August 8, 2011
I recorded a discussion with Michael Young this weekend about the situation in Syria and its impact on Lebanon. You can watch the whole thing at the Bloggingheads website, but be sure to come back and comment.
Michael is the opinion editor of the Daily Star, and the author of a very interesting book about Lebanon called The Ghosts of Martyrs Square, which I discuss here and here.
August 16, 2010
Last month, I reviewed The Ghosts of Martyrs Square, Michael Young’s new book, for The Nation. Shortly after the review appeared, I got in touch with Mr. Young and invited him to expand upon certain themes from his book in the form of a QN interview.
Very much looking forward to the discussion that follows.
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Q: You ended your book by saying that sectarianism, at best, can be “a way station on the path toward a Lebanon that is a common concern for all its citizens.” Elsewhere, you have spoken of the need for a new “social contract” in Lebanese political life. Could you describe what you think that social contract might look like, in broad terms?
MY: In Lebanon’s post-Independence history, there have been two broad agreements to define sectarian relations: the National Pact of 1943 and the Taif Accord of 1989. Both were the culmination of previous political developments, traditions, proposed reforms, interferences by outside powers, and so forth. For better or worse, they came to define political relations in Lebanon, at least in a formal way, though often, as during the years of the Syrian military presence, Lebanese political life was shaped by Syrian interests and by Syria’s ability to exploit Lebanese divisions and power relations.
The result was a further degradation of our constitutional institutions, adding to their already considerable degradation during the 15-year war. In that context, what remained of our social contract as something positive disintegrated. Left in its place was a negative understanding of social relations, whereby Lebanese society was no longer there as a common concern for its citizens, but as a place defined largely by a minimalist sense of self-preservation, usually communal self-preservation, with Syria serving as able manipulator of this very negative notion of statehood. Communal leaders calculated largely in terms of how their decisions might play out with respect to Damascus. When the Syrians left, the Lebanese were too divided to develop a new social contract, as well as being prevented from doing so, a reality infinitely complicated by the fact that Hezbollah has no interest in a social contract that offers it anything less than full autonomy to retain its weapons, mainly on Iran’s behalf.
What social contract would I welcome? We can go into the details later, but in general, and ideally, one in which sectarianism has been transcended, but also where the liberal impulses that sectarianism has created spaces for–paradoxical spaces, for sectarianism is often based on illiberal institutions–are preserved. What preoccupies me in Lebanon above all is liberty, and the ability of the society to block or avert the rise of a single party or coalition of forces that may seek to impose its will on all. The confessional system has, for better or worse, been the prime mechanism preventing this. But as you noted quite correctly, I see it only as a way station toward a system where the Lebanese define themselves not by their differences, but by their common desire to defend a pluralistic, democratic system.
To achieve this, and I’m speaking in very broad terms here, the Lebanese need to find mechanisms to gradually break down bastions of sectarianism, albeit within a sectarian context at first, because this bargain alone can offer the tradeoffs allowing the communities to accept change. Otherwise, nothing will be achieved; society will not suddenly agree to jump from sectarianism to a system shorn of sectarianism, nor is this even sociologically realizable. Resistance to such an endeavor would undermine reform from the start.
I must add, however, that I don’t see that any progress will be possible until a solution can be found to Hezbollah’s arms. No community, least of all the Sunnis, will engage in national negotiation on reform in the face of a militia that has made amply clear, above all in May 2008, that it will resort to violence against its fellow Lebanese to defend its autonomy. Hezbollah is an anti-state, in many respects, and it would block any efforts to surrender its weapons in return for greater power to the Shiite community–though, for what it’s worth, I have proposed such an exchange in several of my articles. My point was, let’s impose this choice on Hezbollah and follow the liar to his doorstep, as the Arab saying goes, and compel Hezbollah to admit that it views its partisan interests as more important than those of Lebanon’s Shiites. But Hezbollah knows one thing better than most: without its weapons the party would effectively cease being Hezbollah.
