough, it was after a meeting with Shimon Peres, the Israeli foreign minister, that Bush for the first time ascribed to Hizbullah a ‘global reach’, the characteristic that in America’s post-9/11 lexicon put it in the same, heinous league as al-Qaeda; this was a new position - ‘clearly show[ing] that there [was] no distinction between terrorism against Americans and terrorism against Israelis’⁴⁶ - on which ‘the Lobby’, also very active in these persuasions, heartily congratulated him.

Thereafter, just as they did in the case of Iraq, the Israelis diligently supplied Washington with such intelligence about Hizbullah as suited their purposes. Some of it was accurate enough, if already well-known, like the fact that Hizbullah aided and abetted fellow Islamists in Palestine, Hamas and Islamic Jihad, which were somehow deemed to have ‘global reach’ too. But much of it, designed to stress the danger that Hizbullah posed not just to Israel but to the world, was not. The most persistent contention in this respect was that Hizbullah - like Saddam - had joined forces with al-Qaeda, and that - after his fall - it trained ‘foreign fighters’ who went to Iraq ‘to kill American troops’; or that it was sending its own people there as well.⁴⁷ This improbable notion that the militant Shiites of Hizbullah would actively assist the Wahhabite extremists of al-Qaeda, who looked on Shiites as heretics, was readily taken up in Washington. And, in any case, said White House spokesman Ari Fleischer, ‘you can’t on the one hand denounce al-Qaeda and then go and join Hizbullah or Hamas’.

Hizbullah had been quick to realize that 9/11 would automatically intensify Western antipathy for any form of Islamic politics, not least its own.⁴⁸ And it took care to condemn it - without, however, forgetting to observe that ‘repeated Zionist massacres’ of the Lebanese had earned no such condemnation from the US.⁴⁹ It strove to differentiate itself, ideologically and politically, from al-Qaeda. It rejected the kind of mass, indiscriminate, international terror it practised, so much so, indeed, that it earned the reproaches of extremist Sunnis around the region.⁵⁰ Nasrallah denied that Hizbullah commanded any ‘global reach’. There had long been strong suspicions that, in collaboration with Iran and as retaliation for Israel’s 1992 assassination of its secretary-general, Abbas Musawi, Hizbullah had been behind the bombings, with heavy loss of life, of the Israeli embassy and a Jewish community centre in Buenos Aires; and Argentina had issued an international arrest warrant against Imad Mughniyah in this connection. But Nasrallah insisted: ‘We haven’t carried out operations anywhere in the world.’ Calling on the US to prove that it had,⁵¹ he also made it clear that he sought no confrontation with it. Furthermore, although the party considered itself to be in the forefront of the anti-imperial, anti-Zionist struggle, its hatred of Saddam Hussein and his ferocious persecution of its Shiite co-religionists caused it to take a distinctly ambiguous position towards the invasion of Iraq, and it never called for jihad against the Americans there.⁵² However, it did, as we have seen, see fit to continue its military operations against the Israeli-occupied Sheba’a Farms. And in fact it was those, as well as its aggressive identification with and surreptitious assistance to the increasingly violent Palestinian Intifada, that so aroused US ire against it. In effect, for America, ‘global reach’ had come to include any form of attack on Israel.⁵³ Hizbullah’s disarming, rather than its disappearance as a political organization, was what it chiefly wanted; but for Nasrallah, that - except in the all but unforeseeable circumstances of an Arab-Israeli settlement that he himself could accept - was out of the question. And he repeatedly warned that if the US did make any attempt to achieve it by force his organization would strike at US interests wherever it could.⁵⁴ He also defiantly endorsed the right of Palestinians to carry out suicide bombings as ‘the only way to defeat the Zionists’ who, civilians or military, were ‘all occupiers and invaders, partners in crimes and massacres’.⁵⁵

In accordance with the new, ‘with-us-or-against-us’ doctrines, these had begun with vigorous approaches to the Lebanese government. The US ambassador told it that it must ‘seize terrorists, prosecute them and hand over, or expel, those who are wanted’. Then, unimpressed by its response, he publicly accused it of hosting ‘terrorist organizations’.⁵⁷ Then he called on the Lebanese Central Bank to impose financial sanctions on Hizbullah, as the US itself was doing. The tone grew menacing. National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, well aware of the importance - and fragility- of Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri’s great post-war reconstruction drive, warned the country that to ‘survive economically’ it ‘needed to reintegrate into the international community’; its ‘very existence’ now depended on its ‘compliance’ with American demands.⁵⁸ Lebanese officialdom, however, thought rather strongly otherwise.

