J´accuse
Dr. Joseph Hitti
April 10, 2008
The incompetence of the West is bewildering when it comes to securing a solution to the Lebanese problem, after all the European and Arab mediation attempts, after all the threats and inducements, after decades of dispatching UN forces under innumerable UN resolutions, and after the Lebanese people went to the streets in the millions to demand a final solution to their decades-old torment.
After all this, it is time to point the finger at the real culprit in this mess: All those who sold Lebanon to Syria for more than 30 years before pretending to have changed course as they do today, supposedly having seen the light in the aftermath of September 11, 2001 and the 2005 assassination of their top broker in the deal, Rafik Hariri. After sealing a Syrian-Israeli ceasefire on the Golan in 1974 (a ceasefire which has lasted till today), then-Secretary of State Henry Kissinger turned Syria loose on Lebanon in an attempt by US foreign policymakers to create in it a war crucible where Palestinians could take over and turn their resistance away from Israel, and where Syria could achieve its long-held dream of annexing Lebanon, thus turning its attention away from Israel too. After engineering this destabilization of Lebanon via Syria as a master proxy orchestrating, in turn, a pleiotropy of sub-proxies like the PLO, the National Movement (a ratatouille of militias and groups that included the Lebanese Left, Islamists, pan-Arab nationalists and associated Palestinian groups) and today Hezbollah, the coalition of the US, Europe, Israel and the Arabs then subscribed to a programmed destruction of Lebanon which they referred to during three full decades as a "stabilization" of Lebanon by Syria. In short, the West, Israel and the Arabs played the arsonist-firemen game in Lebanon: Destabilize, then send Syria to stabilize.
History cannot forget that the US encouraged and sustained Syria as the preeminent interlocutor on behalf of a muzzled and crushed Lebanon and a legal guardian of a retarded Lebanon throughout those decades, even while Syria and its proxies were kidnapping, killing, hijacking, bombing and shelling. In the State Department´s lingo of those years, the Syrians were a "presence" not an occupation, and that "presence" was a "factor of stability". Lebanon was always excluded from Middle East negotiations, since Syria was allowed to speak on behalf of Lebanon. Lebanon was an object of the negotiations, but never a participant. Even on those occasional interludes when Lebanon briefly managed to escape the Syria yoke – as in May 1983 when it negotiated a peace treaty with Israel – the West easily gave in to Syria to scuttle the effort and plunge Lebanon back into violence and a tighter Syrian grip. When Syria´s proxy Hezbollah bombed the Multi-National Force in October 1983, the US and its allies readily fled like rabbits. The charade culminated in the 1990 Taif Agreement that forced an unrepresentative Lebanese Parliament to amend the Lebanese constitution and transform the political structure from what was a less than ideal, though functional, system into the disastrous and completely dysfunctional three-headed system that is on display today.
From a strong presidential-parliamentary system, the Lebanese system was degraded to a tri-cephalic system where the President, the Prime Minister and the Speaker of Parliament have all equal powers (and each insisting on being called "President"). From an unwritten word-of-honor 1943 National Pact that distributed the three seats to the three largest communities, not on demographic criteria as is widely believed but as an act of mutual recognition by both Christians and Muslims of their inborn diversity and common destiny, the Taif Agreement consolidated the sectarian division of power and made Lebanon a sectarian monster that just doesn´t work. Today´s crisis is plain evidence to that transformation. The country has been unable to elect a President for several months now. The Prime Minister – "President" Siniora - is a lame duck who runs half a government over a corrupt administration that cannot even meet the basic needs of the population. And the Speaker of Parliament – "President Berri" – has hijacked Parliament and reduced the legislative body to his own person. He has shut down Parliament and does not allow the MPs to meet and conduct legislative business. This is what the Taif Agreement has done to Lebanon.
The intractability of the Lebanese problem today is directly traced to that gigantic act of treason by the community of nations against one of its oldest, yet weakest, members, a monumental failure of political consistency between principle and action. Not only was Lebanon a beacon of democracy up through the early 1970s in an ocean of theocracies and dictatorships, but the West – mainly the US and a Left-leaning Europe – persisted in their submission to the oil-rich Arabs and indulged in the character assassination of Lebanon: A jungle, a country of many tribes, an artificial entity, an ungovernable mess, etc. Even today, there are some – like Robert Fisk of the Independent – who continue to challenge the right of Lebanon to exist as an independent nation by continuously drilling the point that Lebanon was torn off by France from Syria in the early 1920s, oblivious to the fact this very same argument can be made about every Middle Eastern and African country. The inevitable dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire into all the states in existence today is somehow forgotten when idiots like Fisk speak about Iraq, Syria, Jordan, Israel, Kuwait, Egypt, Sudan, and all the countries that emerged in the Middle East and Africa with the end of European – including Turkish Ottoman – colonialism. For some reason, only Lebanon is cited as the artificial product of that dismemberment in a manner that belittles the country and justifies the crimes perpetrated by Syria – with the support of the West – against its neighbor.
