“Aoun thinks Hezbollah is a wave at its top, at its end,” he said. “He thinks the future belongs to the Sunnis, not to Hezbollah. And he thinks that because Hezbollah is at the top of its wave, he can just jump on this wave and take advantage of the power it has at this moment. He knows that in Lebanon, in a region like the Middle East, Hezbollah doesn’t have a long-term future.”
“But Hezbollah has all the military power,” I said. “The Sunnis have nothing.”
“You cannot say the Sunnis have nothing,” he said. “The Sunnis are the demographic power in the region. The Sunnis are the Saudis. The Shia of the region are like 8 or 12 percent. There is no future for a guerrilla. Yes, Hezbollah is as strong as you can imagine—even stronger—but they don’t have a future. If they changed course, if they adapted to international law and accepted the Taif Agreement, they might have a chance, but they would no longer be the Hezbollah we know.”
“How will the current situation actually change, though?” I said. “Who is going to stop them?”
“They have to change,” he said. “They can’t go on like this. You can’t be as strong as Hezbollah and as pretentious as Hezbollah without an enemy to fight, without a mission to accomplish. They spend an enormous effort searching for the enemy rather than fighting the enemy. They don’t find the enemy. Where’s the enemy? Where’s Israel? It’s not inside Lebanon any longer. The problem, the paradox that every single resistance experiences—and it’s bitter—is that they can’t continue resisting indefinitely after liberation.”
He was right, of course, or at least he’d be in the long run. In the meantime, Hezbollah was still “resisting.” Nasrallah could set both Israel and Lebanon on fire whenever he felt like it. He still had the power to bully—and perhaps even topple—Lebanon’s government. And Michel Aoun, rather than help ensure Hezbollah’s wave had already crested, boosted Nasrallah’s stature with a Maronite fig leaf.
Khoury had the most reliable public-opinion data in the country, so I asked him how many Christians actually found Aoun appealing. He used to be one of the most popular Maronite leaders when he commanded what was left of the army and resisted the Syrian invasion in the late 1980s, but his star had fallen since he signed his “memorandum of understanding” with Hezbollah.
“Most Christians are liberal,” Khoury said, “and will not be attracted to narrow sectarian parties like the Lebanese Forces except in times of danger. Aoun provided an outlet for these people by being deliberately nonsectarian. The problem with his strategy, though, is that he lost a lot of Christians and didn’t gain many Shias. Before Pierre Gemayel was assassinated, Aoun polled at around 37 percent of Christians, but he lost a lot of support since then. We want to replace the March 14 movement with a broader civil society movement. This way we can include the Aounists and isolate the pro-Syrians. Only around 30 percent of the Shias are ready for a movement like this, but the overwhelming majority from all other groups are already there.”
“What will it take to get the Shia on board with this project?” I said.
“The Shia are naturally liberal,” he said. “They are not, when left alone, interested in jihad. Traditionally they have been secular and leftist. Do you know why they used to be secular leftists?”
I didn’t.
“Schoolteachers who were leftists weren’t wanted in Beirut,” he said, “so they were sent out to small towns in the Shia parts of the country. Then Iran came in and replaced them with Hezbollah. They will come around when Hezbollah is gone. Samir Kassir’s Democratic Left used to be communist and pro-Syrian, but now they are militantly anti-Syrian. When political theories fail in the Middle East, they fail hard. People who believed in them have a tendency to support a total opposite point of view later. That’s why the Shia will be okay after Hezbollah is defeated.”
“Hezbollah will always have some support, though,” I said.
“Yes,” he said. “Among irrelevant people. The fact that we have some of these silly leftists who support Hezbollah just shows we are a normal country. We are like everyone else. Those people are everywhere. Did you see the protestors in London who said, ‘We are all Hezbollah now’? Give me a break.”
“What is the solution to this problem?” I said.
It was such an American question. Over time I learned to stop asking it, just as I learned to stop asking about a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict after both Israelis and Palestinians told me to stop it. I was only slowly beginning to understand what every March 14 person knew in his or her bones, that no plausible solution existed for now.
