Hope Over Hate: A Lebanon Diary

Before departing for Lebanon, the traveler who has been in Israel should purge himself of any evidence of having stepped foot in the Jewish state, from bus tickets and loose change to the notepad with Hebrew writing on the spine. The voyage from Jerusalem to Beirut could take, under different circumstances, four hours by car or forty-five minutes by air—the two cities are less than 250 kilometers apart—but today it involves a daylong travail of buses, taxies, aircraft, the duplicitous use of two passports, and the making of false statements to Lebanese customs officials.

Lebanon, like all but two nations in the Middle East, permits entry only to persons with passports free of any indication that Israel has been visited. But this sign of extremism should not be a diversion from the real Lebanon: While other nations indulge in this kind of practice with great satisfaction, many Lebanese find it ridiculous, one of the many reminders of Syria’s nefarious influence. One must also resist being distracted on the short flight from Amman to Beirut, where the theme of Israel-denial is again nourished, this time by way of the television screens that unfold from the cabin’s ceiling. A map of the eastern Mediterranean shows the aircraft’s progress toward its destination, dotted with the various cities of the region, such as Cairo, Amman, Tyre, Damascus, and Nablus—but missing are Tel Aviv, Haifa, Netanya, or in fact any city located within the borders of Israel. This is standard practice among the Muslim and Arab nations of the region, and it is one of the smaller ostentations of the ideology that requires the refusal to accept Israel’s existence in the Middle East.

Lebanon today is either closer than it has ever been in recent history to its liberal dreams, or the farthest away. In the past two years it has been the recipient of a rush of foreign investment, media attention, and diplomatic interest—but it has also been the recipient of unprecedented sums of Iranian money and strategic attention, in the form of around $100 million per year paid to Hezbollah, and a complementary Syrian effort to restore its suzerainty. Lebanon is a territory from which much larger nations are waging war by proxy, and it is the outcome of these battles that will largely set the country’s course.

 

After landing in Beirut and making my way past a thankfully uninquisitive customs agent, a taxi took me to a hotel in the Achrafieh neighborhood of East Beirut. On the way, the cab had to wend through the streets (the ones that remained open) along the outskirts of the menacing conglomeration of Shia Hezbollah and Christian Aounist partisans who had struck camp in the open areas of downtown Beirut, shutting down the most economically vibrant (and Westernized) part of the city. These two factions had gathered in Beirut in a hasty marriage of convenience, having calculated that their chances of destabilizing the Lebanese government under Prime Minister Fouad Siniora—their only common interest—were better if they stuck together, no matter how temporarily or improbably.

Even in the nighttime darkness and from within the trawling taxi, the scene in Beirut was classic Arab street theater, with loudspeakers that sent anti-Siniora tirades echoing off the walls of downtown buildings. But there was a telling homage to the presence of Western television cameras: While Lebanon remains a country in which the various ethnic and religious groups defiantly brandish the flags of their sects, almost all of the flags on display in downtown Beirut were the Lebanese national model, with two horizontal top-and-bottom stripes of red with a green cedar tree against a middle stripe of white; during the big rallies, the sectarian flags of Hezbollah and the Aounists were sheathed, obviously in an attempt to deceive observers into believing that the slow-motion coup being attempted was somehow on behalf of Lebanese sovereignty, or an expression of Lebanese patriotism. The “protesters”—a surly mixture of venal freelancers, ignorant fellow travelers, true believers, and cynical calculators of the political winds—attempted to cultivate the most familiar and idealistic image possible for the cameras that would capture their agitation and beam it westward: That of the 1960s protest movement. They referred to their campaign of destabilization as a “sit-in” and a “demonstration” against “injustice.”

On this portentous Mediterranean night, I found Michael Totten, the foreign-correspondent blogger and journalist, awaiting my arrival in his hotel room, a few blocks from the downtown scene. Totten, who is lanky, stubbled, and rarely to be found without his Nikon D200 hanging from his neck, lived in Lebanon for much of 2005 and earned his popularity covering the Cedar Revolution and its salubrious aftermath; he is a self-created combination of reporter, pundit, and photographer, and in this regard his work conspicuously diverges from that of the “mainstream media,” which insist, with diminishing credibility, on the objectivity of their offerings. His reporting is inquisitive and transparent, and his ability to work in Lebanon is both a reflection of and a contributor to the country’s openness. Totten is one of the few independent journalists who has made a career blogging from foreign lands, and in this he provides an answer to a charge that mainstream journalists levy with some credibility against bloggers: That they use traditional reportage as the foundation for their commentary, that they are, in the journalistic hierarchy, effectively parasites.