Q: You have frequently criticized various Maronite Christian political leaders (from Michel Aoun to the Gemayel clan and Suleiman Frangieh) for their “inability to come to grips with the sectarian contract of 1943… [and] the Taif Accord,” and you’ve characterized many of their proposals as leading towards “communal suicide.” To what extent are these leaders merely pandering to public opinion on the “Christian street”, and is there any politically viable way to sell deconfessionalism to Lebanon’s Christians?
MY: Certainly, there is demagoguery involved in the way many Christian, particularly Maronite, leaders have opposed political reform as laid out in the Taif Accord. That said, a parliamentary majority in 1989, as well as Maronite Patriarch Nasrallah Sfeir, were defenders of Taif, so I think we need to be careful when we say this.
The problem today is that it is very difficult to persuade the Maronites in particular that their surrendering sectarian quotas in parliament and the presidency may be the only way for the community to extract itself from an often debilitating sense of decline. To an extent I can understand this fear. The state the Maronites will surrender power to is hardly one inspiring confidence. What is necessary for such a reform process to work is a national dialogue that can address fears on all sides, but particularly on the side of the Christians, who have the most to lose from a termination of the 50-50 ratio in parliament.
On the other hand, I feel, perhaps idealistically, that only when the Christians liberate themselves from the belief that their role in Lebanon is intimately tied into the number of seats they hold in parliament and Maronite control of the presidency, will they begin to examine more carefully the vital role they play, or can play, in Lebanese society; and only then will Christians gain in confidence. If everything is reduced to numbers and shares, the Christians, naturally, will feel perennially weak, because the numbers and shares are not in their favor. But when we talk about the intangibles—the fact that Christians add a dimension to Lebanon not found in most other Arab societies, that they tend to form a cosmopolitan community with great depth in the diaspora, hence are more powerful than they know, that educationally and historically Christians have brought a lot to Lebanon—then the Christian self-image can change.
Alas, I see very little impetus for change among Christians today. The community, which is in most respects my own, for I’m half-Maronite by birth, is characterized by a lack of political vigor and imagination, of economic innovation and daring, and of intellectual dynamism when it comes to the community and its role in Lebanon.
Photo credit: the NYT's very talented photog in Beirut (and elsewhere), Bryan Denton
I think that Muslim leaders, at least those concerned with Lebanon’s future as a pluralistic, open society, would much prefer a confident Christian community to a depressed one. As far as I’m concerned, it’s not sensible to view Lebanon in a mechanistic, static way as either a Christian or Muslim country. This is a place with infinite and invigorating fault lines, but if we want to focus on sect, than the least we can say is that it is a country of Sunnis, Shiites, and Christians, each with their very different priorities, worldviews, histories, and so on. The dynamics between these three large groups (and granted the internal divisions within each community) are complex, and to me have rendered anachronistic the simplistic Christian-Muslim dichotomy of the past. In this context, self-isolation is disastrous.
But let me add one final thought, and a key one. The Christians are better off embracing political reforms now, voluntarily, and I mean by this the Taif reform process, than finding themselves one day forced to surrender sectarian quotas because the Muslims are in agreement that the time has come for them to do so–because after all that is what Taif mandated. Better to negotiate reform from a position of strength, rather than to clutch on to eroding powers, behaving as an increasingly isolated irritant to the other Lebanese communities.
Q: How would a peace agreement between Syria and Israel impact Lebanon, in your view?
MY: That depends on what basis it is agreed. During the 1990s, the principle according to which the Syrians, the Israelis, but also the Americans and the Europeans, conducted negotiations, was that Syria would recover the Golan Heights, and only then would a discussion be opened relating to Syria’s presence in Lebanon. In specific terms this meant delaying all discussion of Resolution 425 (1978), which called for an Israeli withdrawal from occupied Lebanese territory, until the parties could resolve the Israeli occupation of the Golan under Resolution 242 (1967). Needless to say, this was effectively a way of saying that no one would challenge Syrian hegemony over Lebanon while peace negotiations were taking place.