Their defiance was entirely in line with the public position adopted by virtually all Arab and Muslim states, including the US’s closest ‘friends’. This, in effect, was that for America to condemn Arab ‘terrorism’ against Israel, while failing to condemn the ‘state terrorism’ Israel habitually practised against the Arabs, was only the latest manifestation of Western ‘double standards’ that had bedevilled the Arab-Israeli conflict for decades. It was most authoritatively embodied in an official pronouncement of the Organization of Islamic Countries, which, while deploring what al-Qaeda had done, ‘totally [rejected] ... any confusing of terrorism with the rights of people - notably the Palestinians and the Lebanese - to legitimate defence and resistance against Israeli occupation’. ‘Hong Kong’ to Hizbullah’s ‘Hanoi’ the billionaire prime minister might have been, but he sprang valiantly to the organization’s defence now. This whole, hugely emotive issue of what constituted terrorism and what did not, he said, was simply a product of the US’s ‘blind bias’ in Israel’s favour; and ‘let no one think’ that he would ’stand hand-cuffed in face of the demand for liquidating the resistance’.⁵⁹ He instructed the Central Bank not to freeze any Hizbullah assets. The clergy, both Christian and Muslim, rallied no less earnestly behind Hizbullah. Especially noteworthy was the forthright-ness of the Maronite patriarch, traditionally most Westward-looking of churchmen, who, in the person of Cardinal Butros Sfeir, told an ecumenical conference in Rome that far from being terrorists Hizbullah fighters were ‘Lebanese citizens trying to free their country ... and we all thank them for their effort’.⁶⁰ Though Hizbullah did indeed command a large measure of public, multi-confessional support there was a good deal of attitudinizing about the politicians and the prelates’ anti-American defiance on its behalf. For they knew that, whatever their actual opinion of the organization, they could not realistically have taken any other position. Not only did the inter-communal consensus-seeking of the sectarian polity require it; the fact was that Hizbullah, an armed ‘state within a state‘, was stronger, politically and militarily, than the state itself, and that to seek to dismantle and disarm it now would have been to provoke another civil war. They also knew that ‘sister-Syria’ would not stand for it.

So did the Americans - which was why, despite the initial harshness, the pressures they brought to bear on a congenitally weak and fissiparous Lebanese government to get it to pressure Hizbullah in its turn were in the end rather half-hearted. The Israelis had tried this stratagem again and again, far more violently, and it had never worked. So US leaders now identified Syria, not Lebanon, as the central problem - and the solution. By ‘dealing with’ the Syrian patron they would automatically be ‘dealing with’ the Hizbullahi protégé. Hitherto, in its periods of relative pragmatism, the US had managed to look on a Syrian role in Lebanon as an almost positive thing; but in the neo-conservative era the very idea was anathema. Clean Break, it will be recalled, had identified Saddam’s Iraq as the first target in the grand design to re-order the entire Middle East, but only as a prelude to the more important goal of ‘rolling back’ Syria - Syria, the emotional heart of the Arab world, linchpin of its power system, and, as such, possessed of a special disposition and ability to involve itself in the region’s trouble spots, Israel/Palestine chief among them. Lebanon, and its hegemony over it, was the most important component of Syria’s regional power and prestige. So getting Syria out of Lebanon was not just a matter of ‘getting’ Hizbullah too.

In 1958, it had been in Lebanon that the Arab world’s new, ‘revolutionary’, Soviet-supported republics, led by Nasser’s Egypt - then in organic union with Syria - reached the high-water mark of their struggle against its ‘reactionary’, Western-backed monarchies.⁶¹ In the 1980s, it had been the key arena where the US, Israel and ‘moderate’ Arab states engaged in, and lost, their military and/or political contest with a Syria backed by both the Soviet Union and its ideological antithesis, the new-born Islamic Republic of Iran. Now it became - and ever more intensely remained - a battleground in the latest, and perhaps most fateful, of these regional and international confrontations of modern times, between the Iranian-dominated, Islamo-nationalist camp and that same collection of improbable bedfellows in the opposing one.

CLEAN BREAK

‘A FUSION OF BREATHTAKING UTOPIANISM WITH BARELY DISGUISED MACHTPOLITIK’

RIDDING THE WORLD OF EVIL¹⁵

‘OUR ENEMIES, THE SAUDIS’

‘OUR BIN LADEN’

AFTER IRAQ, IRAN - THEN SYRIA TOO

‘WE DON’T SPEAK TO EVIL’

‘THE MOST VICIOUS AND EFFECTIVE TERRORIST ORGANIZATION IN THE WORLD’

‘TURNING LEBANON BACK TO THE STONE AGE?’