Early reports suggest that establishing a MNF in Lebanon is pure fantasy … It seems a ridiculous proposition unless Israel is prepared to severly degrade Hizbullah’s capacities, which is impossible unless it plans to kill tens of thousands of Lebanese. Perhaps it is all political cover for the Israeli onslaught — something for Rice to do — but really it is quite obvious that there is no end game here for the Israelis or the Americans, which makes everything all the more dangerous …
A number of those in the comments section have objected to Bechir including reports of various groups taking arms and a report indicating that a number of LF members had been arrested for passing information to Israel. To be sure, I can understand the hostility and/or disdain some might feel toward the mere mention of such reports/rumors and appreciate how they might rankle some as paranoid or malicious or stale or tired or hyprocritical or all of the above …
However, it seems naive not to recognize the enormous pressure that is about to brought to bear on Lebanon and Rice’s visit is just the start. Indeed, it will make the current onslaught seem mild. The future is becoming quite clear: Israel will become more and more militarily involved in Lebanon in the coming weeks and this mission creep will bring enormous devastation and enormous pressure on pre-existant Lebanese divisions …
In a re-run of days long past, Israel will begin to get involved Lebanese politics as it knows that it cannot disarm Hizbullah by itself … Israel will be debating whether or not it can trust the Lebanese government to disarm Hizbullah and deploy to the South or whether or not it should try to force a Multinational Force to come to Lebanon. Weighing these option is an impossible task for the Israelis as it depends to much of the course of events. Moreover, they have failed at this before and will likely again.
If Israel places its trust in the GOL, it will probably ask the Americans and the Saudis to take the lead in engaging Lebanese parties directly, but to have this succeed the Israelis will need to put the brakes on its military machine. It is hard to imagine Hizbullah or other resistance parties being willing to compromise with the government while still in-tact militarily but also while the Israelis are attacking their towns and villages (the idea of cease-fire being a prerequisit for any agreement). Support for Hizbullah and the resistance is likely strong enough that the Israelis will give up on this option when they begin to sense that Hizbullah will not likely fade in the face of this Israeli-American-Saudi pressure even if it comes with a Lebanese face and with considerable support from some Lebanese …
Having lost faith in this option, Israel will then likely seek to create conditions for a multinational force. To achieve this goal, it will attempt to wreak destruction by two means: more aggressively destroying Lebanon and/or playing on Lebanon’s divisions such that it induces a collapse of the government and possibly a civil war … Nothing will bring a force quicker than utter chaos as it will melt away Arab opposition to such a scenario …
The stakes are high and whatever frustrations are currently simmering will have a great deal of heat applied to them … To think that things will not get worse is beyond optimistic … Just listen to the Israelis shifts on what they are doing in Lebanon and why …
Some have accused this blog of engaging in “infantile rumors” or of suffering from a “complexe du chrétien bourgeois khomeyniste et anti-américain” or of being acolytes of the likes of Assem Qanso or Nasser Kandil or of being dilettantes of the “genre City Cafe” (although I must say it has been too long and too many scotch whiskeys for me to know if I have ever been there or what the hell that means) … I can appreciate the sentiment as we are often of too like a mind on a great many issues, and we are perhaps guilty at times of a sort of false solmenity and a nagging narcissism of the beyond bourgeious variety …
HOWEVER, our perspective is grounded in our sense of the horrible weight that is about to placed on Lebanon and thus we are both a bit terrified of the death and destruction that might come with it … And it is not based on what we think Lebanon should look like in the future … I myself support disarming Hizbullah, but doing so under foreign pressure is a recipe for utter disaster … I would also add that fears that a Hizbullah victory will somehow plunge Lebanon into the darkness (the axis of evil, muslim dominion, whatever) are misplaced as this is not Lebanon either and underestimates the forces, talents and realities of Lebanon that will never allow this to happen. I do not doubt that Hizbullah can be as venal and power-hungry as any other party in Lebanon, so it is not blind faith in the party that leads me to this conclusion. It is the Lebanese themselves, regardless of their political orientation. (Although I would add at the risk of being criticized that Nasrallah is the very image of Lebanese patience, sophistication, and cunning and I imagine it would be quite fun to hear his stories of dealing with some of the stone-age cretins he must come across when travelling to Iran and across the clerical world and hearing about his dealing with the cold-war, cold-brain miscreants within the Syrian Leviathan).
We, authors, are not without our ideological precommittments or intellectual impediments, but our support for Hizbullah does not spring from our long admiration of the group or our synchronicity with its different political objectives or our disdain of all things related to other Lebanese factions or the Independence05 movement (indeed, I myself, probably more than Bechir, have sympathies with the March 14 movement and some of long-held grievances of LF supporters) …… NO … Instead, I believe it is the only national position that will save Lebanon from horrors in the days to come…
Yes, Hizbullah’s gamble has cost Lebanon greatly in the last two weeks, and yes, in a perfect world, Hizbullah should not be allowed to make decisions of war and peace that affect all of Lebanon, and no, Hizbullah does not deserve some super-status within Lebanese politics that puts it above reproach as truly the party of god …
Mais, les jeux sont faits … and only a Hizbullah victory will prevent the Americans and the Israelis from trying to impose their order on Lebanon — an effort that I believe will result in a civil war … In a sense, perhaps the issues of the arms could only be settled this way so that parties know the exact dimensions of the issues at hand …
Between the possible destinies awaiting Lebanon, I believe a civil war is the worst and I see a Hizbullah victory as the only way to avoid such a possibility. To be sure, a stalemate with the Israelis is victory. But it will be difficult for the Israelis to accept any scenario where they cannot leave Lebanon and tell a story of victory over terrorism back home, so we are talking about enormous costs for Lebanon … But these costs pale in comparison to other possibilities …
Maybe I am wrong, but one need only look to Iraq to know that the Americans will tolerate a failed state if they feel the costs of ensuring success are too high domestically. Israel is no different and thus would be happy to call on the Syrians, who will undoubtedly sit on the sidelines, waiting to play whatever hand it is dealt and willing to return to lines drawn long ago …
For myself, it is really a question of revisiting the civil war … Not to oversimplify or ignore how the following can be used as a political or intellectual weapon, but the old question returns: Will the Lebanese body politic resist foreign temptation or will it turn in on and against itself … These are questions the Independence05 movement could never begin to address … It is no wonder their only source of unity was 1559 and an appreciation of how far Hariri money could go in creating a slim majority in Parliament … That is not to undermine the legitimacy of some of their positions, but the whole of Lebanon is about to come under fire … And neither the US, nor the Arab World, nor the Saudis, nor the French, nor the international community, nor the Syrians, nor the Iranians, nor anybody else will protect Lebanon from catching fire …
Thus, while one can expect and even appreciate some political differences, such differences will be the strands by which others will attempt to unravel Lebanon … And it this fear that motivates Bechir and me, not any conviction concerning the rightness of our position or any hatred of contrary views or any desire to score points in some imaginary intellectual game … How to balance these differences is, of course, the key and we seem to be erring on the side of caution in this respect, perhaps grieviously so according to some of our critics … Fortunately, this is just a blog, Bechir and I are merely releasing some excess psychic energy and not plotting the future course of the Lebanese nation from our seats in Parliament …
But, if we are guilty of anything (in my advanced age, I suffer from an arthritis of the mind that does not yet effect a younger bechir), it is not that we are apparatchiks of some ill-defined “third worldism,” but it rather too aware of frailty: first and foremost, our own, and secondarily, that which we see in others …
My apologies to Bechir, if I have misstated his position ….
Remarkz 