Bush Tour Diminished by Hezbollah Show of Force
May 15, 2008
Jim Lobe, the best US investigative journalist, on Hizbullah foiling the latest Cheney-Neocon plan for the Middle East.
WASHINGTON – While this week’s trip by President George W. Bush to Israel, Saudi Arabia and Egypt was never conceived as a triumphant “victory lap” around the region, the swift rout of U.S.-backed forces by Lebanon’s Hezbollah Friday has provided yet another vivid illustration of the rapid decline in Washington’s influence in the Middle East during his tenure.
The events in Lebanon will no doubt cast a long shadow over Bush’s tour, which begins Tuesday. After all, it was only three years ago that he hailed the “Cedar Revolution” there as vindication of the kind of democratic transformation of the region that he insisted the invasion of Iraq was designed to launch.
Three years and a brief war between Israel and Hezbollah later, the Iranian- and Syrian-backed group appears more powerful and entrenched than ever, just as its Sunni Islamist ally in the Palestinian Territories (PT), Hamas, remains solidly in control of Gaza and grows in popularity in the West Bank in major part due to the apparent lack of progress in peace talks — formally initiated by Bush himself at Annapolis last November — between the Palestinian Authority (PA) and the Israeli government.
“The politics on the ground are absolutely miserable,” Jon Alterman, a Middle East specialist at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) here, told the New York Times Sunday. “It’s hard to remember a less auspicious time to pursue Arab-Israeli peacemaking than right now. U.S. power and influence are at low ebb in the region,” he added.
Bush will travel to Israel Tuesday to help it celebrate the 60th anniversary of its founding and then fly on to Saudi Arabia, presumably to appeal — as he did in January when he last traveled to the region — for a major increase in oil production to bring some relief to U.S. (and Republican candidates), and then to Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, where he will address the World Economic Forum and meet with a collection of Sunni Arab leaders, including Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and Jordanian King Abdullah.
Apart from Israel, to which Bush has been by far the most indulgent president in the Jewish state’s history, he is likely to get his warmest — if most anxious — reception when he meets with the assembled Sunni leaders, many of whom are as concerned about Shi’a Hezbollah’s show of force as is Israel.
Like Bush himself, not to mention Israel, they see Hezbollah’s victory as another in a series of advances by Iran in its effort to shift the balance of power in the Gulf and the wider region against Washington and its allies there. It is an impression that Bush, somewhat ironically, will be eager to reinforce, if only to revive the dying embers of his hopes for a de facto U.S.-Sunni Arab-Israeli coalition against Tehran, even without a viable Israeli-Palestinian peace process.
“To me, it’s the single biggest threat to peace in the Middle East, the Iranian regime,” he told an interviewer from Israel’s TV Channel 10, according to a partial transcript released Monday. “Their funding of Hezbollah — look what’s happening in Lebanon now, a young democracy trying to survive… (I)t’s in Israel interest that the Lebanese democracy survives. You need to be concerned about Iran, and you are concerned about Iran and so are we.”
Indeed, five years after the White House declared “Mission Accomplished” on the deck of the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln, virtually all analysts here agree that almost everything Bush has done in the region — from invading Iraq and ousting Saddam Hussein and then rejecting an Iranian offer to negotiate a settlement on all outstanding issues; to pressing for the total isolation of Hamas after it won (U.S.-backed) democratic elections in the Palestinian Territories (PT) and egging on the Israelis in their attack on Lebanon and Hezbollah in 2006 — has undermined U.S. standing and influence, even as it enhanced Tehran’s.
Even in Iraq, recent U.S. attacks on Muqtada al Sadr’s “Mahdi Army”, particularly in Baghdad’s Sadr City, appear to have bolstered the government factions with the closest and most-longstanding ties to Iran — the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council (SIIC) and its Badr Organisation, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s Da’wa party.
The fact that Tehran itself played a key role in brokering the truces between Sadr and the government in both Basra last month and in Sadr City last weekend underlines the degree to which Iran is effectively challenging Washington in what neo-conservative hawk Reuel Marc Gerecht of the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) admits “is the only arena (in the region) where the administration is capable of moving effectively against Tehran.”
