2004 — 2006

THE ‘NEO-IMPERIAL’ AND THE ’MISSIONARY’

Getting Syria out of Lebanon fell into the main, pro-Israeli, ‘neo-imperial’ side of America’s post-9/11 grand design. But here was a case where the ‘neo-imperial’ stood particularly to benefit from its other, ‘missionary’ side - the promotion of ‘freedom and democracy’. This had come increasingly to the fore as the original, official reasons for invading Iraq - weapons of mass destruction and the al-Qaeda connection - had been exposed for the inventions they were. For, in a region where hereditary monarchies or one-party republics were the norm, Lebanon had a resilient democratic tradition which, however flawed, set it apart from everywhere else. It was a tradition which the Syrian Baathists, after Saddam perhaps the most repressive of Arab dictatorships, had inevitably sought to smother. But, submerged though it had been, it now welled up again, underpinning the growing, nation-wide rebelliousness against the Syrians.

The apparatus of control which, in collaboration with their Lebanese henchmen, they had installed in the aftermath of the civil war reached its malignant height under Emile Lahoud, the former army commander who became president in 1998. The Syrian-Lebanese ‘security regime’ of which he was the titular head fell under the sway of a new and younger generation of Syrian officials generally identified with Bashar al-Asad, who succeeded his father, Hafiz, on his death in 2000. Cruder than their elders, they not only tightened Syria’s political grip, the maintenance of which was one part of their functions, but also augmented the already immense corruption that was the other, and more scandalous, one. They turned Syria’s ‘sister-state’ and protectorate into such a cornucopia of extortion, racketeering and diversion of public funds that the distribution of the spoils - authoritatively estimated to be a good two billion dollars a year ¹ - was said to be a factor in the stability of their regime. Lebanese state and society still of course defined itself by its multifarious sectarian loyalties, but, with the Syrian overlordship, one great fault-line had come to dominate, and blur, all others. That was the one that separated those who - by nature, interest or opportunism - were pro-Syrian from those who were anti-, the ‘loyalists’ from the ‘opposition’.

Opposition to any kind of Arab encroachment on Lebanon had always come from some communities, above all the Maronites, more than others. So when, in 2000, after Hizbullah had driven the Israelis from the South, agitation against the continuing presence of that other intruder, Syria, began to make itself felt, the Maronites led it. Their patriarch, Archbiship Nasrallah Sfeir, called on Syria to fulfil its long overdue obligation, under the Taif accord, to pull back its troops to the Beqa‘a Valley; then, more boldly, a conclave of Maronite bishops lamented Lebanon’s ‘loss of sovereignty’ and the ‘hegemony imposed on all its institutions’.² However, the Maronites, the main losers in the post-war settlement, no longer commanded the pre-eminence they used to. More significant was the very similar position taken by Druze chieftain Walid Jumblat, an official ‘ally’ of Syria, who in due course emerged as the opposition’s effective leader. Even more remarkable still than this coming together of the two oldest and most rooted, but historically perhaps most reciprocally hostile, of Lebanese communities, were the Muslim voices, mainly Sunni, now being raised in favour of a more balanced and equitable relationship with Syria. Stout defenders of Lebanon’s Arab identity, the Sunnis had since independence been Syria’s most ardent friends. It was peculiarly ironic, therefore, that their outstanding leader, Rafiq Hariri - or ‘Mr Lebanon’ as he came to be known in his capacity as the country’s larger-than-life, dynamic and internationally influential prime minister - was to become the focal point of Lebanon’s struggle to extricate itself from Syria’s oppressive tutelage, and chief target of its retaliatory wrath.

Hariri was far from anti-Syrian, partly because he considered himself to be an Arab nationalist and partly because, a pragmatist, he realized that, for the small state of Lebanon, preserving the goodwill of its greater neighbour was an imperious, unalterable necessity. He was also said to be heavily involved in regaling the kleptomaniac appetites of its rulers. He bent every effort to accommodate them, and so assiduously used his international standing to promote Syria’s interests, besides Lebanon’s own, that Jumblat called him ‘Syria’s unofficial foreign minister, much more important than the real [one]’.³ Hariri’s main problem and personal nemesis was Lahoud - he and the joint ‘security regime’. In their obsession with control, they made it virtually impossible for him to govern, let alone pursue his dream of Lebanon’s high capitalist renaissance; they thwarted him at every turn, to the point where ministers would be handed instructions in sealed envelopes before cabinet meetings telling them which way to vote on every proposal tabled.⁴

It was in the wake of the Iraqi invasion that the US began seriously to impinge on this Lebanese-Syrian imbroglio. Congress led the way, with the re-introduction of the ‘Syria Accountability and Lebanese Sovereignty Act’, which it had agreed to shelve the previous year in deference to Bush’s plea that he might otherwise forfeit the useful intelligence Syria had been supplying about al-Qaeda.⁵ Framed by some of Israel’s friends in the House and Senate, it was the fruit of collaboration between them and the US Committee for a Free Lebanon. Led by Ziad Abdul-Nour, a Lebanese-American business-man, the committee was a close cousin of ‘the Lobby’; it boasted an impressive array of neoconservatives in its ranks, including Elliot Abrams, so staunch a Zionist that some Israelis welcomed his appointment to the National Security Council as a ‘gift from heaven’.⁶ They adopted the Lebanese opposition’s cause in much the same spirit as they had formerly adopted the Iraqi one, in the person of Ahmad Chalabi.

On the face of it, Lebanon was the main beneficiary of the legislation, but actually it was far less attentive to Lebanon’s interests than Israel’s. In its charge sheet of Syria’s misdemeanours, it portrayed it as a fitting member of the ‘axis of evil’ - to which, indeed, ‘the Lobby’ was working to have it formally assigned. It demanded that Syria stop ‘undermining international peace and security’, supporting ‘international terrorism’, hosting ‘[Palestinian] terrorist groups in Damascus’, ‘developing and deploying’ weapons of mass destruction and the missiles to deliver them. Where Lebanon was concerned, Syria was to end its ‘occupation’, enable it to achieve ‘full restoration of its sovereignty, political independence and territorial integrity‘, deploy its army in the South, and evict all ‘terrorist and foreign forces, including Hizbullah and the Iranian Revolutionary Guards’. Thereafter both Lebanon and Syria were to enter into ‘serious’ and ‘unconditional’ bilateral peace talks with Israel; that meant, in effect, that Syria was now being expected to renounce all the gains which it had made in earlier, if ultimately abortive, US-sponsored negotiations. In December 2003 House and Senate passed the bill by overwhelming majorities. After his initial, tactical reservations Bush signed it into law, and in May 2004 he slapped on Syria a raft of not particularly debilitating sanctions. Hizbullah, his Administration endlessly insisted, should be dismantled in a Lebanon self-ruled and free of ‘all’ foreign forces.

