Dastardly Hezballah wants... democracy?!

The Muslim majority in Lebanon has a problem. They are *way* under-represented in Lebanon's government, under an ethnic division scheme that was put in place to end the Lebanese Civil War.

Hezballah has been politely asking that the plate of government be reshuffled slightly -- not to benefit Hezballah, but to benefit the other parties in Lebanon that represent Islamic populations. Well, not so politely. They've been protesting in the streets for over a year. Quite annoyingly so, actually, but then that's the whole point of protests. But until May 7, that's *all* they did -- protest in the streets. This is despite the fact that Hezballah is the most powerful military force within Lebanon -- I mean, c'mon. They fought Israel to a draw. You think the antiquated 1950's era armored cars and tanks and 1940's artillery of the Lebanese Army would bother them any? But the fact of the matter is that Hezballah is not interested in taking over Lebanon by force. They could do it in a heartbeat. But that would defeat their long-term goal -- which is to show that a multi-cultural, multi-faith, multi-ethnic nation can work in the Middle East. Their long-term goal is to destroy the rationale for existence of the state of Israel as a Jewish state, said rationale being that a stable multi-ethnic multi-faith state is not possible in the Middle East and thus imposing Jewish law onto non-Jews is the only way to protect the Jewish population of Israel.

Then on May 7, the coalition of Fouad Siniora that currently controls the government made its fatal mistake. They tried to attack Hezballah using force in order to destroy Hezballah's phone system so that they could replace it with a phone system that they could tap, and to remove the Sunni official who was allowing Hezballah to fly weapons into the Beirut airport. Hezballah resisted this force, and basically swept the Siniora coalition's military forces off the table. The Lebanese Army basically said "We are not going to take sides in a new civil war" and stayed off to the side, not that it would have changed things if they had taken sides -- everybody in the area knows that the Lebanese Army is hard-pressed to deal with smugglers, much less wage actual warfare against a military that could fight Israel to a standstill. Everybody gulped, and realized that if it went on this way, there would be civil war, and came to their senses.

So now the country, which has had no President since November because the various parties could not muster a majority for a new President, now has one -- the head of the Lebanese Army, the man wise enough to not start a new civil war, Michel Suleiman, a man who everybody now seems to trust to be impartial and honest. And while Hezballah did not get everything they wanted -- in particular, they did not get any more representation in the legislature for the other folks they were helping -- they did get an agreement that their coalition can veto any major actions such as attempts to seize Hezballah's phone system or radio station or dismiss civil service appointees who peeve the government by allowing Hezballah's arms shipments. Furthermore, because Hezballah used only enough force to resist government attacks upon its facilities but did not engage in all-out war against the government (i.e. they used enough force to defend themselves but no more), Hezballah came off looking no worse in the eyes of the average Lebanese citizen. So while it's not a grand victory for Hezballah, it is one more step toward their goal.

Of course, you wouldn't know any of this by reading the U.S. propaganda press. You'd need to read the foreign press to know that there's more going on than "Hezballah bad! Siniora good!". Lebanese power politics is a chess game with dozens of players each jockeying for position and advantage, far too complicated to express as black and white. Coalitions change with the wind, allegiances shift, I've been following Lebanese politics since the early 1980's and still don't pretend to have that good an idea of who's on whose side today and why and what that means. This is the area of the world that originated Western civilization. They've been playing these games for 5,000 years. Us barbarians with our barely-240-year-old nation can barely imagine how complicated things can get with 5,000 years of trying.

As for the U.S. propaganda press, even if they wished to report honestly, the Western press doesn't have a clue at all, since they fired all their Lebanon specialists as soon as the Lebanese Civil War ended in 1990. You can read good summaries from the Lebanese press, but even there you must read between the lines -- Lebanese reporters are not going to put themselves on anybody's hit-list by reporting things that major players don't want reported, and the editors of these papers are themselves participants in the game of politics that is Lebanon.

So anyhow: my point is that things in Lebanon are in their usual state (FUBAR), but are now in a slightly less level of FUBAR thanks to everybody backing away from the brink. Hezballah "won", but of course in Lebanese politics what they won was what they had to begin with (a veto power over government actions), they merely made it official rather than having to bring out guns to prove it. The situation in Lebanon isn't much different today than it was yesterday, all that's different is that everybody has stepped back and acknowledged reality. There is still a lot of hard work before the goal of the majority of the Lebanese people is reached -- a peaceful, prosperous democratic multi-cultural state capable of serving as an example to the world. Hezballah isn't going to get a free pass from the Lebanese people, and neither is the Siniora coalition. Everybody's going to have to work hard at the compromises needed to keep Lebanon from flying apart again into another civil war. But that's a reality that everybody has acknowledged now. If only our own leaders could similarly acknowledge reality...

-- Badtux the Geopolitical Penguin