Summary: If the assassins of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq
Hariri sought to make an example of him for his defiance of Syria,
the aftermath of the crime has mocked them. For a generation,
Lebanon was an appendage of Syrian power. But now the Lebanese
people, in an "independence intifada," are clamoring for a return to
normalcy. The old Arab edifice of power has survived many challenges
in the past, but something is different this time: the United States
is now willing to gamble on freedom.
Fouad Ajami is Majid Khadduri Professor of Middle Eastern
Studies at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International
Studies at Johns Hopkins University.
THE MEANING OF LEBANON
They quarreled with Rafiq Hariri's way of rebuilding Beirut,
dismissing his renewal project as an assault on the capital's
archaeological heritage and the graceful old city of fabled memory.
They wrote off his ambitious economic policy, pointing to the vast
public debt that accumulated under his stewardship. Many Lebanese
saw Hariri as Saudi Arabia's man, never quite taking to the
swashbuckling way he climbed to the heights of power. But on
February 14, when the former prime minister was struck down by a
huge bomb that shattered his motorcade as it passed near Beirut's
swank hotels and sea front -- in the very district his construction
company had remade from rubble -- Lebanon had its first "martyr" in
many years.
Hariri had not been a vocal opponent of Syria, but the opposition
now claimed him as its own. He had risen through the subtle workings
of politics and power, but "the street" now belonged to him. A Sunni
Muslim, he had never bonded entirely with the Christians of East
Beirut and Mount Lebanon, but he now became public property, a
symbol of national unity. If Hariri's assassins sought to make an
example of him for his growing defiance of Syrian power, the
aftermath of the crime mocked them. A country forgotten and
consigned to the captivity of its eastern neighbor shook off its
fear and reticence. For the span of a generation, Lebanon was merely
an appendage of Syrian power: for all practical purposes, the small
republic left the world of independent nations. But now the Lebanese
were clamoring for a return to normalcy, calling their spontaneous
eruption the "independence intifada."
Lebanon, with a distinctive history and character, was not, after
all, a part of "Greater Syria"; it would not be written off as a
strategic consolation prize for a regime locked into an increasingly
uneven standoff with Israel. It had taken a quarter century of guile
for the late Syrian dictator Hafiz al-Assad to consolidate his power
over Lebanon (although Syria's occupation officially dates from
1990). He did it, alternately, by stealth and brutality. There was
no blitzkrieg like Saddam Hussein's conquest of Kuwait; the
trappings of Lebanese sovereignty were kept but were emptied of
content. But now, in one brazen act of terror, the Syrian presence
in Lebanon would become a concern of the world.
It is safe to assume that no inquiry will establish with
certainty if the Syrians were responsible for the deed. It is likely
that the trail to Damascus will never be found. Access to the "crime
scene" -- Lebanon itself -- has been limited, and Syria's regime of
satraps in Beirut has done its best to hamper a thorough
investigation of the crime. But the Lebanese opposition has no doubt
as to the identity of the assailants, and is taking matters into its
own hands.
SHIFTING GROUND
If the outrage within Lebanon broke through the old taboos of the
Syrian-Lebanese relationship, the international setting has been
dramatically transformed as well. France and the United States
feuded over Iraq; Syria's occupation of Lebanon has provided them
with an opportunity for common purpose. Assad's inexperienced heir,
his son Bashar, is now caught in an international storm destined to
be the test of his regime.
In 1990-91, in the context of a radically different international
order, the world averted its gaze as Syria destroyed the last
vestiges of Lebanon's independence. That was the price willingly
paid by President George H.W. Bush for enlisting Damascus in the
first campaign against Saddam. Those were good wages garnered by the
Syrians. Syria did little for the coalition but was accepted as the
gendarmerie of a volatile Lebanese polity. Then the outside world
forgot about Lebanon. The missionaries, businesspeople, writers, and
spooks who had known the country wandered away or aged. The dominant
impression of Lebanon became that of a country given to tribal
atavisms and bottomless feuds.