Americans like to believe every problem is fixable. Journalist and author Jeffrey Goldberg referred to this mentality, when it guided American policy in the region, as “solutionism.” The Middle East is more fatalistic. Politics have always been violent in that part of the world.
Even the March 14 revolution, nonviolent as it may have been, was backed by the implicit threat of force from America. “I am not Saddam Hussein,” Bashar al-Assad said before ordering his troops to withdraw. “I want to cooperate.” If the United States hadn’t recently toppled Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq, it’s entirely possible that al-Assad would have responded the way his father did to the Muslim Brotherhood uprising in the city of Hama—by killing thousands without flinching and then boasting about it.
Khoury answered my question, though, with a hypothetical solution that might have worked had it been tried.
“The solution to Hezbollah is a United Nations Chapter VII resolution,” he said. “Like in Kosovo. When there is a will, there is a way. It will take fighting, though. Hezbollah will not just give up their guns. One thing we can do is bring back General Aoun’s old officers. They have guts, and they are multiconfessional.”
He pulled out a piece of paper and drew, in a single flourish, a remarkably detailed silhouette map of the country that included most, if not all, of the contours of Lebanon’s coastline and land borders. Then he drew circles around the Shia areas in the south and the Bekaa Valley.
“Block off the Shia areas,” he said. “Surround them utterly with international troops, like from NATO. NATO can do this if Israel stands aside, withdraws from the [allegedly occupied] Shebaa Farms, and stops all these overflights. Then deploy smartly, and do it slowly. I’m not saying storm Lebanon, go house to house, and kill a bunch of people. Just surround them, block them off from Syria forever, and announce that it’s over. Eighty percent of Lebanon would accept this if it’s done right, with government and international approval, and if Israel, at the same time, resolves the outstanding issues.”
The problem with this, aside from the fact it meant war would return to Lebanon yet again, was that it had no chance of actually happening. The United Nations wouldn’t sanction a combat force in Lebanon. Not even during the time of the Bush administration did the United States seriously contemplate such a thing. The Israelis wouldn’t surrender to any Lebanese demands—such as a cessation of aerial overflights—unless Hezbollah was first disarmed. Lebanon’s Prime Minister Fouad Siniora had no stomach for fighting or authorizing a war against anyone.
Even so, Khoury was right that any solution to the Hezbollah problem would have to come from the outside. Washington, though, couldn’t fix it, nor could Jerusalem. The solution would have to be applied in the east, in the land of Ruhollah Khomeini.
None of Lebanon’s zuama opposed Hezbollah’s agenda more fiercely than the wizened Druze warlord and Progressive Socialist Party leader Walid Jumblatt. He spent most of his time in his Ottoman-era castle at Mukhtara high above Beirut in the Chouf Mountains, but he took time out between meeting European members of the Socialist International at his second house in the capital to meet me for coffee in his salon.
Arranging that meeting wasn’t easy. It was more difficult, in fact, than making an appointment with Hezbollah officials. His press secretary repeatedly told me I had dialed the wrong number even though I knew I had not.
He almost convinced me. I actually h
ad misdialed the first time, and the woman who answered laughed uproariously when I asked for an interview with Walid Jumblatt. I didn’t think my error was funny until I imagined someone calling me at home in the United States and expecting to speak with Dick Cheney.
Jumblatt’s press secretary deflected my inquiry because he didn’t know me and because his boss had been getting credible death threats again. Hezbollah’s prolonged occupation of downtown Beirut had turned violent on occasion, and several members of parliament had been assassinated since the Syrians left. No March 14 leader was in the mood to take chances.
A mutual friend called and made the appointment on my behalf, drove me to Jumblatt’s villa in the heart of the city, and warned me security would be tight at the gate. “The Syrians, Michael, if they catch him they will cut off his head.”
Security agents leaped from plastic chairs and aggressively approached me at the entrance. They weren’t hostile, as Hezbollah’s security agents often were, but they moved fast in case I drew a weapon.