‘FINISHING OFF WHAT LITTLE OF THE DEMOCRACY WE HAVE TO BOAST ABOUT’

But the greater the pressure the US exerted on him, the harder President Asad struck back. Denouncing the Bush Administration as ‘extremists’ with a ‘barbaric attitude to human society‘,⁷ he resolved to impose his grip on Lebanon more firmly than ever. He ventured on the very provocative course of adding a three-year extension to the single, constitutionally permitted six-year term of the unpopular President Lahoud. No sooner had the merest hint of this intention emerged than Archbishop Sfeir said that it would ‘finish off, once and for all, what little is left of the democracy we boast about’. Muslim clerics agreed.⁸

So did Hariri. But he did not advertise the fact, hoping, still, for reconciliation with Damascus. His position was critical. It was above all he and his parliamentary bloc who could make or break Asad’s decision, by ceding or withholding the constitutional amendment and the two-thirds majority vote in favour of the extension required to get it through parliament.⁹ This was the issue on which the Syrian leadership went to war against him. Their mistrust grew, nourished by the malicious rumours, fed to them by Lahoud and his ‘loyalists’, to the effect that Hariri was an American agent and a ‘traitor’ who would disarm Hizbullah. At the end of 2003, he was summoned to Damascus; there, in a violent, 45-minute tirade, Asad and three intelligence chiefs accused him of plotting against Syria with both French and Americans.¹⁰ France’s inclusion in this arraignment was no accident. For Asad had by now achieved the near-miracle of uniting against himself the two Western powers which had only recently diverged so bitterly over Iraq. Partly, no doubt, at the urgings of his good friend Hariri, President Chirac, alone among Western leaders, had tried to help the inexperienced new Syrian leader make his way in the world. Chirac had expected at least some recompense for his manifold favours, not least an easing of the Syrian grip on the country, Lebanon, which had so long occupied a special place in France’s affections. But he had got worse than nothing - just snubs and discourtesy - in return.¹¹

‘I WILL BREAK LEBANON OVER YOUR HEAD AND WALID JUMBLAT‘S’

Eight months later, in August 2004, defying French and American appeals for the election of a new president by due constitutional process, Asad again summoned Hariri to Damascus and, in an even brusquer fifteen-minute encounter, flatly instructed him to change the constitution on Lahoud’s behalf. There were varying, but essentially consonant, versions of the brutal, contemptuous language he employed to do this, but perhaps the most shocking was the one recalled by Hariri’s son, Saad:

This is what I want. If you think that President Chirac and you are going to run Lebanon, you are mistaken. It is not going to happen. President Lahoud is me. Whatever I tell him, he follows suit. This extension is to happen or else I will break Lebanon over your head and Walid Jumblat’s ... So, you either do as you are told or we will get you and your family wherever you are.¹²

‘To them’, said ‘Mr Lebanon’ that evening upon his arrival, shaken, humiliated and dejected, at his retreat in the mountain resort of Fakra, ‘we are all ants.’¹³

Hariri had few illusions about the lengths to which the Baathists would go if he blocked the Lahoud extension. He had reason to believe that a score of car-bombs, already prepared, would go off around the city. And he had even larger fears. ‘Do you think’, he asked an aide, ‘they could mobilize 100,000 Hizbullahi people to march on central Beirut?’ ‘Of course,’ the aide replied. ‘What do you think would happen if someone fired into that crowd?’ ‘Hizbullah would burn the city.’¹⁴ Thus personally threatened, and afraid of plunging the country into bloodshed of a kind not seen since the civil war, Hariri presided over the ten-minute cabinet meeting which agreed to put the constitutional amendment to parliament.¹⁵

The Syrian diktat was a crude one; but justifiably perhaps, in the light of past experience, Asad and his henchmen thought that they would get away with it. But this time they were mistaken. Indeed, what they had actually done was to set in motion a chain of events that, within nine months, would all but prise Lebanon from their grasp. More than merely provoking general outrage among the Lebanese, they furnished America and France with the opportunity they needed. With unusual alacrity, their diplomats at the UN drew up and secured the passage of Security Council Resolution 1559. A characteristic mix, under neo-conservative /Israeli influence, of the ‘neo-imperial’ and the ‘missionary’, though with pride of place now assigned to the latter, it called for a new president to be chosen in a ‘free and fair electoral process ... without foreign [i.e. Syrian] interference or influence’, for ‘all remaining foreign [i.e. Syrian] forces to withdraw from Lebanon’ and for the ‘disarmament of all Lebanese [i.e. Hizbullah] and non-Lebanese [i.e. Palestinian] militias’.

The resolution came as a genuine shock to Syria and its Lebanese allies, who denounced it as a flagrant interference in the internal affairs of a UN member-state. It certainly did imply a great deal of hypocrisy on the part of its principal sponsor. For here was the US harrying Syria into compliance with a resolution designed to end what it had taken to calling its ‘occupation’ of another country. However justified in itself, this was conduct that stood in blatant contrast with its infinite tolerance, encapsulated in countless Security Council vetoes, of a much older, and no less reprehensible occupation - by Israel of those remaining areas of Palestine which it had not already conquered and called its own and whose inhabitants it had not driven out.¹⁶ While welcoming the primary thrust of the resolution, the anti-Syrian opposition could have done without the ‘neo-imperial’ part of it, particularly the demand for Hizbullah’s disarmament. Hariri himself assured the organization that its weapons were a strictly Lebanese issue to be settled through internal dialogue, not external interference, and that he would persuade the international community of that. He would never, he said, permit ‘an Algeria in Lebanon’.¹⁷

Barely twenty-four hours after the resolution, the Lebanese parliament was induced to cast its vote in defiance of it. The 128-member chamber had been well packed with Syrian allies and clients, but not well enough, on their own, to guarantee the necessary two-thirds majority. Intimidation and death threats made the difference, reducing the number of opponents from fifty to twenty-nine, and thereby ensuring Lahoud his extra three years.¹⁸

The Baathist security chiefs had apparently got their way. The trouble, however, was that, in their neurotic fear of Lebanese self-assertion, even this bold coup was not enough for them. In breach of their foregoing promises to Hariri that, as a reward for his compliance, he would not be required to fill his next cabinet with Syrian appointees, that was precisely what they now expected of him.¹⁹ Then, a month later, Marwan Hamade, minister of economy and intimate of opposition leader Walid Jumblat, narrowly escaped assassination by car-bomb, an ominous revival of the methods beloved of Syrians, Israelis and others during the civil war. Like almost all such crimes, this one went unsolved - because never seriously investigated - by the joint ‘security regime’.²⁰ But the political message was clear - a reprisal against Jumblat for his Druze-led parliamentary bloc’s vote against the Lahoud extension and a warning to him and Hariri to be on better behaviour in future.

Then, sensing a diminution of UN pressure, Damascus decided that it could dispense with Hariri’s services altogether. He was told to step down as prime minister. And he did. But it was a cathartic moment for him. He might have been forced out of office - but it was only to gird himself, with greater determination, for another, spectacular, comeback. He believed that if, in the upcoming 2005 parliamentary elections, he and his trans-sectarian allies could score an even greater victory than their landslide of five years before, the Syrians would have no choice but to deal with him as a valued equal rather than despised minion.²¹

‘YOU KNOW, IT COULD BE ME OR YOU IN THE NEXT TWO WEEKS’

Even now, however, he sought to avoid a full-scale showdown with them. He tried not to publicly identify himself with other opposition groups, principally Christian, whom he considered too hostile to Syria and too sympathetic to 1559’s call for Hizbullah’s disarming.²² But, despite himself, he was inexorably becoming the opposition’s central figure, alongside an altogether more visible and flamboyant Jumblat now growing ever bolder in his imprecations against ‘the Syrian-Lebanese mafia’ and his demands that it be ‘broken up ... for good’.²³ All the signs were that Hariri’s electoral juggernaut would transform the Lebanese political landscape, and that he would triumph in the mainly Sunni, Druze and Christian areas of the country, leaving only the mainly Shiite south and the Beqa’a Valley in the hands of the pro-Syrian Hizbullah/Amal alliance.²⁴ And when, for the first time, the mainstream Christian/Druze opposition called for the full-scale withdrawal of Syrian troops, as opposed to their mere ‘re-deployment’ to the Beqa’a, the loyalists responded with vituperations of unprecedented ferocity. Hariri was ‘the snake of Koreitem’ (the Beirut neighbourhood where he lived) cunningly guiding the opposition from behind the scenes. Jumblat was a ‘foreign spy’ who would be ‘crucified on the garbage dump of history’.²⁵ Hariri had received warnings from several quarters, including Chirac, about the threat to his life. But he tended to assume that, in the Syrians’ estimation, he was ‘simply too big’, internationally, to be dispatched without risk of major repercussion in the outside world.²⁶ Amidst this crescendo of abuse and vilification, however, his feeling of invulnerability was waning, and in early February he pulled Jumblat aside and told him: ‘You know, it could be me or you in the next two weeks. If they want to create trouble, they will kill either you or me.’²⁷