And while there is little evidence that Washington played any role in pushing the Lebanese cabinet to order the dismantling of Hezbollah’s communications network at Beirut’s airport — the act that provoked Friday’s offensive — its staunch support for the “March 14″ Coalition; its deployment of a U.S. naval destroyer off Lebanon’s coast as the political crisis in Beirut intensified in March; its supply of some 400 million dollars in military aid and training to the Lebanese army and security forces (which stayed out of the fighting); and its covert backing (with Saudi Arabia and Jordan) of Sunni militias, in some cases disguised as private-security firms, intended to counter Hezbollah no doubt contributed to a grave miscalculation by the government.
“These Sunni militiamen proved a complete failure, and America’s proxies in Lebanon barely put up a fight despite their strident anti-Shiite rhetoric,” noted Nir Rosen, a regional expert at the New America Foundation who described Hezbollah’s offensive as “the death throes of the Bush plan for the ‘New Middle East’.”
“Now it is clear that Beirut is firmly in the hands of Hezbollah, and nothing the Americans can do will dislodge or weaken this popular movement, just as they cannot weaken the Sadrists in Iraq or Hamas in Gaza,” he said.
Still, some observers believe Hezbollah’s victory may yet serve the administration’s ends, if only by reminding the Sunni leaders with whom Bush meets later in the week that, in Gerecht’s words again, “Tehran is on a roll”, and they need the U.S. and even Israel to contain it and roll back its influence.
Indeed, some analysts believe the weekend’s events may add to the gradually growing clamour by hawks in and outside the administration to take military action — if only, for now, limited strikes on weapons factories and training sites inside Iran allegedly used by the Revolutionary Guard to train “terrorists” in Iraq, Lebanon, and the PT — to “put Iran in its place”.
“The next couple of days may be critical,” said one former senior Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) officer with expertise on the region, who added that any decision to “strike will actually motivated by an irresistible urge, stemming from pure frustration over continuing American impotence throughout the region, just to ‘do something’…even though the actual positive gain in this case would be minimal, while the downside risks are enormous.”
Jim Lobe’s blog on U.S. foreign policy, and particularly the neo-conservative influence in the Bush administration, can be read at http://www.ips.org/blog/jimlobe/.
The US is reduced to relaying on Saudi;Jordan and some pro-US militias doing the Big Plays which is only going to accelerate the lack of US clout in the region seeing as these regimes have no clout on the ground themselves.
silly short term anti sunni suicide note?
The failure of Hezbollah’s latest effort to tilt the political and military balance in its favor was visible in the eyes of the mild inhabitants of the Shia village of Qomatiyeh on Tuesday, as they buried a young Hezbollah man killed by Druze fighters. According to the villagers, the young man, Suleiman Jaafar, was first wounded then executed by members of the Progressive Socialist Party. Such frightful ferocity will greet Hezbollah in every hostile location it would ever wish to control.
There is great poignancy in the fate of the people of Qomatiyeh. With Kayfoun, the village is one of two Shia enclaves in the predominantly Druze and Christian Aley district. The inhabitants, far more than their brethren in the southern suburbs or the South, must on a daily basis juggle between a past in which they coexisted with their non-Shia neighbors and a present and future in which the neighbors view them as an existential threat. That story written large may soon be the story of Lebanon’s Shia community after the mad coup attempt organized by Hezbollah last week. In the past decade and a half, Hezbollah has injected regional animosities and an antagonistic and totalistic ideology of confrontation into tens of thousands of Shia homes, quarters, towns and villages where such attitudes have no place. Whatever brings the Iranian concept of wilayat al-faqih – the guardianship of the jurisconsult – to Qomatiyeh? Suleiman Jaafar may have been a Hezbollah member, but he was more than anything else a village boy caught in a fight far bigger than him, than all of us.
A solution appears to have been found for the immediate crisis that began last week. The airport and roads have been opened, but there never was a way for Hezbollah to emerge successfully from the conflict it created. Militarily, the only way the party could have momentarily broken the deadlock in the mountains was to mount a massive invasion of Aley and the Chouf, using thousands of men and its most sophisticated weaponry. The Druze would have remained united – as Talal Arslan’s supporters and other Druze opposition members were united with Walid Jumblatt’s followers at the weekend. There would have been carnage, and had Hezbollah prevailed, it would have had to hold unfriendly territory indefinitely, locking down resources and manpower. Then what? An invasion of Metn? Kesrouan? Jbeil? The North? Not even the most ardent Hezbollah believer would have seriously argued that such a project was feasible. Military stalemate would have prevailed, and even if the stalemate had collapsed in one area, it would have been followed by myriad stalemates elsewhere, denying Hezbollah any real political gain.