This equation broke down in May 2000, when the Israelis withdrew from Lebanon, even though Syria and Hezbollah tried to keep the southern front open by literally inventing the Shebaa Farms pretext. I believe it was Nabih Berri who managed to dig the issue up from some dark recess. Hardly a soul at the time could find the farms on a map.
But until the Israeli withdrawal, when negotiations were still ongoing, the Syrian president, Hafiz al-Assad, believed that once an agreement was reached between Syria and Israel, no one would really challenge the Syrian role in Lebanon afterward, particularly if Damascus offered to guarantee the Lebanese side of a peace agreement with Israel and compel Hezbollah to go along with any final settlement.
In other words, Assad had managed to lock himself into a negotiation where he would be handed back the Golan, but then would receive Lebanon as an additional incentive, or should I say endowment. It was very cynical, a clever move on Assad’s part, and I am persuaded that that is still Bashar al-Assad’s aim–of course assuming that negotiations resume one day. Certainly, Bashar’s interest in re-imposing Syrian domination over Lebanon would indicate it is.
I don’t see a peace treaty between Lebanon and Israel before one that takes place between Syria and Israel. Nor am I persuaded that Syria will enter into talks with Israel without the Lebanese card in hand first as leverage for a favorable deal. Going even further, I don’t see that the Syrians really regard the Golan Heights as a priority; their priority is to win back Lebanon, which politically and economically reaps much more, even as they are far more interested in a process of negotiation than a settlement, which would force the regime to dismantle a substantial part of its security apparatus—which it doesn’t want to do, because it protects the minority Alawite regime.
By the same token, I don’t see that there is much interest in Israel to hand over the Golan, particularly in the absence of a comprehensive settlement that includes the Palestinians as well. And since Israel does not seem willing to give up anything on that front either, I think we can safely say that no serious peace negotiations are in store for the foreseeable future. I’m not sure if I answered your question, but perhaps in the grimmest way possible I have.
Q: What kinds of reform mechanisms might actually bring about real institutional change in Lebanese politics? When Nabih Berri proposed the creation of a national commission to explore the possibility of implementing the Taif Accord, the response from the Christians was instantly hostile, and they were abetted in their rejection of his proposal by their allies in the Future Movement (and to a lesser extent in Hizbullah). Similarly, the Boutros Commission’s draft law and subsequent electoral reform proposals from Interior Minister Ziad Baroud have been summarily dismissed. How does one move forward without a strong executive pushing reform through?
MY: I think you’re addressing several issues here: the nature of reform, the fear of the Christians, who will lose the most in any reform effort, and implementation of reform. I’ll look at the first and third, as we’ve already discussed the Christians.
On the nature of reform, I believe that Taif has outlined a mechanism that is specific enough to be a road map toward change, but also vague enough that it allows flexibility. Taif, as I said earlier, was an accumulation of ideas on political reform that had been circulating since the mid-1970s. I agree that ultimately Lebanon should move toward a deconfessionalized parliament, though I believe it necessary to establish, at least for an initial period, a Senate where all the communities can be represented, to reassure the groups who will be expected to lose the most power, above all the Maronites.
I think a rotation of senior posts between all communities, or even between the Maronites, Sunnis, Shiites, and Druze (if a Senate is created), if that is the best we can hope for, would be a step in the right direction. Yes, the proposal is sectarian in many ways, but it would also break the unhealthy bond that communities have tended to create with particular leadership posts. In this way it could widen the horizons for all the communities, particularly the Maronites, who cannot see that their insistence on retaining the presidency, the weakest of the top three posts, is marginalizing them.