THE MURDER OF ‘MR LEBANON’

It was to be Hariri. At 12.56 p.m. on 14 February 2005, as the reverberations of a huge detonation echoed around their city and up into the surrounding hills, most Beirutis thought they came from the sonic boom of an Israeli warplane cavorting in the skies above. But, for those closest to it, that great, rending, unearthly crunch had to be something far more unusual, and deadly, than that. It was, in fact, a mixture of TNT and plastic, all 1,200 kilos of it, gouging a hole in the road three metres deep and ten broad, tossing vehicles into the air, hurling bodies and body parts far and wide, generating such a blast that it went round corners to splinter window frames hundreds of metres away and shatter panes many hundreds more distant still. Hariri had been returning home from parliament. Three possible routes had been available to him. But the bomber in a Mitsubishi van had so positioned himself that, on a word from a spotter outside parliament, he could move to intercept him on whichever one he actually took. He struck the motorcade, five armour-plated Mercedes and an ambulance, just outside the St George, the fine old sea-front hotel which still stood largely derelict ever since it had been gutted in the early days of the civil war, but which had no doubt been destined, in Hariri’s dreams, to become a foremost symbol of Beirut’s renaissance. Instead, Hariri perished in the inferno of burning, mangled vehicles beneath its once more ravaged façade. Twenty-two others, many of them more horribly charred and dismembered than himself, died with him: Basil Fleihan, the friend and adviser at his side, seven bodyguards, and fourteen illstarred passers-by. It had been a very complex and technically proficient operation requiring inter alia the expertise to disable the state-of-the-art, anti-bomb electronic jammers installed in three of the convoy’s cars. It was hard to believe that it could have been carried out without the knowledge of the Syrian and Lebanese intelligence services, or indeed, given their subsequent, ill-disguised attempt at a cover-up, that they had not done it themselves. That, indeed, was the supposition of the first, interim report of the UN Commission that was set up to investigate the killing. As for the Lebanese themselves, from the very first moment few in the opposition camp had any doubts about the identity of the principal culprit.²⁸

‘Look into your hearts’, yelled a young man in the angry, grieving throng that had assembled outside Hariri’s Beirut mansion, ‘We know who did this! Syria!’ It was a pivotal moment, the shattering of fifteen years of sullen Sunni acquiescence in Syrian rule. ‘Like an aircraft carrier altering course in the ocean’, wrote Nicholas Blanford in his book The Killing of Mr Lebanon, ‘the Sunni community was turning with an inexorable momentum into outright opposition.’ For the first time, under the aegis of his son and political heir, Saad, the movement Hariri had founded now openly joined forces with the others, Christian and Druze, who had preceded it down the anti-Syrian path. Together, they issued a declaration holding ‘the Lebanese ... and Syrian authority responsible for this and other similar crimes’, and demanded the formation of a provisional government and the withdrawal of Syrian forces before the upcoming parliamentary elections. The crowd outside shouted ‘Syria out, Syria out.’ It was the first time in history, said the newspaper al-Nahar, that Sunnis had given voice to such hostile sentiments ‘against the country which they have always viewed as a strategic depth and support, if not a safe haven for them’.²⁹

It marked the beginning of what came to be known as the ‘Independence Intifada’, a manifestation of ‘people power’ soon being likened to the ‘Rose Revolution’ that had recently swept Georgia or the ‘Orange’ one of Ukraine. ‘Independence, Liberation, Sovereignty’ became its principal slogans and establishing ‘the Truth’ - about who had killed Hariri - deemed vital for its ultimate success. The possible repercussions of a popular upheaval unique in modern Arab history were deemed to be great, for the region as well as for Lebanon itself. Samir Kassir, a Lebanese journalist of Palestinian origin, wrote in al-Nahar. ‘The Arab nationalist cause has shrunk into the single aim of getting rid of the regimes of terrorism and coups, and regaining the people’s freedom as a prelude to the new Arab renaissance. It buries the lie that despotic systems can be the shield of nationalism. Beirut has become the “beating heart” of a new Arab nationalism.‘³⁰ And surely nowhere were the repercussions liable to be more intensely felt than in Syria - Arabism’s original ‘beating heart’ — whose people, the more discerning of them at least, could hardly fail to grasp that what the Lebanese were really rebelling against was less Syria as such than the extension on Lebanese soil of what they themselves more drastically endured at home. That is to say the oppression of a once revolutionary new order which - like the now defunct, Soviet-style, single-party ‘people’s republics’ on which it was largely modelled - had lost all true legitimacy.

THE CEDAR REVOLUTION

The Intifada was an essentially spontaneous, indigenous affair; and - regionally - a strictly Arab, or inter-Arab, one too. But the Bush Administration quickly got into the act. It dubbed it the Cedar Revolution - Intifada being too suggestive of Palestinian suicide bombers blowing up Israelis.³¹ It could not but rejoice at a development easily spun as a major success in its Middle East crusade for ‘freedom and democracy’. Addressing ‘the people of Lebanon‘, Bush told them that ‘the American people, millions across the earth, are on your side’. And he prophesied that once democracy had taken root in their country, it would ‘ring the doors of every Arab regime’. But these Intifadists could hardly be principally defined as ‘pro-American’ — and many of them certainly did not want that discrediting label themselves - even if they did attract and accept American and European support. They were above all anti-Syrian, or, perhaps more precisely, anti-Baathist. It was that, rather than their love of democracy, which in Bush’s book really put them on the side of the angels. No wonder that, as he stepped up his calls for a complete and immediate Syrian withdrawal, the neoconservatives were salivating over what they called this ‘low-hanging fruit’³² ripe for plucking without the resort to force that had been needed for the Baathists of Baghdad.

In its vast, initial ardour, the Intifada took the form of an escalating series of popular demonstrations. Yet there were soon to be counter-demonstrations too. For, authentic and unprecedented though it was, it could never claim to be nation-wide. It was true, perhaps, that the combined numerical weight of these three key components of the sectarian state, Sunnis, Christians and Druzes, was less important than the manner in which, often such bitter adversaries in the past, they were now coming together in an overriding common cause. Unfortunately for them, however, the fourth main component did not join them. At least 1,300,000 in number, and in their way perhaps the most dynamic and upwardly mobile of communities, the Shiites, a mere 16 per cent of the population in 1932, had by now risen to a full 35 per cent of it.³³ To be sure, many Shiites, cleric and lay, grieved for Hariri, and took part in his funeral. That was a multi-confessional event the like of which Lebanon had never seen before. He was laid to rest in the vast new Muhammad al-Amin mosque, largely his own creation, in Martyrs’ Square, the mid-town area where in pre-war years all confessions had uniquely and ecumenically mingled. But the Shiites hardly compared in numbers with the Sunnis and Druzes as, amid a cacophony of muezzins’ calls, they flocked to his burial-place from Muslim West Beirut, or with the Christians who, church bells everywhere tolling, converged with them from the East.