But more than a decade later, U.S. power positioned itself in
Iraq, directly on Syria's eastern border. Pax Americana's tolerance
for bargains with strongmen had substantially eroded since the
September 11 attacks. True, Syria had not merited charter membership
in President George W. Bush's "axis of evil." The Syrians warded off
danger by "turning state's evidence" -- sharing what intelligence
they had about the countless jihadists who hailed from Syria. But
even as Syria tried to sit out the campaign in Iraq, it could not do
so entirely. The lucrative Syrian trade of reexporting Iraqi oil in
violation of international sanctions -- bringing in a windfall of
some $1 billion a year -- was one casualty of this war. The other
was most of Syria's leverage with the United States. Damascus had no
real claims on Washington's loyalty and indulgence. The sort of
access to the Pax Americana enjoyed by Cairo and Riyadh was not
available to Syria's rulers. In the run-up to the Iraq war, Damascus
had voted for a Security Council resolution authorizing Iraq's
disarmament. But that could not buy Syria indefinite protection
against the United States' wrath. Indeed, Bashar al-Assad and his
cronies could be forgiven their worries that their regime could be
the next target in U.S. cross hairs. The spectacle of the Iraqi
dictator chased into his "spider hole" provided a cautionary tale.
Hard as Damascus may have tried to maintain that Iraq was not its
affair, the toppling of the Baathist tyranny next door was a crystal
ball in which Syria's rulers could glimpse intimations of their own
demise.
No one in the Arab world would shed tears for Assad and his
political dynasty, and he and his men knew that. Theirs was a
minority regime, the dominion of the Alawis, a heterodox Muslim
community from Syria's northern mountains, over a principally Sunni
Muslim society. Hafiz al-Assad, who established the regime, may have
lacked Saddam's megalomania, but at the heart of his government was
the cult of the ruler and his iron fist. In Syria as in Iraq, a
generation of peasant soldiers and merciless ideologues took the
society apart and trumpeted their pursuit of a new social order,
only to create a system of political sterility and economic
plunder.
Although Assad's regime had shut down its critics at home and had
seemingly subdued Lebanon, the new security doctrine of the United
States held dangers aplenty for it. Wars of pre-emption were now a
distinct possibility. Washington had its hands full in Iraq, but no
one in Damascus could be certain that the U.S. drive to finish off
Arab dictators would come to a halt in Iraq. And there were
Washington's "neocons" -- a veritable obsession of the Arab
intellectual and political class, in Damascus and beyond. Who knew
what they had in mind? There was unsettling talk of "low-hanging
fruit" and "phase two" of the U.S. military effort. There was
paranoia to spare in Arab political circles about a new American
imperial bid to remake the Arab world.
As Syria's rulers hunkered down and waited to see the unfolding
of the U.S. project in Iraq, they did their best to aid and abet the
anti-U.S. insurgency there, while still maintaining the necessary
fiction of their neutrality, doing what they could to avoid open
confrontation with Washington. It was a game of cat and mouse: it
was known that Arab jihadists from Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and
Jordan traveled to Mosul and the Sunni Triangle from Syria. There
was irony here: an Alawite regime that was at odds with Sunni
Islamists at home was feeding a Sunni insurgency next door. The
jihadists dreaded the Syrian regime as a "godless tyranny" but took
its favors. The 400-mile border was porous, and the Syrians had no
interest in securing it. There were loyalists of the decapitated
Iraqi regime with money to spare; they were looking for sanctuary,
and the Syrians would provide it.
It was important for Syria that this heady U.S. bid to change the
politics of the Arab states be thwarted. The more blood and treasure
the United States expended in Iraq, the safer it was for Damascus.
The new U.S. reach into the Arab world was a transient affair, the
Syrians hoped. In time, Washington would grow weary of its burdens
and pack up the military gear, along with U.S. designs for the
region and its people. In the interim, Syria would punctuate its
steady undermining of the U.S. operation with small favors and
concessions to the U.S. military authorities. The Syrians could also
plead that sealing the Syrian-Iraqi border was beyond their power
and that they lacked the means and technology to monitor the age-old
traffic on their frontier.
The Bush administration had announced nothing less than the
obsolescence of the Arab world's old authoritarian order. The
brittle system in Damascus was in a fight to keep intact its old
ways of control. Gone was the steady hand of the old juggler, Hafiz
al-Assad. Gone, too, made obsolete by the rise of George W. Bush and
Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, was the tortured U.S.
diplomacy, that fabled "peace process," that had courted Damascus
and catered to its sense of importance as a big player in the
Fertile Crescent. When he was Israel's prime minister, Ehud Barak
had contemplated a deal with Damascus in preference to a settlement
with the Palestinians. The Syrians had held back and were left on
the sidelines. No one in Jerusalem or Washington was waiting on
Syria any longer. An autocratic regime had survived, but the
confidence and the security it had once possessed had cracked.