Alongside this, I am also in favor of deeply changing social relations. Civil marriage has to be permitted, and the establishment of a non-sectarian sect is something to be considered. The religious establishments in Lebanon are stifling, and that is the problem. They will resist this, and the politicians as well as a substantial portion of the population that falls for the canard that greater secularization is somehow an abuse of morality will side with them. However, that doesn’t prevent Lebanese society from gradually striving to create secular spaces. Reforms aiming at deconfessionalizing the society may create the momentum needed to introduce significant changes in society, though we should not underestimate the difficulties.
Ultimately, will Lebanon be able to shed the confessional system? I think such a process will take much time, as it’s in our DNA, and it would be naïve to insist, in the name of political correctness, that this can and should be done rapidly. Nor do I believe it’s a good idea to enforce deconfessionalization by writ, since it simply would not work.
I will address only briefly the issue of executive power as mechanism for pushing reform. Which executive power do you mean? The president’s? The prime minister’s? The cabinet’s? Each institution reflects Lebanon’s sectarian contradictions. Either everyone must agree, which requires tradeoffs, or nothing gets done. Is this the definition of a dysfunctional system? Of course it is. But when you speak of a “strong executive”, what you’re really doing is creating a vicious circle: You need a strong executive to impose reform, but you need reform to create a strong executive… And the sectarian nature of the system has a tendency to neutralize both sides of that equation.
You mentioned the Boutros Commission. With all due respect for its work, and for many of those participating in its meetings, among whom I count several friends, that project was a pie in the sky. In no way would the political class have ever accepted such a scheme, nor did the Lebanese even understand it, so complicated were its proposals. It was the work of intellectuals and academics, individuals of high intelligence doubtless, but it went against the sordid grain of how Lebanese politics are generally conducted. It was never going to get very far among the politicians who had the final say on it.
It was a gamble, I suppose, to at least introduce new ideas into political practice, to get the ball rolling, such as allowing expatriate Lebanese to vote, which I think is necessary. However, beyond that it was dead on arrival. I agree with you that electoral reforms, particularly things like proportional representation or the direct election of the president, have the capacity to fundamentally alter the Lebanese political system. Yet that is precisely why the political class will undermine such measures at every turn.
Q: In your book and in various other writings, you’ve criticized the figure of the “statist”: the politician who has no regard for the sectarian system and tries to break it in favor of a more consolidated central hierarchy. Statists include figures such as Fouad Chehab and Bashir Gemayel, but also Michel Aoun and Hassan Nasrallah. In your view, was Rafiq al-Hariri not a statist? What about March 14th’s politicians today, with their calls for “building the state”? And is statism necessarily a vice?
MY: I would certainly not include Nasrallah in the category of “statist”, as I consider Hezbollah to be, almost by definition, a personification of an anti-state. Bashir Gemayel wanted to strengthen the state, certainly, but I believe he saw the state very much in sectarian terms, as the life raft of the declining Maronites, so I would greatly hesitate to place him in the same sentence as Fouad Chehab.
As for Aoun, he is no more than an opportunist when it comes to the state—a man who will fight the Lebanese Forces in 1989 and 1990 because allegedly he could not accept an armed militia, this in a time of generalized civil war; but who now advocates Hezbollah’s right to retain its weapons, at a time when there is a state, or some semblance of one. I believe that Aoun’s driving ambition always was to join the ranks of the traditional political class, and he saw the state as his ticket. Now that he’s succeeded, all he really wants to do is preserve a dynasty by handing the political and economic power of the Aounist movement off to his sons in law, because he doesn’t have a son of his own. Meanwhile he will say and do anything for or against the state to maintain his power, and keep this semi-filial venture alive.
What about Hariri? Hariri was a statist, but he also very much became a traditional politician. When he began his reconstruction effort in the early 1990s, he did two contradictory things: he revived those state bureaucracies he needed to advance his agenda, and in some cases tied them more rigidly to the prime minister’s office. For example, he revived and streamlined the Finance Ministry and gave new impetus to the Council for Development and Reconstruction, whose budget was attached to his office.