But worse, Hezbollah’s actions of last week have brought terrible misfortune upon the Shia community. As the Christians learned to their detriment during the 1975-1990 war, fighting the Sunni community in Lebanon is tantamount to fighting the Arab world. The Northern Islamists have been awakened, and with them Sunni Islamists everywhere in the region and beyond who will rally to do battle against the apostate. As Saad Hariri said in his press conference on Wednesday, fitna, or discord between Muslims, already exists; things may still be under a measure of control, but not for long if the situation worsens. As Hariri implied, if Hezbollah chooses to break the Future Movement and the Sunni moderates, it will soon have to face the most extremist Sunnis.
The Shia community is obeying a leadership that cannot be said, in any way, to have ever understood the essence of the Lebanese system. Hezbollah and its secretary general, Hassan Nasrallah, will often insist that sectarian compromise requires handing the party, and Shia in general, veto power over political decision-making. But that’s not what the consociational system is about; the point of the sectarian arrangement is not to build a system based on mechanisms of obstruction. It is to force the different communities to reach compromises in order to avert mechanisms of obstruction. Hezbollah has repeatedly tried to ignore this by imposing its will in the street or through its guns. The result has been a gathering, strengthening alignment of adversaries that will fight hard before allowing Hezbollah or the Shia to gain hegemonic power.
But wasn’t this reaction always obvious? Apparently not to Nasrallah and his Iranian sponsors, who never had any liking for the baroque but necessary give and take of the Lebanese order – let alone respect for the retribution that has always crippled those ignoring its fundamental rules. Through its contempt for Lebanon, Hezbollah has left itself with two stark choices: either to integrate fully into the state or to control the state. But since it will or can do neither, we are in for a long and harsh standoff between Hezbollah and the rest of Lebanese society.
The clock began counting down in May 2000, when Israel withdrew from Lebanon. This threatened to deny the party its reason to exist, even though it tried to keep “resistance” alive through the Shebaa Farms front. In 2005, once the Syrians departed, everything collapsed. The party found itself having to justify its private army against a majority of Lebanese that opposed Hezbollah’s state within a state and its lasting allegiance to the Syrian regime. In 2006, as the national dialogue prepared to address the issue of Hezbollah’s weapons, Nasrallah sought to turn the tables by kidnapping Israeli soldiers and imposing his version of Hezbollah’s defense strategy on March 14. The plan backfired when Israel responded by ravaging Lebanon and the Shia in particular. And now, having fully discredited its “resistance” in the eyes of its countrymen, having ensured that an antagonistic population will be to its rear in the event of a new war with Israel, having weakened its non-Shia allies, Hezbollah, as both an idea and a driving force, is in its death throes. The party may yet endure, but the national resistance is finished.
It is undeniable that Hezbollah has over the years given Shia a heightened sense of self-respect. But regrettably, it has taken the party’s accumulation of arms to do so, even as Hezbollah has utterly failed to clarify the Shia role in any new Lebanon. In fact the party has consciously undercut that debate to retain its grip over its co-religionists and block the emergence of a sovereign country free of Syria. What kind of party places its own community in such dire straits? Certainly not one that can ever hope of finding itself at peace with its fellow Lebanese.
Michael Young is opinion editor of the Daily Star newspaper in Beirut.
its always a curious position when someone is looking for Israel to invade their own country so that they can attack their fellow citizens in the rear.Especially given the damage last time.
You can tell this paper is owned by pro-Hariris and are somewhat smarting from the humuliation of the past week , i know the US was stuck with backing losers , but i never knew things had sunk so low.
I rest my case.
Given your belief in the Syrian Democratic process,I think you rested your case a while back.
If your so keen a daily Star reader try these 2 articles for size:
Hizbollah rout of government supporters deal blow to US policy:
http://www.dailystar.com.lb/article.asp?edition_id=1&categ_id=2&article_id=92082
and
Israeli General says Hizbollah proved strength
http://www.dailystar.com.lb/article.asp?edition_id=1&categ_id=2&article_id=92091
Looks like your operation cut and paste has not cut much muster.
Yes.
I’d read them.
Which democratic elections did the SSNP stand in?
Remind me.