A DIFFERENT WORLD
In retrospect, it was inevitable that Lebanon would provide the
setting for the response of Syria to the mounting pressures it
faced, that it would be in Beirut that Damascus would set out to
defy the world, only to highlight the crisis of its moribund
regime.
In late 2004, trouble had erupted when Syria extended the mandate
of its Maronite Christian satrap in Beirut, President Emile Lahoud.
He had served out his six-year term, and Lebanon's constitution
decreed the end of his tenure. Lahoud's had not been a happy
stewardship. The country had begun to bristle under Syrian control,
and the former military officer was Syria's man -- nothing more.
Lahoud was even at odds with the mainstream members of his own
Maronite community, who have traditionally been devoted to the
ancestral independence of their country. Over time, the Syrian
embrace had grown suffocating. Syrian agents were trampling on
internal matters such as naturalization policies and an education
system of which Lebanon had long been proud. The machinery of
extortion had become particularly burdensome, as the Syrians helped
themselves to what could be had in Lebanon. It had become
increasingly difficult to live with the humiliation.
A quiet rebellion was gathering steam. The revered Maronite
patriarch, Cardinal Mar Nasrallah Boutros Sfeir, launched a brave
campaign for the restoration of Lebanon's sovereignty. Lebanon had
always been, at its heart, a "Christian homeland." With the sanctity
and protection given him by his standing in Lebanon and the Catholic
world, Sfeir emerged as the standard-bearer of the country's
sovereignty. Hereditary Druze leader Walid Jumblat, who had
accommodated Syrian power for a quarter century, also drifted into
the opposition. His father, Kamal, once a towering figure in the
country's politics, had been struck down by the Syrians in 1977. The
son knew that there was nothing he could do to avenge his father,
but he threw caution to the wind to become a vocal opponent of
Syrian hegemony.
Lebanon's identity was at stake, but the backward Syrian regime
showed no signs of retreat. A military presence passed off as a
counter to Israel's "security zone" in the south had taken Israel's
May 2000 withdrawal in stride, as though nothing had happened. The
Syrians could have left well enough alone: they could have abandoned
Lahoud and chosen another proxy from the Maronite political class.
But Bashar al-Assad lacked his father's touch. He was determined to
get his way, if only to show that nothing had changed since Hafiz's
death. Prime Minister Hariri, a bitter enemy of Lahoud, was summoned
to Damascus, where he was informed that the decision to extend
Lahoud's mandate had already been made. The meeting between Hariri
and Assad lasted only several minutes. A man of great wealth, who
had been prime minister for 10 of the preceding 12 years, was shown
little respect.
Hariri knew he would be a marked man if he opted for a break with
Syria. He hedged his bets, submitted his resignation, and let the
word out that he was probing his political options. His government
was replaced by one of quislings. The relative legitimacy that had
been accorded his cabinet was denied the successor government. Syria
now faced the prospect of an immensely influential Sunni Muslim, the
leading figure of his community, bringing his followers -- and his
substantial wealth and international standing -- into the
opposition.
It was in the midst of this crisis that the UN Security Council
adopted Resolution 1559, sponsored by France and the United States,
calling for a "free and fair electoral process in Lebanon's upcoming
presidential election ... without foreign interference" and for "all
remaining foreign forces to withdraw from Lebanon." The timing was
telling: the Security Council vote took place on September 2 of last
year; the hapless Lebanese parliament rubber-stamped Syria's
extension of Lahoud's tenure a day later.
It was immensely important that Washington and Paris worked
together. In the new effort to push Syria out of Lebanon, the United
States was free of the burden, and the taint, of unilateralism.
Europe had substantial assets to bring to the fight, if only because
the U.S. economic, cultural, and political presence in Syria had
been rather limited in comparison.
French diplomacy may have been "pacifist" over Iraq, but Paris
still felt the tug of its imperial memory. The Mediterranean
coastline and the hill country of Lebanon were once French domains.