The funeral had of course been primarily a religious occasion. But the Shiites, as a community, were notably absent from the entirely political demonstrations that followed. Privately, many of them shared the wider antipathy to Syrian domination, resenting among other things the unfair competition which cheap Syrian labour, entering the country en masse, posed to their own people, as well as the way in which Syria waged its ‘proxy war’ against Israel without ever, like them, having to pay the price in Israeli retaliation. But at the same time they saw in Syria a natural external guardian of their interests; for it was, after all, during its hegemony that their once impoverished, backward and marginalized community had come in from the periphery of Lebanon’s sectarian politics to the central place it occupied now³⁴ A startling measure of the difference between Shiites and the rest came in the form of an opinion poll about who they thought had killed Hariri. Whereas the overwhelming majority of Christians, Sunnis and Druzes said that Syria had, a mere 9.4 per cent of Shiites did so. In that they were probably motivated more by political correctness than sincere belief.³⁵ For they had a greater deference for their most representative political organization - Hizbullah - than any other community had for theirs, given all that, in war and peace, it had achieved on their behalf; as a generally conservative, devout society in an era of revivalism there was also a religious dimension to their reverence for Sheikh Nasrallah. They therefore faithfully reflected Hizbullah’s hopes and fears. And what Hizbullah feared was that, with Syria gone, there would come greatly intensified pressure on it to disarm, depriving it both of its basic vocation, jihad, and of the surreptitious leverage its weapons gave the Shiites, fearful of being brought low again, vis à vis everyone else.³⁶ It had little reason to love or trust the Baathists, with whom it had once come to blows, but, realistically, it could not turn against them now.

8 MARCH, 14 MARCH

On 8 March 2005, after a series of ever larger opposition demonstrations, Nasrallah stepped in with one of his own. Apologizing for the ‘insults’ which some of his compatriots had heaped on Syria, he swore that Lebanon would remain the country of Arabism, nationalism and resistance’.³⁷ With perhaps half a million attending, this was the largest yet. But it was a single-sect affair, and, with the party mobilizing its followers everywhere, a significantly regimented one too.

Undismayed by this impressive show of force, the opposition called for a yet greater one. And its followers rose to the occasion. This time, fully a million people converged on Martyrs’ Square. That represented something between a quarter and a third of the entire population, ‘equivalent’, remarked Nadim Shehadi, a Lebanese scholar at Chatham House, ‘to twenty million British demonstrators showing up at Trafalgar Square’.³⁸ The day on which this took place, 14 March, became the name of the political coalition to which the Intifada gave birth, just as ‘8 March’ furnished the label by which Hizbullah and its friends identified themselves.

APRÈS MOI LE DELUGE

Thereafter it looked, for a while, as though the Intifada’s goals were being reached one by one. In March, the loyalist prime minister, Omar Karami, was forced to resign. In April the Security Council called for an international investigation into Hariri’s murder and, in a swift and humiliating withdrawal, the Syrian army ended its thirty-year sojourn in the country; officially, at least, Syrian intelligence bureaux went with it. In May and June, the anti-Syrian opposition, centred around the ‘14 March’ coalition, won the four-stage parliamentary elections; it was not the landslide the late Hariri had hoped for, but, with 72 seats out of 128, they secured a majority in what was the most representative parliament since the end of the civil war, turning the pro-Syrian ‘loyalists’ into the new ‘opposition’.³⁹ In September, at the behest of UN investigators, Lebanese police arrested the all-powerful Jamil Sayyid and three other barons of the joint ‘security regime’ as suspects in the Hariri killing. Their downfall electrified the Lebanese, and Arab commentators described it as ‘an earthquake for the whole Arab region‘, one that could have ‘the same impact [there] as the birth of the Solidarity trade union movement had had in eastern Europe twenty-five years ago, resulting in the collapse of the communist police state system’.⁴⁰ In October, the chief UN investigator Detlev Mehlis issued a first, interim report, which found ‘probable cause to believe that the decision to assassinate ... Hariri could not have been taken without the approval of top-ranking Syria security officials’.⁴¹ And the Security Council demanded, and in due course partially secured, the questioning of several heavyweights of the Baathist regime, including such relatives or intimates of Asad as his brother-in-law, Asef Shawkat, chief of military intelligence.

Then, for the first time since the Baathists seized power in 1963, a comprehensive array of Syrian opposition groups - secularists, Islamists, Kurds and prominent personalities - joined forces to issue their ‘Damascus declaration’, effectively offering themselves as an alternative to the regime. The US announced the establishment of a fund to ‘accelerate the work of reformers’ in Syria. A high-profile defector, former Vice President Abdul Halim Khaddam, forecast that the regime, already crumbling, would fall within a year.⁴² Rumours swirled around Arab and Western capitals to the effect that Asad, in desperation, was preparing to play his last card - the prospect of his own collapse and Syria’s consequent descent, Iraqi-fashion, into chaos, civil war, terror and Islamist fanaticism. That was a prospect, it was said, which should surely alarm the Americans almost as much as it was already alarming the Syrians themselves, and interest them in the grand bargain, emulating a precedent set by Colonel Gadafi of Libya, that Asad would offer them. He would yield up all his regional assets - control of Lebanon, Hizbullah, Palestinian militants, and the flow of jihadists into Iraq - in exchange for US guarantees of his continued mastery in his own house. Otherwise it would be ‘après moi le deluge’.⁴³

SYRIA TURNS THE TIDE

But that was as far as it went. The low-hanging fruit fell not of its own accord, neither was it plucked. The Baathists weathered the storm. Regaining confidence at home, they counter-attacked in Lebanon. With their army’s departure, their official public presence might have come to an end; but in other, surreptitious, and no less effective ways, they came back - if they had ever truly left in the first place. And nothing came, either, of what was to have been the automatic corollary of Syria’s chastening: Hizbullah’s too. On the contrary, the organization grew in defiance of all who sought to reduce it.

Lebanon’s real emancipation from Syria, and its assimilation, in some way or other, of Hizbullah, might have come to pass had the Intifada, and what it stood for, truly imposed itself. The question of what it actually did stand for would have elicited different answers from different people. Suffice it to say, however, that for a great many, especially the younger, more educated or idealistic, their peaceful uprising meant more than merely ejecting the Syrians. It meant rebuilding Lebanon, state, institutions, society, on new and sounder foundations: thorough-going reform and modernization. Of central importance would have been a serious attempt, at long last, to address what had been an official objective ever since its enshrinement in the country’s first, 1926 constitution - the phasing out of ‘political sectarianism.’ But to impose itself the Intifada needed to secure two main things: decisive mastery over the existing apparatus of power and the embrace of all the communities of which the sectarian state was composed. But it secured neither. Its potential may have been great, but, as a result of this failure, so were the countervailing forces that brought it to grief. Enough of the old, Syrian-backed order — embodied in President Lahoud and a residue of the joint ‘security regime’ - survived to thwart the rise of the new one. And the Shiites, as a community, stood outside it. In fact, far from overcoming the inherent divisions of Lebanese society, the Intifada only, in the end, led to their deepening, and to a crisis of national identity as profound as any the country had ever experienced. And, far from easing the inevitable consequence of internal rivalries - the interference of external ones - it intensified that too, with the Iranian-led, Islamo-nationalist camp backing the former, ‘8 March’ order, and, in very diverse ways, Americans, Israelis and ‘moderate’ Arabs favouring the ‘14 March’ new one. There were even fears of a new civil war.

To be sure, with the Syrian withdrawal, the balance of power had changed, and the ‘14 March majority’, having won the elections, formed a new government under the premiership of Fuad Siniora, close friend and aide of the late Hariri. But even as the Syrians and their Lebanese friends seemed to be retreating, it was really a case of reculer pour mieux sauter.