We hadn’t seen each other since the Israel-Hezbollah war in the summer of 2006, which Totten covered from the Israeli side of the border. The war for him had elicited conflicting feelings: He was despondent at the bombing of his beloved Lebanon, or, I should say, despondent at the bombing of non-Hezbollah Lebanon and the anti-Israel animosity it provoked among the Lebanese groups who are natural, if not yet realized, Israeli allies in both their common Islamist enemy and their shared Western culture. (Several Lebanese Christians told us that in the opening days of the war they took to their rooftops to gleefully watch Israel’s bombardment of the Dahiya, Hezbollah’s headquarters in southern Beirut—but turned against Israel when its bombs started falling on infrastructure in Christian regions.) Totten, like so many Lebanese, had fervently hoped that the war would decisively cripple Hezbollah in the struggle for power that defines Lebanese politics, and thereby apply another layer of finality to the accomplishments of the Cedar Revolution.

Now, five months after the war, amidst Hezbollah’s (quite glaringly porous) containment by UNIFIL in the South, the ambiguous outcome of the summer war, and the upcoming formation of a commission of inquiry into the assassination of Prime Minister Rafik Al-Hariri, Hezbollah was attempting to assert both its relevance in Lebanon and the continued salience of its Syrian and Iranian patrons, principally by manufacturing instability and violence. Two weeks before my visit the prominent Christian politician, cabinet member, and son of the former president, Pierre Gemayel, had been assassinated, execution-style, in the streets of Beirut: Several gunmen had boxed in his car and emptied their automatic weapons into his body. Syria has perfected a particularly audacious art of intimidation that serves both to eliminate existing liberalizers and to terrify any potential replacements. Aside from intimidating the anti-Syrian coalition, the elimination of Gemayel, and thereby his cabinet seat, helped to expedite the destabilization of the Lebanese government, which must be dissolved and reconstituted should one-third of its twenty-four-member cabinet become unable to serve. Following the assassination, Hezbollah’s five cabinet members resigned (plus one Aounist), leaving the Lebanese government with a threadbare two-person cushion against dissolution. For all of these reasons, the Iranian-Syrian axis was desperate to push Lebanon as far as possible toward the brink, topple or marginalize the government, and re-assert Hezbollah’s primary role, which is to serve as Iran’s crisis-creator and deterrent capability in the eastern Mediterranean.

The morning after arriving in Beirut, Totten and I headed for the large section of downtown that had been taken over by anti-government agitators. Beirut’s neighborhoods are decorated with poster-size portraits of Lebanese political figures, which are routinely defaced and refreshed according to political events. On this day, and in this Christian area, almost every picture of Michel Aoun, the Free Patriotic Movement leader, had its eyes either scratched out or spray-painted. New posters of Gemayel were everywhere. The scene downtown was like a carnival, with vendors selling Hezbollah flags, key chains, scarves, and food to the thousands who had pitched tents and set up their occupation of downtown. The ostentatious display of the Lebanese flag—the one that represents a sovereign country—was hard to find outside the moments of mass rallying that attracted so much international media attention. Instead, cars were decorated with Hassan Nasrallah posters taped to the inside of their windows, the imported protestors ambled about draped in various types of Hezbollah apparel, and flags from a half-dozen fractious Lebanese groups, some with only a few hundred followers nationwide, were displayed from clusters of tents. Just about every atavistic platoon of the Lebanese political spectrum was putting in an appearance. Nervous Lebanese soldiers were stationed throughout the city, usually in close proximity to their armored personnel carriers, while hedgerows of concertina wire blocked off certain streets and sensitive areas from colonization by the visitors from the south. A sound system worthy of an arena heavy-metal concert sent an oppressively loud Wagnerian Islamist cacophony thundering across the encampment. The state-within-a-state reality of Hezbollah was conspicuous here: Once past the Lebanese army checkpoints at the outermost perimeter of downtown, to reach the main event one had to pass through another set of checkpoints, these guarded by humorless Hezbollah agents wearing black baseball caps and earpieces, trying very self-consciously to look as gravely serious as possible. At one point I asked a member of the Party of God, shouting to be heard over the echoing death music, if I had finally found the Rolling Stones concert, but he refused to answer, probably unable to grasp my post-modern irony.