France's language and culture left their indelible mark on the
people of Mount Lebanon. The traffic between France and Lebanon's
Maronites goes back centuries. In 1860, Napoleon III dispatched a
French expedition to Lebanon to help the Maronites after a communal
war broke out between them and the Druze. French power, in 1920,
created the modern republic of Lebanon, bequeathed it its favorable
borders, annexing to the Maronite Mount Lebanon the coastal cities
of the Mediterranean, the Bekaa Valley to the east, and the Shia
hinterland to the south. And beyond old memories, personal
friendship was no doubt a factor: President Jacques Chirac was a
close friend of Hariri's for years. The Syrian rulers, generally
given to a healthy dose of paranoia, were convinced that Hariri had
played a big role in drafting resolution 1559 and that French
diplomacy, in turn, had stiffened U.S. resolve against Syria.
But even before Hariri's tragic death reawakened interest in
Lebanon's fate, Syria's occupation was being called into question.
In his State of the Union address on February 2, 2005, President
Bush announced a departure from the old U.S. reticence: "Syria still
allows its territory, and parts of Lebanon, to be used by terrorists
who seek to destroy every chance of peace in the region. You have
passed, and we are applying, the Syrian Accountability Act, and we
expect the Syrian government to end all support for terror, and open
the door to freedom." The Syrian Accountability and Lebanese
Sovereignty Restoration Act, a congressional initiative of 2003, had
given the president broad authority to impose a range of economic
sanctions and restrictions on Syria. The White House had initially
treated the initiative with some reserve, and so its embrace by Bush
signaled a change in official policy.
In the aftermath of Hariri's assassination, Bush upped the ante:
Syrian armed forces had to quit Lebanon and take with them their
intelligence operatives. There was no small irony in this twist of
history: fifteen years earlier, George H.W. Bush and Hafiz al-Assad
had struck a deal that liquidated Lebanon's independence; now their
sons were bringing that deal to an end. It was fitting that the
edifice of Syrian control secured in the first campaign against
Saddam was being undone in the course of the second.
Syria never fully assimilated how different the world had become
after September 11. In March 2001, Cardinal Sfeir had journeyed to
the United States, where he sought an audience with Bush -- in vain.
This was, after all, the time of realism: no one wanted to offend
Damascus or stir up the passions of Lebanese nationalism. Four years
later, however, a president who had "planted the flag of liberty" in
Arab lands had no choice but to take up the cause of Lebanon's
independence. The war on terror came to Lebanon's rescue. If the
Middle East was to be repaired, then the establishment of a
legitimate system of authority in Lebanon was of paramount concern.
Damascus held effective power but was not accountable; Beirut
retained the trappings of sovereignty but could not deliver public
order or maintain peace in its territory.
THE HEZBOLLAH EFFECT
A truly sovereign Lebanese government could have brought
Hezbollah to heel. But Syria's writ made it impossible for the
Lebanese army to deploy to the south, the frontier with Israel;
Hezbollah lived on the indulgence granted by its status as an
Islamic "resistance movement" and could ride roughshod over the
authority of any incumbent government.
In truth, however, the Israeli withdrawal from southern Lebanon
robbed the militia of its raison d'être. True, a pretext was found
for Hezbollah to retain its weapons: in the aftermath of the
withdrawal, the group made a new claim on a small strip of land
still in Israel's possession called Shebaa Farms. But the cause of
Shebaa Farms is a sham, and everyone apart from the most diehard of
Hezbollah operatives knows it: the underdeveloped land is actually
subject to negotiations between Damascus and Jerusalem, for Syrian
forces had possession of it when it fell under Israel's control in
1967. No great emotions stir in Lebanon about that largely barren
territory.
Strictly speaking, Hezbollah does not need the "holy war" and is
already participating in the confessional politics of Lebanon, on
behalf of the poorer Shiites. The Party of God fields candidates for
Lebanon's parliament, runs a television station, and funds a whole
host of economic endeavors. Hitherto, U.S. diplomacy has paid
Hezbollah only fitful attention. U.S. officials could turn up in
Damascus, but no satisfaction could be had there. In the words of
the articulate Lebanese publisher Gebran Tuéni, the Syrians ruled
Lebanon by "remote control" and would never own up to their power
over Hezbollah's operatives. Why would Syria clip Hezbollah's wings?
The organization was Syria's trump card in Lebanon and on the border
with Israel. Iran provides Hezbollah with money; Syria's gift has
been protection. But the logic of the Bush administration's war on
terror is one of pre-emption, of refusing to wait on gathering
dangers, so Hezbollah has long been destined to be a legitimate U.S.
concern.