‘THE DIZZYING DUPLICITY OF LEBANON’S POLITICS’

The rot started with those parliamentary elections themselves. It was there that, to the disgust of many an Intifadist, the ‘old politics’ asserted themselves once more, there that ‘people power’ delivered the people back into the arms of the self-same elite of sectarian ‘strongmen’ that the system had always favoured.⁴⁴ Typically, rather than offering national agendas of a political or socio-economic kind, candidates in Lebanese elections make back-stage deals and alliances with the other candidates, be it of their own or another sect, who in their estimation can deliver them the most votes. What the Lebanese commentator Michael Young memorably and despairingly called the ‘dizzying duplicity of Lebanese politics’ could yield the bizarrest of bedfellows, and it did not fail to do so now.⁴⁵

Thus it was that the most outspoken leader of the anti-Syrian camp, Jumblat, allied himself and his Druzes with those who were soon to become his polar opposite, Hizbullah and its Shiites. He did so at the expense of the man who would have been his most natural ally among the Maronites, General Michel Aoun, hero of the 1989 anti-Syrian ‘liberation war’ who had just returned, in the Intifada’s wake, from a fifteen-year exile in France. As for Aoun himself, while still insisting that Hizbullah should be disarmed, he did not hesitate, popular though he was in his own right, to ally himself with traditionally pro-Syrian Maronite personalities, such as Suleiman Frangieh, who boasted useful electoral machines.⁴⁶

When it came to the formation of cabinets, the confessional system had its rules. And the chief one was that all the major sects be represented, and, however divergent the political tendencies which that brought together, all decisions had to be taken by consensus, or, failing that by a two-thirds majority vote which, in practice, was almost never achieved. Effectively, everyone had a veto over everything they didn’t like. Although the new ‘14 March’ parliamentary majority dominated the cabinet, what had become the new minority was represented there in the shape, most notably, of five ministers owing allegiance to Hizbullah and its ally Amal.

AN UNNATURAL MARRIAGE

With this, the latest stage of its ‘Lebanonization’, the puritanical Hizbullah was for the first time deigning to sully itself with the business of government.⁴⁷ Ironically, that meant joining an administration whose latent disposition was to oppose all it stood for. But that was precisely why it joined it. For, with Syria gone, it felt the need, in compensation, to insert itself more strongly into the Lebanese power structure. Syria’s withdrawal, said deputy secretary-general Naim Qasim, ‘made us directly responsible for providing the domestic protection in a better way than before’.⁴⁸ It was, however, an unnatural marriage from the outset, and before very long it led to tantrums, and then to virtual divorce.

At first the new government trod gingerly; in its opening policy statement, it praised the ‘resistance’ as ‘a natural, honest expression of the Lebanese people’s national right to liberate their land’.⁴⁹ A great many Lebanese still did not like that ‘neo-imperial’, pro-Israeli, anti-Hizbullah portion of 1559. In an opinion poll, 74 per cent of them said they supported the organization, and a large majority of all communities - especially Shiites, but Maronites too - opposed any idea of disarming it by force. Of the ‘14 March majority’ leaders, Jumblat himself was the least responsive to America’s clamour to bring the organization to heel, the least impressed by its consternation that a ‘terrorist organization’ should have been admitted to the government in the first place. International insistence on 1559, he said, threatened to bring Lebanon ‘under foreign tutelage’ and ‘detach [it] from its Arab and Islamic belonging’.⁵⁰

But as relations deteriorated between the new ‘loyalists’ on the one hand, and the ‘8 March’ opposition and Syria on the other, the five Shiite ministers, protesting a violation of the consensus rule, staged a walk-out from the cabinet. Among the ‘14 March majority’ it was Jumblat, the great ‘prestidigitator‘⁵¹ of Lebanese politics, who now turned most strongly against the organization he had hitherto sought to accommodate. The ‘war of liberation’ was over, he said, Nasrallah should turn in his weapons and dismantle his ‘state-within-a-state‘, for ‘no country in the world allows an irregular militia to take law and order duties along with its regular forces’.⁵² But Hizbullah would have none of it. Had not Nasrallah, in a rousing speech with this self-same Jumblat at his side, already warned: ‘If anyone tries to disarm the resistance, we will fight him the way the martyrs fought in Karbala’ and ‘consider any hand that tries to seize our weapons an Israeli hand, and cut it off’?⁵³

Hizbullah’s fundamental reasons were its least admissible ones: its inability, on ideological grounds, to give up jihad, even if for the foreseeable future it was only able to practise it in symbolic ‘gradualist-pragmatic’ mode, and, intrinsically linked to that, its dependence on an Iran and Syria for which, were it bereft of its weapons, it would have lost almost all its utility. Publicly, therefore, it confined itself to ‘Lebanese’ arguments for its own indispensability. To those who said that it was wrong, unfair and ultimately dangerous for one community to retain the right to a militia when those of all the others had been disbanded, it retorted that it was not a militia but a resistance movement. This had been repeatedly, officially and, as it were, constitutionally acknowledged, most recently with the government’s very own policy statement; furthermore, its weapons were ‘national ones‘, never to be used against other Lebanese in order to ’defend or protect the Shiite community‘.⁵⁴ That of course was only a promise, not a guarantee - all the less convincing at a time when, following the Syrian withdrawal, Hizbullah was increasingly turning back to sectarian loyalties as the basis of its public support, as well as closing ranks with its rival, Amal, in a manner liable to cause any move against itself to be interpreted as one against the Shiites as a whole.⁵⁵ To those who said that the ‘resistance’ had completed its mission, it retorted that it had not - there still remained the Sheba’a Farms.

And if, for many Lebanese, that was not a persuasive argument, it now trumped it with a grander one altogether. During a so-called ‘national dialogue’ between the country’s major leaders, about a ‘national defence’ strategy and other contentious issues that were threatening to tear the country apart, it argued that Hizbullah itself, not the national army, should assume the principal burden of defence, since it, and it alone, had the capacity to ‘deter’ Israeli aggression. The 12,000 missiles of which Nasrallah now openly boasted would be the backbone of it. ‘Today’, he said, ‘the whole of occupied northern Palestine [i.e. Israel] ... its ports, its [military] bases, its factories, everything‘, lay within their range. There was no need, he added cryptically, ‘for us to say whether they can reach beyond the north’.⁵⁶ To those who said that, instead of competing with the army, Hizbullah should become an effective part of it, it retorted that it could not, among other things because that would make it an easier target for the Israelis;⁵⁷ the most it could do, while retaining its organizational autonomy and freedom of action, was to ‘co-ordinate’ with the army. Finally, to the charge that, as a non-state actor, it was usurping functions that only belonged to a state, it retorted that ‘when the state fails in carrying out some of its functions, society must help the state in carrying them out - even if the state doesn’t ask’.⁵⁸

JUST WHAT KIND OF A STATE WAS LEBANON?

And just what kind of state was Lebanon anyway? Or, rather, what kind of people were the ‘14 March majority’ now heading it? This was the nub. It was not simply for operational reasons that Nasrallah refused to merge his mujahideen with the military; there were powerful political ones too. For he had no confidence at all in the government of which his organization was nonetheless a part. In any case, he contended that the ‘majority’ they claimed to represent was an ‘illusory’ one; Hizbullah itself stood for the real, the ‘silent’ majority, the majority of ‘the true people’. Moreover, he pointed out, they were members of Lebanon’s ‘political elite’, and, as such, much resented by the ordinary folk of every community for their endemic corruption, their intrigues and their egoism. In other words, who was really more representative of the nation’s will, a Hizbullah whose leadership’s probity and austerity not even its enemies impugned, or ‘these giants’ who thought only of their ‘villas, wealth and bank accounts’ as they ‘made their empty speeches from behind their desks in their air-conditioned offices’?⁵⁹ Worst of all, it was their international allegiances that were suspect. ‘What they had to do’, said Nasrallah, ‘was assure us that their decisions and positions are not dictated by Washington.’⁶⁰ For, as far as he was concerned, they were increasingly demonstrating the opposite.