But Hariri also sought ways to circumvent the ministries and administrations he could not control, and in that sense his project could not really be called a project of national administrative resurrection. In some ways perhaps this was understandable, as it allowed him to move his program forward. But the state wasn’t the better for it. He tried an administrative reform effort, but all it really turned into was an administrative purge, one he was forced to backtrack on. So in that sense Hariri was a paradoxical statist, at best.
But Hariri also became a quintessential traditional leader. He devastated the traditional families in Beirut in the 2000 elections, effectively replacing them, though he had already made major political inroads in the capital as of 1992. He became the leading Sunni, and succeeded through his wealth and patronage networks in expanding his reach to Sunnis around the country, even if the Syrians always made it a priority to contain or undercut him, particularly in the North and Beqaa where their means of intimidation was especially efficient. By the time he became prime minister in 2000, Hariri was the main enemy to a powerful part of the state, particularly its intelligence and security services, and that year’s election was the first major revolt of the traditional politicians against Emile Lahoud.
But after this long introduction, let me hasten to correct you. I’m not critical of the statist, as such, despite my libertarianism. Some level of state presence is always necessary. Fouad Chehab, for instance, merits considerable admiration. Lebanon’s first major post-Independence institutional reform program occurred mainly during his mandate (though Camille Chamoun was not idle on that front), and I’ve always had great respect for many of those who rose from Chehabist ranks, such as Fouad Boutros, Elias Sarkis, and so on. Rather, I’m critical of the abuse that has often accompanied statism in Lebanon.
To simplify, there have been two broad power structures in Lebanon, even if that has changed in the last decade and a half. There have been the traditional leaders, whose power derives from such things as family, money, or some other form of primary loyalty; and there have been those seeking to challenge the traditional leaders, and whose only available instrument has been the state, and specifically the sticks of the state, namely the security and intelligence services.
At the time of Chehab, as you well know, the political system drifted into a conflict between the traditional leaders and the Deuxième Bureau, or the military’s intelligence service. We saw a lesser replay of that under Emile Lahoud in 1998, when he tried to use the various security services against Rafiq al-Hariri. But Lahoud was no Chehab, and Hariri benefited from the collaboration on occasion of the Syrian intelligence chief in Lebanon, Ghazi Kanaan, who saw an opportunity to cut Lahoud down to size, play Hariri and Lahoud off against one another, and ensure that Lebanon remained under Syria’s thumb.
In the past 35 years, after the war started, state institutions have gradually deteriorated, and the Syrian presence, particularly after the war between 1990 and 2005, exacerbated this, even if there was improvement in certain sectors. The judiciary is in urgent need of reform; the state bureaucracy tends to be inefficient, bloated, and corrupt; the army is a house of many mansions; the electricity utility is a cancerous mess, and so on. For one to defend the state in Lebanon imposes a question: What state are you defending? Certainly, the traditional sectarian leaders have contributed to corrupting the state, but so too have those within state institutions.
We can’t hide behind a wall of theory here. What practical means can Lebanon adopt to ameliorate the state? Unfortunately, the answer has eluded generations of political leaders, and in the absence of an answer, the traditional leaders have benefited.
However, I wouldn’t want to suggest that I defend the traditional leaders. They do, in general, allow for a more pluralistic system by default, because they balance each other out; and such equilibrium, or call it gridlock, has, historically, created wider spaces for free expression. But beyond that the political leaders, from all persuasions, have tended to feed on the state and derail all reforms. But to righteously raise statism as one’s standard is meaningless if the state is as bad or worse than the traditional leaders.
July 15, 2010
I’ve written a review of Michael Young’s new book for The Nation. An excerpt is pasted below with a link to the rest of the review.