Hezbollah's independent power should not be overestimated. A
Lebanese army free to assert its authority would easily subdue it.
That army would have on its side the bulk of a Shia community averse
to hurling itself and its villages into another destructive war on
the Lebanese-Israeli border. A viable political center revolves
around the authority of the Maronite patriarch, the prestige and
power of the Druze leader Jumblat, and the technocrats who were
associated with Hariri, mainly Sunni Muslims who have shed their
acquiescence to join the anti-Syrian coalition. The Shiites have
appeared uncertain in the midst of this tumult, but they are
nationalists and will not want to be left out of the making of a new
political order. They will not want to end up on the side of a
despised Syrian regime.
Hezbollah can bring its supporters to the street, it is true. The
Party of God is full of forebodings about its future. But its public
displays of "gratitude" to Syria for its presence in Lebanon cannot
provide the basis of a successful political strategy. Underneath the
sound and fury of Hezbollah, there are hard calculations of power.
Hezbollah's leaders must have a feel for the sentiment of the Shia
mainstream: it was Lebanese flags, rather than the banners of their
party, that they brought to the mass rally in Beirut on March 8.
There was a moment of silence at that rally for Hariri, and a
message to the opposition that Hezbollah wants a share of the
country's power. A vast Shia propertied class, with a tenuous hold
on prosperity, has come into its own over the preceding quarter
century. That Shia mainstream will give Hezbollah time but will not
want to bear the stigma of supplication to Damascus. The call of
home and patriotism will in the end bring the Shiites into the
emerging national consensus.
The Lebanese opposition to Syria is at peace with Hezbollah's
political role. What the opposition seeks is an acceptance by
Hezbollah that Syrian hegemony has run its course and that a
sovereign Lebanese government must have unfettered authority. The
French are advocates of a "soft landing" for Hezbollah -- a
transition to the political world. By the appearance of things, the
Bush administration has for now come to an accommodation with that
view, as it pursues the larger goal of pushing Syria out of
Lebanon.
FORTRESS OF SOLITUDE
The current Syrian regime is truly alone in the world. In the
Arab world itself, the isolation of Damascus is easy to see. Arab
public opinion has never taken to Syria's rulers. Before the
destruction of his regime, Saddam was accepted as defender of the
Arabs, a son of the "Arab nation," fighting its wars and sharing its
atavisms. But he was a Sunni Arab; Syria's rulers are cut of a
different cloth. Perhaps their esoteric Alawite faith is, in part, a
factor in their estrangement. More important, they are people of
stealth who have waged their own wars against the Palestinians and
cut down to size Beirut's pan-Arabists in pursuit of Syrian
hegemony.
Nor can the established Arab order do much for the Syrians. Cairo
will not intercede on behalf of Damascus. If the Egyptians attempt
it, their intervention will come without conviction. U.S. policy
owes no deference to Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. If anything,
the Bush administration's new emphasis on reform and liberty only
highlights the inadequacy of Mubarak's own regime.
Riyadh will not intercede either, but for different reasons.
Hariri held Saudi citizenship, and his ties to the House of Saud ran
to the very heart of the dynasty. Hariri had brought to Beirut not
only Saudi money and investments, but also the Saudi way -- an
aversion to ideology, a businessman's peace, and a belief in the
power of wealth and caution. The Saudis are not given to expressions
of public outrage, but one of their own was struck down in Beirut. A
huge contingent of Saudi princes came to Beirut for Hariri's
funeral; the de facto ruler, Crown Prince Abdullah, went to the
Hariri home in Riyadh to offer condolences to his two older sons.
Saudi Arabia will not trumpet Syria's culpability in his death. But
the reserve that Saudi Arabia has displayed toward Syrian
officialdom since the murder has conveyed the House of Saud's
unease. Plainly, there is no faith in Riyadh that Assad, the young
Syrian ruler, knows the intricacies of power.
Lebanon has long been ignored in the Arab circles of power, but
the wind now blows its way. This is a marked break with the past. In
the 1970s, when Palestine was the Arabs' avowed cause, the Arab
states bought time for themselves at Lebanon's expense. They
bequeathed Lebanon and its sovereignty to the Palestinians; they
underwrote Yasir Arafat's "state within a state." During the 1980s
and 1990s, it was more of the same: the Arabs stepped clear as Syria
chipped away at the remnants of Lebanon's independence and dignity.