It certainly did appear that the major Western powers were on their way back into Lebanon’s internal affairs, not with their armies as in 1958 and 1982, but with their potent diplomacy. They conducted it largely via the United Nations. A string of Security Council resolutions reinforced and expanded the scope of 1559; a stream of rapporteurs and investigators were sent to monitor and enforce them. Had the UN, asked Nasrallah, ever appointed a single official to follow up, and make regular reports, on the progress of the countless resolutions which Israel had flouted down the decades? Of course not. But ‘total international tutelage’ was now ‘being imposed on Lebanon and [Terj Roed-] Larsen [foremost of the UN officials dealing with Lebanon]’ was ‘the new high commissioner carrying the 1559 sword and using it to chase after the Lebanese, Palestinian and Syrian authorities’. Through this tutelage, he said, the so-called ‘international community ... imposes its will, classifies people, passes judgement, differentiates, decides on the details and follows up on the smallest Lebanese issues’.⁶¹

‘THEY NEVER LEFT IN TERMS OF THEIR CRIMINAL DEEDS’

If, for Hizbullah, the 14 March ‘loyalists’ were betraying Lebanon’s Arab and Islamic identity by turning to the US, they, for their part, levelled a countervailing charge: the 8 March ‘opposition’ were instruments of foreign quarters too, in the shape of Syria and Iran. It appears, in fact, that it was less the matter of Hizbullah’s weapons that really turned Jumblat against it than the way it behaved, within the government, as a fifth column on Syria’s behalf. Nasrallah had considered Hariri to be his friend, called him a martyr, and agreed that establishing the ‘truth’ about the identity of his killers was a necessary and laudable task. But he strongly opposed the UN commission of investigation set up to carry it out. Like Syria itself, he said that the great powers were ‘politicizing’ it, and exploiting it as an instrument in their campaign against Syria, Hizbullah and an ‘Arab’ Lebanon. When the Lebanese cabinet decided - and by a majority, not a consensual, vote — to ask the UN to set up a mixed Lebanese-international tribunal to try any suspects the UN commission named, the cabinet’s Shiite members ‘suspended’ their participation in the government. For Jumblat, Nasrallah was now no more than ‘a tool in the hands of the Syrian regime’, of the ‘terrorist tyrant’ Bashar al-Asad. Indeed, Hizbullah and its Amal allies did systematically seek to shield Syria and defend its interests in Lebanon. In early 2006, determined to secure full control of all the offices of state, the ‘14 March’ coalition launched a campaign to impeach President Lahoud, held to be Syria’s ‘chief agent’ and ‘partner’ in the murder of Hariri.⁶² It was Hizbullah and Amal who chiefly foiled them - together with a surprise new recruit to the ‘8 March’ opposition alliance, the once ferociously anti-Syrian general, Michel Aoun. Aoun was apparently determined that Lahoud should stay in place until it was sure that, with the Shiite vote behind him, he himself would be his successor.

Very useful to Syria though Hizbullah and Amal were, their exertions on its behalf only supplemented its own. ‘The power and role of Syria in Lebanon are not dependent on the presence of Syrian forces there,’ said Asad.⁶³ And so it amply proved. Conventional wisdom had it that he was ready, if need be, to turn Lebanon into ‘another Iraq’, so that he could then say to the world, as Jumblat put it, ‘Look, the Lebanese are unable to rule themselves. We are the only people who can guarantee stability ... They never left in terms of their criminal deeds.’⁶⁴

Sure enough, within weeks of Hariri’s assassination, small bombs, gradually increasing in size, began to go off in public places. Then came the assassination of a string of anti-Syrian politicians and personalities. The first to die, in June 2005, was Samir Kassir, one of two journalists for whom Syrian intelligence apparently harboured a particular dislike;⁶⁵ a bomb, placed under the seat of his car, went off when he turned on the ignition. The other, Jibran Tweini, editor of al-Nahar and perhaps Syria’s most fearlessly outspoken critic, died five months later. Within a day of his return from Paris, where he had taken refuge in the conviction that his name was at the top of Syria’s ‘hit-list’, he was torn to shreds in the biggest and most sophisticated operation since the Hariri killing: a shaped-charge bomb struck his armour-plated four-wheel drive on a mountain road above Beirut.⁶⁶ Two months before, May Chidiac, a television talk-show host, had survived the loss of an arm and leg in another under-the-seat car-bomb. There was no such miraculous escape for George Hawi, a former communist party chief, and the first of the politicians to be so targeted.

If Syria, as most Lebanese believed, was indeed behind these seemingly effortless, ruthlessly efficient and always unsolved murders it had no shortage of willing perpetrators among the subversive networks its intelligence had left behind.⁶⁷ These suspicions found corroboration in a second, interim report from UN investigator Mehlis, who charged that, ‘in order to create public disorder in response to any accusations of Syrian involvement’ in the Hariri murder, Syria had supplied arms and ammunition for some of the bombings.⁶⁸ Top Syrian intelligence officials who had formerly been in charge of Lebanon were again sighted in various parts of the country, holding secret meetings to forge electoral alliances among their old Lebanese friends.⁶⁹ Pro-Syrian Palestinian guerilla organizations were reportedly smuggling in weapons on Syria’s behalf.⁷⁰ Retaliation of another open and official kind came with Syria’s resort to its time-honoured practice of closing Lebanon’s only land frontiers to commercial traffic, costing it $300,000 a day. And when Mehlis pointed his finger of suspicion at Syria, it was against Lebanon that Asad poured out all his fury; it was, he said, 4a route, a manufacturer and financier ... for conspiracies‘, and Siniora was a ‘slave’ of the Americans.⁷¹

This vehemence and incitement of anti-Lebanese sentiment was part of a full-blooded counter-offensive which Asad now launched. In a keynote speech he told the Syrians that they were facing an American assault on their ‘national identity and values’ as an Arab people, that America wanted to destroy them, just as it had Iraq’s. They had a choice, he said, between resistance and chaos. Palestine, and defiance of Western/Israeli schemes for it and the region, lay at the heart of it. It was a ringing, demagogic appeal to that pan-Arab nationalism - with its admixture of a specifically Syrian one - to which they, more than any other Arabs, remained deeply wedded. And the rallying-cry did rally. To be sure, the Syrians had little love for their ossified, decadent, corrupt and despotic regime, but much as they might yearn for change, they did not want America - champion of Zion, enemy of Arabism - to bring it. Even some of the small, liberal, secular opposition, soon to come under renewed oppression, went out of their way to show that the democratization they sought had nothing to do with the fact that America, in its ‘missionary’ self, apparently wanted it too. A great many Syrians did buy the official line that the Mehlis inquiry was biassed at their country’s expense. And Baathist officials were probably right when they said that if Asad were to have made a spectacular, humiliating foreign policy volte-face, Gadafi-style, he would have ‘lost his legitimacy and be laughed at by the people’.⁷²

THE SHIITE CRESCENT

Then there was Iran. With 1559 and the expulsion of the Syrians, America had not merely planned to weaken or undermine the Baathist regime, but Iran too, and the whole Islamo-nationalist camp which it headed. That meant strengthening their own side - the so-called ‘moderate’ Arabs - in the perennially polarized Middle East. In its current form, the fault line went back to the 1979 Khomeini revolution. It had always had a sectarian hue to it; and it was this which, Shiite versus Sunni, now took on a new, virulent, region-wide and strategically unsettling intensity. The rise of Hizbullah in Lebanon was an already long-established manifestation of it. But the real turning point came after the invasion of Iraq — when what was supposed to have been the great ‘transformational’ moment of modern Middle Eastern history became pretty much the opposite of all that was expected of it.

Historically, Iraq was where the great schism of Islam had begun. Now, with the emancipation of its long-oppressed Shiite majority, it was erupting there anew. With the elections of January 2005, Shiites became the rulers - or at least the politically dominant community - of an Arab country for the first time in centuries, and a pivotal country at that. From now on, forecast Iranian scholar Vali Nasr, ‘Shiites and Sunnis will compete over power, first in Iraq, but ultimately across the entire region.’⁷³ Sure enough, this electorally established ascendancy of the Iraqi Shiites deeply troubled the Sunni Arab establishment. For Jordan’s King Abdullah, the great peril came from Iran, whose ‘vested interest’ was ‘to have an Islamic republic of Iraq’. And he warned of a ‘crescent’ of Shiite movements stretching from the shores of the Gulf, via Iraq and Syria, to a Hizbullah-dominated Lebanon. ‘This is the first time‘, said Lebanese commentator Joseph Samaha, ‘that an Arab official has used such crude, direct and dangerous language to publicly incite against a particular confession and warn that it may turn into a fifth column to be used against the majority.’⁷⁴ President Mubarak of Egypt, however, outdid the King with his observation that ‘most Shiites are loyal to Iran, not to the countries they live in’.