 

It became clear to both my companion and me that Hezbollah, strategically speaking, was cornering itself. It was tied down, if temporarily, in the South; the non-Shia (and even many Shia) detested it for instigating a month of Israeli bombardment, and now, a few months after the war, it was attempting to bring maximum pressure to bear on the government, albeit non-violently. If the government refused to budge, what card did Nasrallah have left to play other than violence? This was also the view of Toni Nissi, the coordinator of the Lebanese Committee for UNSCR 1559, an NGO that advises and lobbies both the Lebanese government and the international community for the disarmament of militias in Lebanon, as required by United Nations Resolution 1559. Nissi is a canny, pro-Western observer of Lebanese politics—Nasrallah once denounced him as “the Beirut branch of the Mossad”—and one evening Totten and I interviewed him in his Beirut office. Nissi, like many in his camp, had pushed hard last summer for a war-ending UN resolution that would fall under Chapter 7 authority. A Chapter 7 resolution would have brought soldiers into southern Lebanon to disarm Hezbollah under the command of the United Nations. The significantly weaker resolution that initiated the cease-fire—Resolution 1701—was under Chapter 6 authority, which meant that, in Nissi’s words, “If the international community wants to act against Hezbollah they have to have the permission of the Lebanese government. They have to wait for the Lebanese government to order them. Under Chapter 7 the international community acts alone, like what happened in Kosovo.”

Nissi and his allies know that the Lebanese army is in no position to disarm Hezbollah, making Resolution 1701, to no small degree, a dead letter. And so the Lebanese government’s best strategy was to react to the increasingly feverish downtown by remaining serene and unprovoked. If Hezbollah’s role in Lebanon was in part to exert pressure that would help push the United States and other liberalizers out of the Middle East, an unprovoked act of war by Hezbollah against the Lebanese government risked inviting more, not less, Western intervention. And if Nasrallah wasn’t willing to stage a riot in downtown Beirut, how would he climb down from his apogee of confrontation without looking weak and ridiculous? Nissi’s answer: “Nasrallah doesn’t know what to do tomorrow.”

With downtown Beirut percolating aimlessly, Totten and I ventured south, with the aim of reaching Bint Jbeil, the Hezbollah stronghold on the Israeli border that during the summer war was the scene of several intense ground battles and a great deal of bombardment. Two Lebanese Christians, veterans of the Lebanese Forces army, accompanied us through the villages of the Shia south. There is no border separating this region from the rest of the country, but crossing the threshold is unmistakable; the first Shia towns are only an hour’s drive away but are as similar to Beirut as Jenin is to Tel Aviv. As we descended from Beirut into a landscape whose terrain is almost indistinguishable from northern Israel’s, the destruction from the summer war became increasingly apparent. But this was not the kind of demolition that sensationalistic media images convinced people had happened. To the contrary, in evidence was what could be called surgical obliteration, a result of precision munitions put at the service of detailed intelligence. “What shocked Hezbollah the most,” one Lebanese source told me, “was that within the opening hours of the war, Israel destroyed every one of its mid- and long-range missiles. Those were Hezbollah’s most prized weapons, and they were stunned that Israel knew where every one of them had been hidden.” Individual bridges and buildings were effectively plucked from the landscape, as if construction crews had arrived one day and quickly dismantled the offending structures. What remained was, in all but a very few instances, Shia villages that were largely untouched by the war, although the same cannot be said for southern Lebanon’s roads, bridges, and highways, which were bombed quite thoroughly.

Our car passed into another Shia town, this time under a banner emblazoned with a dramatic Arabic script, and I asked our driver what it said. “It’s a quote from the Koran celebrating martyrdom.” I made a trite remark about the Shia obsession with victimhood, and he replied, “The best way is to change them into real victims. This way they won’t be liars.” He laughed. The sad and self-reinforcing aspect of the Iranian-sponsored Shia cult of victimhood is the manner in which the religious politburo promotes martyrdom to its followers, and then uses the predictable result of dead martyrs as more evidence of the world’s injustice toward the Shia, and of the need for more martyrs. This is a gruesomely tautological theology.