The West – with the US in the lead – stands accused today of the state of affairs to which Lebanon has arrived after more than 30 years of this monumental failure of international politics. Nothing explains the incompetence or the unwillingness of the international community to go the extra mile to finally extricate Lebanon from the turmoil of the Arab-Israeli-Iranian cesspit. When Saddam Hussein used the same Baathist argument (that Syria uses vis-à-vis Lebanon) against Kuwait, he was kicked out within months by the international community. But in Lebanon, the victim is blamed. Not only was Kosovo protected by NATO and the West, it was deliberately torn off from Serbia, supposedly to protect the Moslem Albanians from the savage Serbs. The West assembled an expeditionary force that allowed the secession of East Timor´s 200,000 people from Indonesia´s 250 million population and into a country made up of half a tiny island out of the thousands of islands that make up the Indonesian archipelago. But the help that Lebanon received during close to four decades was never sufficient to cross the threshold of enabling a definitive solution to take hold. All the measures taken were half-ass short-term solutions that continued to pile new problems on top of older problems, rendering a resolution almost insurmountable. If Hezbollah is today sitting on 30,000 long range missiles and rockets, it is because Syria was given custody of Lebanon by the West between 1975 and 2005. Even today when everyone is lashing out at Syria for destabilizing Lebanon, there are no planes policing Lebanese skies against the movement of arms and murderers across the Lebanese-Syrian border. For 30 years, Israeli jets flew thousands of times over Lebanon and bombed Lebanon repeatedly back into the Stone Age. Yet, Israel was very careful never to fly over Syrian territory and its jets bombed targets inside Syria only twice, both times after 2005: Once against an abandoned Palestinian training camp, and the second time against a suspected nuclear site. If Syria was "forced" to withdraw its troops from Lebanon in 2005 under international pressure, why can´t it be forced today – with the same international instruments of pressure used then – to stop arming Hezbollah, to stop bombing and assassinating people in Lebanon, to establish diplomatic relations with Lebanon, to settle the border dispute over the Shebaa Farms, to finally recognize Lebanon´s right to exist as an independent nation, and to dissociate Lebanon from the issue of the Golan (Israel-Syria) or the Palestinian-Israeli problem?
There is no answer to explain the failures of the West in Lebanon and its collusion with the Arabs against Lebanon, except to invoke some sort of conspiracy. There has to be a reason why Lebanon´s suffering has been allowed to continue to this day since the early 1970s. There has to be an objective behind allowing a founding member of the UN, a land of coexistence between the otherwise "clashing civilizations", to disintegrate and collapse as it has. Could it be that the West is indeed colluding with both Arabs and Israel to finish off Lebanon and make it a substitute homeland for the Palestinians, like Henry Kissinger had wanted back in 1974?
After all this, it is time to point the finger at the real culprit in this mess: All those who sold Lebanon to Syria for more than 30 years before pretending to have changed course as they do today, supposedly having seen the light in the aftermath of September 11, 2001 and the 2005 assassination of their top broker in the deal, Rafik Hariri. After sealing a Syrian-Israeli ceasefire on the Golan in 1974 (a ceasefire which has lasted till today), then-Secretary of State Henry Kissinger turned Syria loose on Lebanon in an attempt by US foreign policymakers to create in it a war crucible where Palestinians could take over and turn their resistance away from Israel, and where Syria could achieve its long-held dream of annexing Lebanon, thus turning its attention away from Israel too. After engineering this destabilization of Lebanon via Syria as a master proxy orchestrating, in turn, a pleiotropy of sub-proxies like the PLO, the National Movement (a ratatouille of militias and groups that included the Lebanese Left, Islamists, pan-Arab nationalists and associated Palestinian groups) and today Hezbollah, the coalition of the US, Europe, Israel and the Arabs then subscribed to a programmed destruction of Lebanon which they referred to during three full decades as a "stabilization" of Lebanon by Syria. In short, the West, Israel and the Arabs played the arsonist-firemen game in Lebanon: Destabilize, then send Syria to stabilize.
History cannot forget that the US encouraged and sustained Syria as the preeminent interlocutor on behalf of a muzzled and crushed Lebanon and a legal guardian of a retarded Lebanon throughout those decades, even while Syria and its proxies were kidnapping, killing, hijacking, bombing and shelling. In the State Department´s lingo of those years, the Syrians were a "presence" not an occupation, and that "presence" was a "factor of stability". Lebanon was always excluded from Middle East negotiations, since Syria was allowed to speak on behalf of Lebanon. Lebanon was an object of the negotiations, but never a participant. Even on those occasional interludes when Lebanon briefly managed to escape the Syria yoke – as in May 1983 when it negotiated a peace treaty with Israel – the West easily gave in to Syria to scuttle the effort and plunge Lebanon back into violence and a tighter Syrian grip. When Syria´s proxy Hezbollah bombed the Multi-National Force in October 1983, the US and its allies readily fled like rabbits. The charade culminated in the 1990 Taif Agreement that forced an unrepresentative Lebanese Parliament to amend the Lebanese constitution and transform the political structure from what was a less than ideal, though functional, system into the disastrous and completely dysfunctional three-headed system that is on display today.