My bulky Nikon D200 hung around my neck from its strap.
“Turn on the flash,” said the lead agent after patting me down. “Then point your camera at the ground and take a picture.”
I did what he said, proving to him that my camera wasn’t a bomb. If he was seriously worried I had rigged it to explode, he would have confiscated it or at least made me step into the street before pressing the button. He seemed satisfied when I handed over my passport. My nationality must have made things a lot easier. Terrorist-cell leaders would have an awfully hard time finding an American willing to assassinate a pro-American member of parliament.
Jumblatt wore a dark suit and waited for me in the shadows of late winter evening on the side of the path leading up to the house. He greeted me coolly, professionally, and a little bit tiredly, as though he had spent most of the day meeting someone or other and would rather put up his feet and knock back shots of arak. Lebanese politics were dangerous and stressful enough when things were calm.
He was by far the most complicated political leader in Lebanon. Though he belonged to the Socialist International, his economic ideas no longer related in any meaningful way to those of Karl Marx. He was sort of a neoconservative insofar as he hailed from the left and credited regime change in Iraq with Lebanon’s national interest, yet he went even further than American neoconservatives and called for regime change in Syria. While he was a liberal in the general sense of the word, especially by the Middle East’s standards, he was also a feudal lord and former militia leader who lived in an ancestral castle.
“Hassan Nasrallah is officially the representative of Iran’s Ayatollah Khamenei,” he said wearily as we sat down to talk on his couch. “Khamenei has declared that he wants to overthrow the government and replace it. Syria is becoming a satellite of Iran. They want to use Lebanon as a battleground or as a bargaining card. This is what they have done in the summertime, when they declared the war, when Nasrallah declared the war against Israelis. They want to make Lebanon a satellite of Iran and Syria.”
A servant brought us Turkish coffee in cups the size of shot glasses and set them beside finger bowls of pistachios.
“Do you think Hezbollah will ever disarm peacefully,” I said, “or will it require force?”
“Nobody in Lebanon said or believed it was possible to disarm Hezbollah by force,” he said. “But as a Lebanese I don’t accept a state within a state. We have a state within a state. And a separate army, the Hezbollah army, next to the official army. Their intelligence is stronger than our intelligence. They control part of Lebanon without the possibility of the Lebanese state to enter it and enforce law and order. That’s the situation.”
“So what do you think the solution is?” I said. It was one of the last times I asked that question in the Middle East.
“The solution is not in Lebanon,” he said. “The solution is in Tehran.”
Walid Jumblatt never called for regime change in Iran as he did in Syria, and I don’t think he was trying to coyly suggest it. He was just stating the obvious, that only Iran could solve the problem, whether or not it would actually do so. The Lebanese army and government weren’t strong or united enough, Lebanon’s Shias weren’t about to disown the most muscular zaim they’d ever had, the Israelis couldn’t engineer political changes in Lebanon through the use of violence or otherwise, and there wasn’t a chance the Americans would go in and do it. Tehran’s regime, though, at least under its current leadership, would never dismantle Hezbollah. Hezbollah was its most prized possession abroad, the Mediterranean branch of its Revolutionary Guard Corps. No realistic solution existed, not as long as the likes of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Ali Khamenei were in charge of the Islamic Republic.
“The solution is in Tehran,” Jumblatt said again. “In the summertime they launched a kind of preemptive war against the Americans and the Israelis, and we had to suffer a struggle we don’t have anything to do with. We were expecting two million tourists. Nobody came. Now downtown is closed, hotels are closed, nobody’s coming from the Arab world, no tourists, that’s it.”
Jumblatt was something of a radical, but he was not on the Lebanese fringe. He occupied Lebanon’s radical center, which is why his answers to questions like these were important. He was a one-man public-opinion barometer.
The Druze are always centrists of sorts. They are a minority in Lebanon, in Israel, and in Syria. There is no Druzistan anywhere in the world and there never will be. Their numbers are too small, and they’ve learned over time that it’s safest to join the political mainstream—which in the Middle East was usually enforced at the point of a gun—to avoid persecution. As Jumblatt’s own father explained, the Druze are ever alert and must “gauge their surroundings and choose their words carefully, assessing what must be said and what can be said.”