 

Our final southern destination was Bint Jbeil, which before the war served as a hub of Hezbollah activity and today is more like a parking lot. In the other parts of southern Lebanon, there was curiously little rubble on display. As one of our Lebanese sources explained to us, in its southern stronghold Hezbollah had set about quickly cleaning up the post-war wreckage, leaving smooth foundations in place of wrecked buildings in an attempt to save face among the populace and downplay the destruction that Hezbollah had brought upon them. But in Bint Jbeil, there had not been much cleanup, and the devastation was stunning; the outer ring of the city had been less thoroughly bombed, but in the center there were only a handful of structures that even remained standing, much less intact. It had become a moonscape of pulverized rock. Arriving in the center, we parked the car atop a field of plowed-smooth debris and set out on foot to take in the scene. A Hezbollah watcher hurried over to ask what we were doing, and our Lebanese escorts explained that Totten and I were “international journalists documenting the Zionist destruction of our country.” The Hezbollah man credulously nodded his approval.

His town looked like Dresden. For Westerners who think that the only acceptable reaction to such a scene is horror and regret, the proper emotion upon arriving in the center of Bint Jbeil would have been to recoil in dismay, to be taken aback by the sheer magnitude of violence that had been delivered, to solemnly reflect on the senselessness of it all. But despite sorrow at the loss of innocent life, I did not feel fear or repulsion. It was something much closer to awe: At the devastation, and at the feeling that the piles of rubble and crumbling Party of God buildings were in large part monuments to Israel’s refusal to let Hezbollah’s July provocation go unanswered. I understood that every day since the war, and for many months to come, Hezbollah’s prideful warriors would be surrounded by this destruction, would hear the rubble crunching under their feet as they walked, would taste the dust that filled their mouths as they breathed. I wished that every Israeli could experience the feeling that had come over me; from Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, it looked as if the war had ended ambiguously. Not in Bint Jbeil.

 

Southern Lebanon is not uniformly Shia. It is scattered with a few enduring Christian villages, one of which, named Ain Ebel, sits near Bint Jbeil, and is a Hezbollah-free zone. This town is spread across the northern-facing slope of one of the area’s many smooth, undulating hillsides, and from the top of this hill, where a few houses stand, the Israeli border is easily visible in the distance below. Many of the houses in the town, especially the ones closest to the hilltop, were badly damaged by Israeli bombardment during the war, seemingly confirming the charge that Israel had targeted civilians, or at least that the Israel Defense Forces attacked Lebanon indiscriminately. But that is not the reality of Ain Ebel: Israel did not lay siege to the town—Hezbollah did, and the manner in which it went about doing so should clarify the true cynical brilliance of Hezbollah’s asymmetric tactics.

The residents of Ain Ebel, in several different interviews, explained to us that at the outset of the war, Hezbollah transported a number of rocket launchers into the village and set them up for use as close to civilian houses as possible. Meanwhile, Israel was dropping leaflets over most of southern Lebanon urging civilians to evacuate (many of these leaflets were still visible, blown into countryside ditches and brambles). When the air campaign started, Hezbollah blocked the roads leading out of Ain Ebel, preventing civilians from fleeing, and on one occasion even opened fire on a caravan of evacuees, forcing them to return to their homes. With many of its residents trapped in the town, Hezbollah ignored the abundant open spaces in Ain Ebel, and fired rockets instead from within meters of civilian houses, drawing Israeli fire onto the village. As we surveyed Ain Ebel’s houses, many in varying states of reconstruction, I had to grudgingly admire this clever way of waging war against modern Western armies, when the combination of our precision munitions, a media that treats Western militaries with skepticism, and the expectation of morally perfect warfare have made civilian casualties one of the most dominant points of contention in warfare.

From Hezbollah’s perspective, premeditating the creation of civilian casualties makes perfect sense: It ensures the highest possible rate of return for the Katyusha rocket, insofar as it is turned into a weapon that can be used to kill both Lebanese and Israelis. More importantly, I realized, it accomplished something stunning in that it allowed an inferior power to use its adversary’s superior weaponry to carry out its own battlefield strategy. In Ain Ebel and elsewhere, Hezbollah was in effect aiming Israeli firepower, directing its missiles and artillery onto Hezbollah’s preferred targets—houses, hospitals, apartment buildings, anywhere civilians could be found—knowing that Israel would be punished by the ensuing international outrage. Scenes of civilian death and destruction are irresistible for the Western image media, and the course of the summer war was affected perhaps like none before it by the manner in which the spectacle of dead Lebanese galvanized anti-Israel actors. Many people refer to Hezbollah’s tactic as the use of “human shields,” but this gets it exactly backward: It implies that Hezbollah was trying to protect its assets by using civilians to deter an Israeli attack. In fact, Hezbollah was trying to provoke Israeli bombardment so that both human lives and infrastructure would be destroyed, and the Party of God could enjoy the resulting moral absolution. In this way, Hezbollah achieved its greatest victory in the war, which was its ability to transform the narrative of the conflict from one in which Israel was defending itself from attack by a terrorist organization to one in which Israel was barbarically laying waste to civilian Lebanon. During the war, a Lebanese Shia unfriendly to Hezbollah wrote a letter to the editor of a German newspaper that was circulated widely. It should eliminate any doubt about the self-consciousness of Hezbollah’s civilian-casualties strategy:

How can a country like Israel defend itself under these circumstances?