Iraq’s Sunni minority resented their sudden, drastic loss of power, and the country steadily slipped towards an inter-communal civil war replete with atrocities that were if anything even more horrible than those of its Lebanese predecessor, and which only the Americans, themselves frequently under attack from both sides, could hold in check. As Iraq’s troubles worsened, the alarm of other Arab countries grew, especially those in the Gulf that had substantial Shiite communities of their own, all of them nursing historical grievances against their Sunni rulers. The Shiites were perhaps worst off in Saudi Arabia, where, constituting little more than 10 per cent of the total population but a majority in the oil-rich Eastern Province, they were still regarded as heretics by fiercely orthodox Wahhabite clerics. The Saudi foreign minister warned American policy-makers that full-scale civil war would not only ‘dismember’ Iraq for good, it would ‘bring the whole region into a turmoil that would be hard to resolve’.⁷⁵ The Americans were later to discover that well over half the monthly flow of volunteer, Shia-hating Sunni jihadists infiltrating into Iraq came not from hostile countries such as Syria, but from its most important Arab ally, Saudi Arabia itself.

The ‘Shiite crescent’ was a misnomer, in that at least two of its supposed members, Syria and Hamas, did not, in their sectarian composition, properly belong to it at all. There were very few Shiites in Syria; if the Alawite minority which furnished the backbone of Baathist power could be described as Shiite at all it was at most a theologically esoteric, dissident sub-sect of the creed. As for its non-state members, only Hizbullah qualified by this criterion; Hamas (not to mention its lesser rival, Islamic Jihad) was entirely Sunni - and, as such, evidence, for Iran and Hizbullah, that their cause was not sectarian at all, but the truly pan-Islamic one they always claimed it to be. However, tensions were on the rise between the two great branches of Islam. Lebanon now had ample domestic reasons for its portion of them, but, inevitably, they both nourished and were nourished by the larger regional ones. If the worst came to the worst and another civil war broke out, it would differ, in its principal protagonists, from earlier ones; no longer would it mainly pit Christians against Muslims, it would be a mainly intra-Muslim, Shiite versus Sunni, affair. The physical flashpoints, the locations where scuffles and occasional shoot-outs were already occasionally breaking out, were no longer those - the Burj (or Martyrs’ Square), the old Damascus Road, the ‘Museum crossing’ - that separated Christian East Beirut from its mainly Muslim West, they were all - Corniche Mazra‘a, Tarik Jadide, Basta — neighbourhoods within the West where Shiite immigrants, spilling out from the Dahiya, lived cheek by jowl with the indigenous Sunnis. When skirmishes did erupt, they were as likely to be the product of regional tensions - between Saudi Arabia, say, and Iran, or Saudi Arabia and Syria - as they were of some strictly local quarrel. Lebanon, it seemed, had only thrown off Syrian overlordship to become, once more, the prize in a struggle for dominance over the whole Middle East. Its fortunes would mirror those of this larger contest. With the ‘14 March’ Intifadists in disarray, Syria making its comeback, and Hizbullah more than holding its own, there could not be much doubt which side was by now in the greater trouble.

IRAN, VICTOR OF AMERICA’S WAR

By early 2006, virtually nothing of the neoconservative/Israeli grand design, be it the neo-imperial or the ‘missionary’, had been achieved, with regime change occurring in only one of the full seven or eight places where it had originally been hoped that it would. And that one, Iraq, was bidding fair, in the words of a retired American general, to become ‘the greatest strategic disaster in US history’.⁷⁶ There, ‘the cakewalk’ was now ‘the quagmire’. The Islamic Republic had always been seen as the greatest adversary, whose defeat would yield the commensurately greatest region-wide reward. But now, here it was, the only true victor of America’s war. Now, more than ever, the Middle East could be defined, strategically, as the arena of a bipolar struggle between Iran on the one hand, America and Israel on the other. For its new, backwoods, millenarian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, only America stood in the way of the regional supremacy that was Iran’s ‘incontestable right‘, an America, which, ‘defeated’ in Iraq, was but a ‘sunset power’ in its ‘last throes’ before the ‘sunrise’ of the Islamic Republic.⁷⁷ Like George Bush, he believed he was doing God’s will. His government was paving the way for the ‘return’ of the Mahdi, or Hidden Imam, an event - associated in Shiite eschatology with ‘chaos’ and ‘the end of days’ - which he held to be imminent. Along with America’s undoing, it would be preceded by the destruction of the Jewish state.⁷⁸ Unlike some others - including Ali Khamenei, the Wali himself — Ahmadinejad did not state that Israel must be ‘wiped out’ with quite the explicitness that most Western news agencies reported him as doing. He merely quoted ‘our dear Imam‘, Khomeini, to the effect that ‘this Jerusalem-occupying regime must disappear from the pages of time’.⁷⁹ Slightly milder this formulation might have been, but, constantly reiterated, it was hardly reassuring, especially given other outrages he perpetrated, such as his theatrical espousal of Holocaust-denial or his proposal that, if there really had been such a genocide, then Europe should make amends for it by relieving the Palestinians of the Jewish state themselves. But the main reason it agitated Israeli leaders and caused them to take such furious note of an annihilationist discourse they had formerly belittled⁸⁰ was the vigour which the new president imparted to Iran’s nuclear programme - a programme, he intimated, the Mahdi himself was in charge of and would additionally speed his ‘return’.⁸¹

In April 2006, Iran mastered the fuel cycle, enriching uranium to a level of 3.5 per cent, enough to power a reactor though not to produce a bomb. With this, said an exultant Ahmadinejad, his country had now entered ‘the nuclear club of nations’, thereby ‘turning [it] into the biggest power in the Middle East and [changing] all the power equations in the region and beyond’.⁸² For the Israelis and ‘the Lobby’ this was nothing less than the rise of Hitler all over again; the ‘parallels’ were ‘stunning in their likeness, eerie in their implications’.⁸³ America’s friends in the Sunni Arab establishment were not happy either, with some of them, especially in the Gulf, deeming a potentially nuclear Iran to be an even more threatening prospect than the already existing Israeli nuclear capability.⁸⁴ But they spurned America’s call to ‘stand firm’ against it, largely because they knew that, for their people and especially their Islamists, the real enemy was still Israel, not Iran. And with America, its popularity in the region at an all-time low, backing its detested protégé more unashamedly than ever, their people could not but marvel at a jumped-up country bumpkin who was doing what none of them would ever have dared to do themselves. For Ahmadinejad exhibited nothing but contempt for the hypocrisy embedded in the West’s insistence that Israel’s monopoly on nuclear weapons was a fait accompli that no regional power should challenge, and its implicit presumption that an Iran in the possession of nuclear weapons would be any greater menace to the Middle East and the world than Israel itself.