Since March 14, 2005, Lebanon’s Druze had been the most solidly pro-American and staunchly anti-Syrian group in the country. If Hezbollah’s Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah were really the strong horse he was portrayed to be, Walid Jumblatt would have been his ally whether his heart was in it or not. Instead, he accused Hezbollah’s secretary general of collaborating with the car bombers assassinating his colleagues.
“Of course,” he said, “we have to say the fighters of Hezbollah did well. Okay? It’s a brigade, an Iranian brigade fighting in the south of Lebanon. But it’s not Lebanon that won the war. Israelis did not win the war, but they destroyed our country.”
“Which country is more dangerous to Lebanon?” I said. “Israel or Syria?”
“Both together,” he said and laughed. “Israel and the Syrian regime, okay?”
Saying Syria and Israel were both equally dangerous was, I suppose, the “centrist” position in Lebanon at the time.
“Lebanon is a composition of various confessions and communities,” he said. “We are suffering from a huge and quite important Palestinian Diaspora—maybe 200,000 or 300,000 Palestinians here. And we have an aggressive neighbor called Syria. It’s safer for us when the Syrians sign a peace with Israel for us to sign a peace with Israel. That’s it. We cannot ask to sign a peace unilaterally without having the Syrians first signing the peace.”
“During the July War,” I said, “you said the Lebanese government was in danger of becoming weak like the government of Nouri al-Maliki in Iraq.”5 It was an ominous thing for him to say. Though al-Maliki’s government was legitimately elected by Iraq’s people, the only reason it hadn’t been overthrown by Sunni and Shia militias was because American soldiers defended it with their lives.
“What I predicted is now a fact,” Jumblatt said. “The Lebanese government included the ministers of Hezbollah who have resigned. The Lebanese government, after all, is a coalition between us and the others. But we have to specify, who are the others? It’s not like a coalition in a normal state where you have a coalition with other partners. Here we have a coalition between the official state and the other state. We have a parallel state. So we a
re not speaking with somebody else who is at the same table on equal terms. This somebody else is aiming a rocket at our heads. Not only guns—rockets. Lebanon is part of this regional struggle from one side—Russia, Iran, and Syria—and from the other side—America, the West, and us. We are unlucky. It’s like Poland in 1940 or 1939, divided between the Russians and the Germans.”
He laughed darkly, something Lebanese did rather a lot. Sometimes there wasn’t much more you could do.
“If the U.S. loses the war in Iraq,” I said, “do you think it will be a problem for Lebanon?” The outcome of America’s “surge” of troops to Iraq under the command of General David Petraeus was still in doubt when I asked this.
Walid Jumblatt thought for a long time before he answered that question. I could see his mind working cautiously, calibrating his response for multiple audiences as he always did. He said the following very carefully: “It would be bad for Lebanon and for the Middle East if the U.S. withdraws from the region. We will face a different Arab and Muslim world. It is very strange and ironic that even the pro-Iranians in Iraq are asking the Americans to stay. You could write a theater about it. Making the Americans totally withdraw from the Arab world would be a mistake, would be a disaster for the moderates in the Arab world. The radicals and the Iranians would win.”
A few weeks later, in late January of 2007, Nasrallah tired of his experiment with nonviolent protests and decided to act more like the militia leader he was.
Young Hezbollah militants severed the links to Lebanon’s international airport with huge piles of rocks and dirt brought in on dump trucks. Masked and hooded men barricaded roads all over the country with thousands of rubber tires and set them on fire. Thick black smoke clotted Beirut’s skyline. The airport itself remained operational, but no one could get in or out.
The Lebanese army, divided as always, stepped back and out of the way. Nasrallah promised his people he wouldn’t let up until Prime Minister Fouad Siniora was toppled from power.
The Road to Fatima Gate: The Beirut Spring, the Rise of Hezbollah, and the Iranian War Against Israel Page 23