One weekend during the spring of 2008, I found myself in a discussion with a friend about Lebanon’s latest political crisis. In Beirut the office of the Lebanese prime minister was being besieged by a sprawling tent city of protesters led by the country’s opposition, demanding the resignation of the premier and his cabinet. The business of government had long since ground to a halt, as had all commercial activity around Martyrs Square, not far from where the protesters were gathered; and multiple efforts to reach a compromise between the opposition and the “March 14″ loyalists, a coalition of Sunni, Christian and Druse parties backed by the Bush administration and its European and Arab allies, had ended in failure. Pundits warned daily of a descent into the abyss of sectarian violence and civil war.
Like many Lebanese, I found this state of affairs to be both maddening and deeply ironic. Three years earlier, Martyrs Square had been the scene of what was heralded around the world as Lebanon’s rebirth, a popular uprising 1 million strong demanding the end of Syria’s military occupation of the country. This uprising—dubbed the Cedar Revolution—was triggered by the assassination of a billionaire former prime minister, Rafik Hariri, the architect of Lebanon’s postwar recovery. Syria was widely blamed for the assassination, and the ensuing protests—unprecedented in size and in their brazen defiance of Damascus—coupled with intense international pressure, succeeded in forcing the withdrawal of Syrian forces from Lebanon. While no one could have imagined that Lebanon’s endemic divisiveness was now a thing of the past and that a strong democratic state would emerge spontaneously from the ashes of Syrian tutelage, there was a palpable hope, naïve in retrospect, that the Lebanese could finally take their first step toward building such a state.
Nothing so optimistic had come to pass. In the three years since the withdrawal of Syrian troops, the country had been racked by a series of high-profile assassinations and a devastating war with Israel. An international tribunal established to investigate the murder of Hariri seemed to have stalled, and street violence was mounting between youths allied with opposing factions. Most significant, the country had no president. The previous one, Émile Lahoud, a pillar of the pro-Syrian regime, had resigned four months earlier, and the polarized government could not reach agreement over a successor.
All of this I related to my friend—a Syrian expatriate living in New York City—expressing my amazement at how Lebanon had turned into a farce, its political system so broken that it could not even carry out the most elemental of democratic processes: voting a person into office. Amused by my frustration, he suggested that far more remarkable than Lebanon’s paralysis was that the Lebanese state had survived without a president for more than 100 days, with no attempted coups, military takeovers or invasions. Imagine such a thing anywhere else in the Middle East: a power vacuum at the highest levels of government “lasting five minutes, let alone four months.” The laws of political gravity, he mused, do not apply in Beirut as they do in other Arab capitals. What’s more, they never have.
December 30, 2009
I haven’t read it yet, but judging from the reviews, it sounds like Lee Smith’s book is a bit of a dud. Max Rodenbeck skewers it for The National:
“Smith believes he has much to teach us about this corner of the world, a patch he covered, from Cairo and Beirut, for the Weekly Standard, the small-circulation flag-bearer for American neoconservativism, before landing his current perch at the right-wing Hudson Institute in Washington. His book, a mix of citations from primers on Arab history, bald assertions, and anecdotage populated by a parade of mournful natives that Smith seems to have attracted in his travels, purports to be an expose of the true nature of the Arabs. It is meant as a corrective to the misty eyed romanticism of other journalists, scholars of the region, and such pitiable types as “Americans too young, confused or rich to love or respect their own country”.
Yet despite the jarring apparition of occasional perspicacity, his 200-page effort at myth-busting is potholed with mistakes, misjudgements and lapses in logic. Right up front, for instance, Smith asserts that Sunni Arabs have crushed minority challengers and ruled “by violence, repression and coercion” for 1,400 years. Yet one might have assumed that Sunni rule would be natural here, considering that nine-tenths of Arabs happen to be Sunni Muslims. (And not the 70 per cent that Smith strangely proposes, a figure quite unattainable even if one throws in not just religious minorities, but ethnic ones such as Kurds in Iraq or Berbers in North Africa.)”
Still not satisfied? An anonymous reviewer puts the Qnion to shame with a savagely brutal take-down.