SUPPORTING DEMOCRACY — BUT NOT DEMOCRATICALLY ELECTED GOVERNMENTS

The ‘missionary’ side only made matters worse. Wherever there were elections, which America claimed some credit for promoting, the wrong kind of people - ‘radical’, Islamist, nationalist and anti-American - kept winning them, or, at least, faring much better than the right, ‘moderate’ and peace-loving kind, whom democracy was supposed to have encouraged and empowered. True, in Lebanon, the ‘Cedar revolutionaries’ had won in their elections; but Hizbullah had done very well too, as had the single most popular Maronite leader, General Aoun, who then proceeded - shortly after being received by neoconservatives in Washington - to enter into a formal alliance with it. In Iraq, it was Islamists, notably Iran-friendly Shiite ones, who came out on top, not the secular modernists the Americans had been counting on. In Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood achieved remarkable gains in the face of severe obstructionism. But the most spectacular upset was the Hamas victory in the West Bank and Gaza. Although this actually constituted the most exemplary, authentic and peaceable rotation of power in recent Arab history, Bush was aghast. ‘We support democracy‘, he said, ‘but that doesn’t mean we have to support governments elected as a result of democracy’; and his Administration set in motion nefarious and decidedly undemocratic schemes to achieve ‘egime change’ in reverse. America’s adversaries, Iran and Syria, were no great democrats themselves, but, ironically, it was they that the Hamas triumph strengthened, America’s ‘moderate’ friends that it weakened. Calling it ‘proof that God’s promises come true‘, Iran once more cast itself as the stoutest champion of the Arabs’ most sacred cause.⁸⁵ For Israel, on the other hand, Iran and Syria, Hizbullah and Hamas, were now forging a ‘new terror axis’ that could trigger ‘the first world war of the twenty-first century’.⁸⁶

What was to be done? Nothing - neither carrots nor sticks - worked with Iran, and nothing probably ever would, short of a ‘grand bargain’ involving American acceptance of the legitimacy of the Islamic Republic. The mullahs seemed to be ready for one, but the Bush Administration clearly was not. So was it not time to resort to military means, to the ‘pre-emptive’ force ever central to neoconservative/ Israeli doctrine? By the spring of 2006, it looked as though it was. Fears of an imminent US strike were at their height. The British government, America’s partner in Iraq, was said to believe that war was now ‘inevitable’.⁸⁷ Some even said that, with US ‘special forces’ active inside the country, war had already begun. Pundits debated what form the full-blown assault would take. Would it be limited to hits on nuclear-related sites, or a sustained assault against a much wider range of political and military targets, Revolutionary Guards, intelligence departments or even leaders of the regime itself? Another burning question: might ‘bunker-busting’ tactical nukes have to be used against installations that were dispersed around the country and buried up to twenty-five metres deep, beneath reinforced concrete and earth?⁸⁸

Had it actually come to war, said Scott Ritter, the former UN arms inspector, it would have been ‘a war ... made in Israel and nowhere else’, even more flagrantly than it had been in the case of Iraq.⁸⁹ And the plain fact was that Israel, and the ‘friends of Israel’ in the US, were now putting immense pressure on the Administration to take immediate action, and intimating, with more than a hint of blackmail, that if the US did not do the job, Israel might take it on itself — come what may for both.

But war did not come. In fact, even as they mounted, these expectations of an attack generated a counter-current of profound scepticism. Was it really possible that, after the fiasco of Iraq, President Bush would, as many put it, be ‘mad enough’ to risk another one by attacking the infinitely more formidable Iran? Would the US Army, already restive, or the general public stand for it?⁹⁰ Experts like retired Air Force colonel Sam Gardiner were unequivocal. War games he had conducted left him with ‘two simple sentences for policymakers: You have no military solution for the issues of Iran. And you have to make diplomacy work.‘⁹¹ Other such exercises similarly concluded that Iranian retaliation could indeed be quite as ‘devastating’ as its leaders repeatedly threatened that it would be. With their Russian-built, ‘Sunburn’ anti-ship cruise missile, by far the world’s most advanced weapon of the kind, they could turn the Persian Gulf into a death trap for the US fleet, causing its confined, shallow, manoeuvre-impeding waters to ‘run red with American blood’.⁹² They could launch missile barrages against US forces in Iraq, then engage them on the ground, through Iranian para-military forces infiltrated into the country or, irony of ironies, through the pro-Iranian Iraqi militias patronized by the American-backed, Shiite-dominated Iraqi government itself. They could close the Straits of Hormuz, depriving the world of two-fifths of its oil supplies, and push the price of crude to stratospheric heights. And, of course, they could get Hizbullah to unleash its arsenal of missiles on Israel.

Sure enough, the US did, all of a sudden, revert to diplomacy - relatively conciliatory diplomacy at that - joining Russia, China, Britain, Germany and France in new, collective proposals for a negotiated solution to the dispute. But by this time it had also given its blessing for a war against someone else. It cannot be said that Bush decided to let Israel attack Hizbullah for the sole, simple reason that, for the time being at least, he himself had developed cold feet about attacking Iran. But it would have been quite logical if he had; if, in other words, instead of the US going after the main enemy, it delegated its protégé to go after the subsidiary one. After all, those missiles poised to rain down on Israel which Nasrallah called Lebanon’s ‘deterrent’ were effectively Iran’s too. Mindful of domestic Lebanese sensibilities, Hizbullah pooh-poohed the idea that, if Iran were attacked, it would react on its behalf,⁹³ but it was pretty clear to everyone that it very well might. For Israel, therefore, destroying Hizbullah would not only be an inestimable gain in itself, but a great strategic and psychological blow to its patron, rendering an eventual assault on it significantly less hazardous than it would otherwise have been. Nor could it be said - from the evidence so far available - that Israel, with US connivance, was actively conspiring to provoke this war, not, at least, to the extent that it had the last one, the Fifth Arab-Israeli War of 1982.⁹⁴

A WAR WAITING TO HAPPEN

What can be said, however, is that this, the Sixth in the series, was a war waiting to happen, or, as British scholar Fred Halliday put it, a ‘regional conflict long planned, if suddenly, almost casually, detonated‘.⁹⁵ ‘Of all Israel’s wars since 1948’, said Gerald Steinberg of Israel’s Bar-Ilan University, ‘this was the one for which Israel was most prepared. In a sense, the preparation began in May 2000, immediately after the Israeli withdrawal ...’⁹⁶ The US knew of Israel’s plans at least a year beforehand; in Powerpoint presentations to diplomats, journalists and think tanks, a senior Israeli officer had been laying them out in ‘revealing detail’.⁹⁷ In the summer of 2006 several Israeli officials went to Washington to get ‘a green light’ for ‘a bombing operation’ and, with the help of two high-powered neoconservatives in the White House, they soon secured it from Bush himself.⁹⁸ In fact, the Administration had already been ‘agitating for some time ... for a preemptive blow against Hizbollah’, realizing, however, that Israel would have to be the one to administer it. According to Seymour Hersh, the renowned investigative reporter, the Bush Administration was chiefly interested in an Israeli attack as the prelude to an American strike on Iran; the way Israel ‘hunt[ed] down and bomb[ed] missiles, tunnels and bunkers from the air ... would be a demo for Iran’. Bush had another objective too. Lebanon’s Western-backed government had failed to dismantle Hizbullah by persuasion. Getting that done by force should enable it to assert its authority over the whole country, then turn it into a model of ‘freedom and democracy’ in the Middle East.⁹⁹ In this connection, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, not Israeli Prime Minister Olmert, was said to be the ‘the leading figure’ in ‘the strategy of changing the situation in Lebanon’.¹⁰⁰ Furthermore, the Administration was in a hurry for the Israelis to act. ‘Look,’ they were told, ‘if you guys have to go, we’re behind you all the way. But we think it should be sooner rather than later - the longer you wait, the less time we have to evaluate and plan for Iran before Bush leaves office.‘¹⁰¹ Having already decided that he would respond to any kidnapping of Israeli soldiers with ‘a broad military operation‘,¹⁰² all that Olmert needed was a pretext. And on 12 July 2006 Hizbullah furnished it. ‘The War with Iran has Begun’, ran the next morning’s headline in one of New York’s more extravagantly pro-Israel newspapers.¹⁰³