From a strong presidential-parliamentary system, the Lebanese system was degraded to a tri-cephalic system where the President, the Prime Minister and the Speaker of Parliament have all equal powers (and each insisting on being called "President"). From an unwritten word-of-honor 1943 National Pact that distributed the three seats to the three largest communities, not on demographic criteria as is widely believed but as an act of mutual recognition by both Christians and Muslims of their inborn diversity and common destiny, the Taif Agreement consolidated the sectarian division of power and made Lebanon a sectarian monster that just doesn´t work. Today´s crisis is plain evidence to that transformation. The country has been unable to elect a President for several months now. The Prime Minister – "President" Siniora - is a lame duck who runs half a government over a corrupt administration that cannot even meet the basic needs of the population. And the Speaker of Parliament – "President Berri" – has hijacked Parliament and reduced the legislative body to his own person. He has shut down Parliament and does not allow the MPs to meet and conduct legislative business. This is what the Taif Agreement has done to Lebanon.
The intractability of the Lebanese problem today is directly traced to that gigantic act of treason by the community of nations against one of its oldest, yet weakest, members, a monumental failure of political consistency between principle and action. Not only was Lebanon a beacon of democracy up through the early 1970s in an ocean of theocracies and dictatorships, but the West – mainly the US and a Left-leaning Europe – persisted in their submission to the oil-rich Arabs and indulged in the character assassination of Lebanon: A jungle, a country of many tribes, an artificial entity, an ungovernable mess, etc. Even today, there are some – like Robert Fisk of the Independent – who continue to challenge the right of Lebanon to exist as an independent nation by continuously drilling the point that Lebanon was torn off by France from Syria in the early 1920s, oblivious to the fact this very same argument can be made about every Middle Eastern and African country. The inevitable dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire into all the states in existence today is somehow forgotten when idiots like Fisk speak about Iraq, Syria, Jordan, Israel, Kuwait, Egypt, Sudan, and all the countries that emerged in the Middle East and Africa with the end of European – including Turkish Ottoman – colonialism. For some reason, only Lebanon is cited as the artificial product of that dismemberment in a manner that belittles the country and justifies the crimes perpetrated by Syria – with the support of the West – against its neighbor.
The West – with the US in the lead – stands accused today of the state of affairs to which Lebanon has arrived after more than 30 years of this monumental failure of international politics. Nothing explains the incompetence or the unwillingness of the international community to go the extra mile to finally extricate Lebanon from the turmoil of the Arab-Israeli-Iranian cesspit. When Saddam Hussein used the same Baathist argument (that Syria uses vis-à-vis Lebanon) against Kuwait, he was kicked out within months by the international community. But in Lebanon, the victim is blamed. Not only was Kosovo protected by NATO and the West, it was deliberately torn off from Serbia, supposedly to protect the Moslem Albanians from the savage Serbs. The West assembled an expeditionary force that allowed the secession of East Timor´s 200,000 people from Indonesia´s 250 million population and into a country made up of half a tiny island out of the thousands of islands that make up the Indonesian archipelago. But the help that Lebanon received during close to four decades was never sufficient to cross the threshold of enabling a definitive solution to take hold. All the measures taken were half-ass short-term solutions that continued to pile new problems on top of older problems, rendering a resolution almost insurmountable. If Hezbollah is today sitting on 30,000 long range missiles and rockets, it is because Syria was given custody of Lebanon by the West between 1975 and 2005. Even today when everyone is lashing out at Syria for destabilizing Lebanon, there are no planes policing Lebanese skies against the movement of arms and murderers across the Lebanese-Syrian border. For 30 years, Israeli jets flew thousands of times over Lebanon and bombed Lebanon repeatedly back into the Stone Age. Yet, Israel was very careful never to fly over Syrian territory and its jets bombed targets inside Syria only twice, both times after 2005: Once against an abandoned Palestinian training camp, and the second time against a suspected nuclear site. If Syria was "forced" to withdraw its troops from Lebanon in 2005 under international pressure, why can´t it be forced today – with the same international instruments of pressure used then – to stop arming Hezbollah, to stop bombing and assassinating people in Lebanon, to establish diplomatic relations with Lebanon, to settle the border dispute over the Shebaa Farms, to finally recognize Lebanon´s right to exist as an independent nation, and to dissociate Lebanon from the issue of the Golan (Israel-Syria) or the Palestinian-Israeli problem?
There is no answer to explain the failures of the West in Lebanon and its collusion with the Arabs against Lebanon, except to invoke some sort of conspiracy. There has to be a reason why Lebanon´s suffering has been allowed to continue to this day since the early 1970s. There has to be an objective behind allowing a founding member of the UN, a land of coexistence between the otherwise "clashing civilizations", to disintegrate and collapse as it has. Could it be that the West is indeed colluding with both Arabs and Israel to finish off Lebanon and make it a substitute homeland for the Palestinians, like Henry Kissinger had wanted back in 1974?
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