In other news, Tha’ir Ghandour thinks the Lebanese Forces come out on top in the battle of words between Hezbollah and the Kata’eb, and Michael Young has a New Year’s prediction about Aoun’s relations with Saudi Arabia:
“Within the coming few months, perhaps even sooner, we shall see Michel Aoun visiting the Gulf; and don’t be surprised to hear his followers suddenly less eager to denounce the “Wahhabization” of Lebanese life.
A divorce between Syria on the one side and Iran and Hezbollah on the other is unlikely. Hassan Nasrallah cannot afford to enter into a confrontation with the Assad regime. But his allies are recalculating. When you’re unsure about political decision-making, follow the money. “
Over at Syria Comment, Josh Landis is crowdsourcing a “Year in Review“, and I’ve contributed a few paragraphs about the Syrian-Lebanese relationship:
I think that the Syrian government had a good year, as far as its relations with Lebanon were concerned. The parliamentary elections ended with a pretty ideal result: a win for March 14, followed by the self-destruction of March 14. This meant that Syria did not have figure out how to run pass coverage for what would have surely been portrayed in the Western media as a “Hizbullah government”. At the same time, though, the defection of Jumblatt and the general fractiousness of the remaining coalition partners meant that M14 no longer posed a credible threat to Syrian interests.
The formation of a national unity government — enfranchising the Doha Accord as the new powersharing mechanism in Lebanon, at least for the time being — formalized the stop-gap solution that Syria has sought, with regard to the weapons of Hizbullah.
The rapprochement with Saudi Arabia seems to have inaugurated a new agreement over Lebanon. It’s not quite a condominium like the one that existed from 1990-2004, but the two countries seem to have agreed to stop making life difficult for each other in Beirut, in exchange for cooperating on matters like Iraq.
It’s not clear what Syria’s long-term aim is for the Lebanese file. Some believe that it wants nothing less than to re-establish control over Lebanon, albeit without having the expense of keeping its army posted there. Others say that its interests in Lebanon are purely instrumental: using Hizbullah as a card in its effort to regain the Golan, and in its bid for greater regional clout.
What’s clear to me is that Syria is trying to diversify its relationships in the region, distributing its eggs from the “axis of resistance” basket (Iran, Hizbullah, Hamas) to other baskets. This does not amount to a potential “flip”, as the State Department is unrealistically hoping for. Those allies remain too valuable to Damascus. But as Tehran looks increasingly vulnerable and the credibility of the regime there is challenged, Syria’s cache as an interlocutor diminishes. This is where its relations with Turkey make much more sense, as does its rapprochement with Saudi Arabia.
December 10, 2009
Michael Young’s op-ed over at the Daily Star makes sense on the following point, I find:
But right after shattering the jar of complacency on Hizbullah, Sfeir was asked about the abolition of political confessionalism. And here the patriarch fell back into a disposition that showed why, for all his qualities, he is no innovator. He, quite correctly, stated, “What is the advantage of abolishing political confessionalism in [national] texts before doing so in [people’s] minds, if everyone says ‘I’m a Maronite, or a Druze?’” And when asked about Walid Jumblatt’s proposal for a communal rotation of the three presidencies, Sfeir responded that he did not understand it.
Jumblatt’s proposal was intentionally ambiguous. Did the Druze leader mean that all communities would benefit from being rotated into the three top posts in the state, or that the rotation would occur between the Maronites, Sunnis, and Shiites, who already hold those posts? The Taif Accord outlines the abolition of confessionalism, but it does so in parallel with the establishment of a Senate which would retain a sectarian breakdown, and which Jumblatt would like to see led by a Druze.
Sfeir is not a politician, so his evasiveness was defensible. However, his uneasy response showed he was still thinking, in a most conventional way, that the Maronites’ final protection remains the presidency. It’s true, confessionalism cannot be abolished in law before the outlook of the Lebanese is transformed. However, that line of reasoning is self-reinforcing. Unless you abolish confessionalism institutionally somewhere, unless you change laws somewhere, nothing will ever alter the confessional mindset. But what is needed is a gradual, self-sustaining process of change, where you modify texts to help modify minds, in a way that those who feel most threatened by such change find simultaneous compensations, institutional or otherwise, elsewhere.