 

It is easy enough to be dispirited by Lebanon, to see a bleak future. It is a country that in recent history has never been in control of itself. There has not been a government with anything approaching a monopoly on the use of force, or a government whose power geographically extended throughout Lebanon, and there has never been the kind of consensus on fundamental questions that Western nations more or less take for granted as the foundational characteristics of their societies. Lebanon suffers from so much diversity that consensus seems impossible, and the result is the perpetual struggle for power that occurs among its rival ethnic and religious groups. How can a state cohere when one of the largest factions seeks to impose sharia law, and another wouldn’t mind topless beaches?

Three decades of civil war and Syrian dominance have diminished and marginalized Lebanon, as compared to its halcyon days as the most prosperous and elegant Middle Eastern nation. Lebanon’s sects have always had their foreign patrons—for the Christians, France, the Sunnis, Saudi Arabia, the Shia, first the Soviet Union (by way of Syria) and today Iran—but today, Lebanon’s problem is that many of its foreign patrons regard its existence as symbolically important, whereas Iran views it as strategically vital. For Iran, controlling Lebanon is a means of pursuing four major ambitions: Creating ideological and strategic momentum, deterring an Israeli or American attack, extending the geographic contiguity of its alliances in Iraq and Syria, and delivering a defeat to the American democratization project that upholds the Cedar Revolution as an exemplary success. But this central problem—an expansionist Iran—may also contain the glimmer of a solution.

Because Iran functions as a matrix from which money, arms, and ideology flow to other parts of the Middle East, the Western forces allied in clear opposition to Iran—so far, America and Israel—must be willing to challenge it on every new front that it opens, with the understanding that in this ideological war, every battle is symbolic and every bit of symbolism represents a battle that is either won or lost. If the West wishes to show Iran that its nuclear program, its fomenting of the insurgency in Iraq, and its patronage of Hamas will not be tolerated (Iran recently surpassed the European Union as the Palestinian Authority’s biggest donor), it must engage every one of Iran’s proxy wars with strategic clarity. One place to start—a place in which an organic and longstanding pro-Western sentiment is widespread—is in a muscular defense of Lebanese sovereignty. Almost twenty-five years ago, Michael Ledeen wrote a long analysis in Commentary about the 1982 Israeli invasion entitled “The Lesson of Lebanon.” In explaining the final disposition of American involvement in post-invasion Lebanon, Ledeen concluded that “In the end, as so often happens, the one country in the area that knew what it wanted—Syria–prevailed.” Today, Syria still knows what it wants, and unlike in the era that Ledeen documents, it enjoys an alliance with an Iran that also has unambiguous ambitions. To prevent them from realizing these ambitions, Lebanon’s Western allies must act with a similar clarity—or Lebanon will be subject to the same fate that befell it in the 1980s.

Before visiting Lebanon, I never quite understood the phenomenon in which so many people I know and like visited the country and quickly formed intense bonds of affection for it. But when it came time to return to its southern neighbor, I found myself in sympathy with this infatuation; for me, it involved an admiration for the patriotism, determination, and physical bravery of the Lebanese who obdurately refuse to be ruled by foreign powers and Islamists. I met many Lebanese whose talent and ambition could have brought them to the United States or any number of other safe and prosperous countries. But in Lebanon, they are members of a remnant that prefers to stay and fight—and they deserve recognition and support from every country that identifies with the cause of the West.

When I left the Beirut throng to set out for Rafik Al-Hariri International Airport, the taxi driver took me through the Hezbollah-saturated southern suburbs, and along the main north-south highway. Beirut was still simmering with protesters, and their downtown ranks were being enlarged with freshly imported agitators. The northbound side of the highway was congested with buses and pickup trucks overflowing with Hezbollah sympathizers, most of them the ignorant, paid-off dupes of cynical men who act as local marionettes and cash distributors for Iran. It will be a wonderful day when this menace is gone and an Israeli passport is no barrier to Lebanon’s sunny shores.