Many Lebanese are convinced that this lack of sympathy derived from
the fact that Lebanon is, in the main, a Christian country with
heterodox communities. There is a great deal of truth to that
charge. But the Arab abdication in Lebanon springs from varied
sources, including the nature of Arab politics: there was no "Arab
solution" for Kuwait's troubles in 1990-91 and no Arab solution for
Iraq's nightmare under Saddam. The indifference to Lebanon thus was
of a piece with this larger cynical acceptance of the logic of brute
force in life.
In the Arab world, there is now in the air the same reading of
Syria that came to surround Saddam's regime on the eve of its
destruction by the United States: a recognition that the Syrians
have overplayed their hand and are now on their own. No science can
predict when old ways will suddenly lose their legitimacy, and when
patience with them will snap. There has been much bloodshed in Arab
life, everyone knows all too well. But the Hariri murder, in full
public view at midday in West Beirut, claimed the Syrian power
structure as its collateral damage. Assad's move to replace the head
of military intelligence with his brother-in-law only days after
Hariri's murder was a clumsy response to the suspicions swirling
around Syria.
The claims of an Iranian-Syrian accord should also not be given
much credence. Iran's horizons are wider, and Iran's interests
differ radically from those of Syria. For all their strident
revolutionary poses, the Iranians are shrewd, unsentimental
practitioners of realpolitik. Iran's pursuit of its nuclear
ambitions (or the barter of these ambitions for economic and
political concessions from Europe and the United States) overwhelms
the concerns of Syria, with its extortion rackets in the Bekaa
Valley and Tripoli. Tehran will not ride to the rescue of
Damascus.
THE STORM WAVE OF FREEDOM
The independence of Lebanon should not be feared; it is not
stability that the Syrians provide. The sky will not fall if Syria
pulls out its troops. The Lebanese can take heart from recent
events, for the army has not split up, and the institutions of the
state have held thus far. Terrorism may yet make its appearance and
threaten the fragile peace. It is then that the Lebanese will be
tested. But come what may, the "trusteeship" of Syria has outlived
its use. What the Syrians have built is a safe haven and a sanctuary
for terror.
The nature and makeup of the Syrian regime is not known with
confidence. It is part Stalinist, part tribal-sectarian.
Fundamentally, it is remarkably similar to the Tikriti edifice built
by Saddam. It has the strengths and weaknesses of sectarian control:
the secretiveness, the devotion to the clan, the subordination to
the leader, and the brittleness at the center of it all. Hafiz
al-Assad, the shrewd peasant soldier who built this dominion and
brought the Alawis out of their insularity to their current position
of power and material plenty, knew the ways of his region. But to
judge by the ongoing performance of Syria in Iraq and Lebanon, his
son lacks his subtlety.
In one reading, Damascus will fight for its turf in Lebanon. The
Syrians will see their eviction from Lebanon as the first step
toward "regime change" in their own country. Syria's rulers have
nowhere to go. They ride a tiger, and the retribution against them,
were they to be overthrown, would be frightful. But there are
grounds for a less apocalyptic view of things. In this more
realistic scenario, withdrawing from Lebanon would have no
consequences for the survival of the regime in Damascus. The
withdrawal would be deliberate, first to the Bekaa Valley, then
across the border. The Syrians would be given a fig leaf of an
orderly retreat, in accordance with Security Council Resolution 1559
and with a 1989 agreement concluded in Taif, Saudi Arabia, that
legitimized Syria's reach into Lebanon but made clear, in spirit,
that Syria's role was contingent on Israel's occupation of Lebanese
territory. A Lebanese parliamentary election scheduled for May is
sure to bring a lopsided victory for Syria's opponents, providing
the perfect opportunity for the emergent Lebanese government to ask
for Syrian withdrawal.
Even if Syria leaves, there is no swift sword that would
extirpate with one stroke its influence in Lebanon. The claims of
contiguity, and geography more generally, would continue to make
themselves felt. But what would end is the debilitating machinery of
control that the Syrians use to dominate so much of Lebanon's life.
