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A new cold war in the Middle East
By Greg Sheridan, Foreign editor
The Australian
WAS the surprising Lebanese election result, in which the pro-Western government won a clear victory over the Hezbollah-led opposition, the first flower of Barack Obama's new spring
for the Muslim and Arab worlds? Were enough Lebanese voters won over by the charm and eloquence of the handsome young American President to give the fading Western power one more try?
I am tempted to write a wholly
optimistic column. I want to declare "Let Lebanon be Lebanon ", as Ronald Reagan at the height of the Cold War so famously and effectively declared "Let Poland be Poland ". Lebanon , its sons and daughters
will tell you, used to be the best country in the world. Beirut was the Paris of the east. It was the cradle of much civilisation. Its offspring have been magnificent citizens of Australia , from the last Victorian premier to
the incumbent NSW Governor.
Can this glory come again? Well, sadly, it is better to tell the truth.
This election result is good news, but it is very modest good news.
Hezbollah won all the seats it
contested. The alliance it leads will have just under a half of the parliament. Hezbollah is a devoutly Shi'ite terrorist group controlled by Iran .
It will continue to wield by far the most powerful army in Lebanon . It
will continue to receive weapons and financial support from Syria and Iran at will. It will continue to possess 50,000 rockets deployed on Israel 's border. It will continue to exercise dominance within Lebanon whenever it
wants to by force of arms.
The best piece of writing on Lebanon in recent months was a brilliant cover story in the May 20 issue of The New Republic. In it, journalist David Samuels recounts an interview with former
Lebanese president Amin Gemayel, in which he outlines Hezbollah's strategic value to Iran .
Gemayel says: "In the form of Hezbollah, they ( Iran ) get a brigade on the Mediterranean and on the border with Israel .
So $100 million a year they spend here is nothing."
In 2007, Hezbollah's leader Hassan Nasrallah made a famous speech in which he answered directly the charge that Hezbollah was not complying with UN resolutions
that forbade it from bringing armaments into Lebanon .
Nasrallah said: "We are being very clear and we have arms. We have arms of all shapes and sizes. The resistance (Hezbollah often refers to itself as the
resistance) has arms. It is saying it in public, adding that it is rearming and increasing the scope of its armaments in order to get more dangerous arms ... We are transporting the arms secretly and in straw trucks so as not
to embarrass you (the Lebanese government). I am saying we will remain on the border, in Beirut and everywhere in Lebanon ."
You've certainly got to hand it to Nasrallah and Hezbollah generally: they say what they
mean, even if athousand Western commentators try to find some other meaning in their words.
One of the most striking features of Samuels's long essay is his description of his interview with Saad Hariri, son of Lebanon
's assassinated former prime minister, Rafik Hariri, and the leader of the winning coalition in the recent election. Hariri, the successful and just-elected senior politician in Lebanon , lives behind a fortress, seldom leaving
his stockade, with street traffic kept at least a block away so no car bomb can kill him as it killed his father.
If he wants to go out for an evening meal at a restaurant, he goes overseas.
Of course, much normal
life goes on in Lebanon . The Lebanese have a national genius for making the most of what normality is afforded to them. But giant, convulsive and violent forces are at work within their society, and from outside.
In one
sense, the Lebanese election was the latest episode in what is becoming a fairly clear cold war in the Middle East . On one side of this cold war are the US , Egypt , Saudi Arabia and, despite Arab unease with them, the
Israelis. On the other side are Iran , Syria , Hezbollah and Hamas, which rules the Gaza Strip. Communal, ethnic, religious and national identities and loyalties are infinitely more complex than these cold war divisions,
naturally, but the strategic competition between the US and Iran is a central axis around which the region revolves.
This was reflected in the alliances in the Lebanese election. Hariri's group was called the March 14
alliance. It consists of the main Sunni parties, the Druze group led by Walid Jumblatt and some Christians who were associated with the old Phalangist Party. They got strong political support from the US and a lot of money from
Saudi Arabia .
The Hezbollah group is called the March 8 coalition and involves Hezbollah, another Shia group called Amal and the Christian forces of former general Michel Aoun.
Aoun's forces were the big losers in the election.
The inherent madness of Lebanese politics and the sheer desperate scramble to survive is evident in Aoun's electoral alliance with Hezbollah. This is an alliance against
nature and against conviction.
Aoun was once the hero of Lebanese resistance to Syrian hegemony. One of Aoun's election posters featured a dazzlingly beautiful, bare-armed young woman wearing saucy orange lipstick and
with plucked eyebrows. The caption urged women to "be beautiful and vote".
Yet Aoun's allies, Hezbollah, are Islamic fundamentalists who want an Islamist state. Go figure.
Samuels argues that Lebanon
offers a taste of the future of the Middle East, once Iran has a nuclear weapon and can operate anywhere without fear of military retaliation. For Iran and Syria today operate with a virtually free hand in Lebanon .
The
UN has been investigating for a very long time the assassination of Rafik Hariri, but the UN's various actions and inactions have put no serious curb on Damascus or Tehran .
Hezbollah has accepted the election result but
it has also said clearly and repeatedly that it is never giving up its arms, that it requires its arms for anti-Israeli resistance. Hariri wants Hezbollah to join the government. There is no force in Lebanon that can disarm
Hezbollah. Thus Lebanon is a state that cannot exercise sovereignty over its own territory.
One reason American strategic players are so keen to push an Israel-Syria peace deal is the hope that this could be a process by
which Syria is strategically reoriented away from Iran . Middle East expert Martin Indyk argues this position with particular eloquence. But how realistic is it? For Syria to cut off its assets in Hezbollah, to betray its other
proxies in Lebanon , to earn the hostility of Tehran , which everyone in the region believes will soon enough possess nuclear weapon: all this for what from the Syrian point of view? So that the Americans can bring them into
the disciplines of the World Trade Organisation and lecture them about the virtues of democracy?
People of goodwill everywhere should wish the Lebanese government good fortune, and we should do what we can to help it
build its state and deliver as normal a life as it can for as many of its citizens as possible.
But strategic matters in the Middle East are seldom solved by elections. This was a good election result, but it doesn't
much change the Lebanese status quo, which is pretty grim. Perhaps we'll have better luck in tomorrow's presidential election in Iran . But I wouldn't bet the house.
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