In their fashion, the Syrians have been darkly warning that they
would set Beirut to the torch and bring about a second civil war
were they forced to pull out. There is primitiveness here, but bluff
as well. Lebanon's prosperity has spared the Syrians the
consequences of their own inefficiencies. Lebanon's banks have
functioned as a banking system for the Syrians. And an estimated
600,000 Syrian laborers have found work across the border. Damascus
would not likely destroy a country upon which it relies.
In addition, the will of Europe and the United States -- and of
the other Arab states, if they can be relied upon -- could come into
play. Syria is not a warrior state: it lives off tourist receipts
and a respectable amount of oil income, and it needs the economic
skills and resources of the foreign world. The Syrians cannot settle
for a scorched-earth retreat in Lebanon.
In fact, Syria's Lebanon enterprise exacts a toll on Syria
itself. The occupation favors the military and the nomenklatura and
robs Syrian intellectuals of a next-door country where they might be
able to enjoy a margin of freedom. It was in that vein that a group
of prominent Syrian thinkers and oppositionists wrote an open letter
to their Lebanese counterparts that was published on February 24 in
Lebanon's most prestigious paper, An-Nahar-a national institution in
its own right, which has been fearless in its advocacy of Syria's
withdrawal. The essay was a moving tribute to Hariri, a message of
condolence to the Lebanese over the death of their leader. His
murder was a "terrible ugly slaughter planned and perpetrated by
those who do not wish to see Lebanon healthy, united, and free," the
letter read. It continued:
We fully support your demand for the withdrawal of the Syrian
army from Lebanon, for the rectification of Syrian-Lebanese
relations, for the building of a relationship based on equality,
independence, and the free choice of both peoples. We have long
expressed this view through all means available to us, for we as
educated Syrians have always found in Lebanon a window for the
expression of ideas not permitted us in our own homeland.
This is not quite a "Damascus spring," but in Syria, too, there
can be seen the stirrings of freedom. The Syrian people can now see
what is going on in the larger world. The Syrians, long in the grip
of autocracy, now find themselves in the crosscurrents of change. To
their east, a new Iraqi democracy struggles to take root and move
away from dynastic succession and the cult of statues and supreme
leaders. To their west, valiant (and stylish) young Lebanese have
taken to the streets to proclaim their attachment to liberty. Fear
stalks Syria, to be sure: the rulers fear that the world menaces
their old privileges, and ordinary Syrians fear that an embattled
regime could visit on them its wrath and mercilessness. The Syrian
rulers must know that they have run their string in Beirut. But they
may want to put on a brave face, as Assad did in a much-anticipated
speech to his parliament on March 5. He mixed hints of withdrawal
with a false, serene insistence that Syria will not be hustled out
of Lebanon.
Deep down the Syrians no doubt once believed that a Pax Americana
pressed in Iraq could be made to strike a bargain: Iraq for Lebanon.
The Syrians would provide their own version of cooperation on the
Syrian-Iraqi border in return for the old acceptance of their
dominion in Lebanon. This sort of bargain has had its advocates in
Washington. But it now lies in shambles. For one, the Syrians have
not made good on their promises of cooperation. Then, too, the
prospect of a functioning Iraqi government that would tend to its
own affairs with Syria and hold it responsible for its deeds
suddenly seems within reach. This was the outcome of Iraq's
elections. And there has been that discernible change in Washington
that makes tolerance for Syria harder to live with: the new emphasis
on freedom, the assertion by President Bush that the old bargain
with Arab autocracies has been an incubator for terror.
The entrenched systems of control in the Arab world are beginning
to give way. It is a terrible storm, but the perfect antidote to a
foul sky. The old Arab The entrenched systems of control in the Arab
world are beginning to give way. It is a terrible storm, but the
perfect antidote to a foul sky. The old Arab edifice of power, it is
true, has had a way of surviving many storms. It has outwitted and
outlived many predictions of its imminent demise.
But suddenly it seems like the autumn of the dictators. Something
different has been injected into this fight. The United States -- a
great foreign power that once upheld the Arab autocrats, fearing
what mass politics would bring -- now braves the storm. It has
signaled its willingness to gamble on the young, the new, and the
unknown. Autocracy was once deemed tolerable, but terrorists,
nurtured in the shadow of such rule, attacked the United States on
September 11, 2001. Now the Arabs, grasping for a new world, and the
Americans, who have helped usher in this unprecedented moment,
together ride this storm wave of freedom.