Take the Senate. Regardless of whether it is headed by a Druze or not, such a body would be a valuable corresponding institution to a deconfessionalized Parliament, and according to Article 22 of the Constitution should address “major national issues.” The aim of a Senate would be to reassure those expected to lose most from deconfessionalization, namely the Christians, who continue to benefit from a 50-50 ratio in the legislature even though they make up less than that in the population. Sooner or later Christians will face challenges to the ratio. Better for them to negotiate a new formula from a position of strength than to obstinately defend a system that, if Sunnis and Shiites ever reach agreement, may be forcibly overturned in their disfavor.
What of Jumblatt’s rotation plan? Sfeir’s mistake, and that of many Christians, is to read too much into a Maronite presidency, whose powers have been depleted. In fact, the presidency has brought only woe to the community. Competition for the post has divided Maronites in a way the prime ministership and speakership of Parliament have not Sunnis and Shiites. The powers of the president are by and large less proactive than those of his Muslim partners. Therefore, why remain so unyielding toward a plan that would give Maronites a taste of political positions often more effective than the presidency, thereby offering them a chance to transcend their sense of communal decline; a plan, also, that might rejuvenate the political order by creating more frequent openings for fresh leaders?
The symbolism of being head of state is important to Maronites, but it is also an illusion. The presidency has power, but on a day-to-day basis, in the formulation of long-term policy, its latitude is more limited. Instead of resisting this, the patriarch, like all Christians, should consider new ways his community can reinvent itself in a Lebanon that is changing rapidly, where Christian irrelevance is, alas, becoming ever more flagrant.
I think Young is exactly right on this point, and frankly have never understood why the Christians are so attached to the Presidency and yet simultaneously so aware of its limited powers.
To my mind, rotating the three posts would not really amount to a legitimate confessional re-balancing act. It would simply represent a confidence-building measure, in advance of taking more dramatic steps. But confidence is surely what is most needed, no?
July 10, 2009
Michael Young had an excellent op-ed in yesterday’s Daily Star about the dangerous course charted by Lebanon’s Christian leaders, particularly the young Sami Gemayel. I’ve disagreed with some of Young’s writings before in these pages, but I think that he is consistently among the most astute observers of Christian politics in Lebanon. Those who airily dismiss his articles as M14 propaganda would do well to read this critique of Gemayel’s isolationist politics. Here are the key paragraphs:
“An alarming number of Maronites today appear to have lost any sense of the collective nature of the Lebanese state. The Aounists, Sami Gemayel, Nadim Gemayel, even Sleiman Franjieh, have shown an inability to come to grips with the sectarian contract of 1943, the National Pact, and its successor, the Taif Accord. Taif is the real culprit to them, documentary proof of Christian decline – a decline they have all received with bitterness, even if their responses have differed.
“For the Aounists, Taif handed Maronite power to the Sunnis, hence their effort to reverse this by allying themselves with another rural community, the Shiites, to regain what was lost. For people like Sami Gemayel, the solution lies in greater Christian unanimity against the outside, which when you peel away the layers is really just a strategy bound to enhance Christian isolation. For Franjieh and not a few Aounists, the way out is through an alliance of minorities, with the Alawites in Syria and the Shiites in Lebanon, against the Sunni majority in the Middle East. Each of these notions is foolish in itself, an avenue toward communal suicide, and all have one thing in common: antagonism toward the Sunni community.
“There is no small amount of historical irony, and hypocrisy, here. For decades the Maronites took pride in saying that they were the true defenders of “Lebanon first.” Now that the Sunnis have adopted the slogan as their own, too many Maronites have reacted as if this were a threat to the Lebanese entity because Sunnis are extensions of an Arab majority. Ultimately, the message this sends is that the Maronites only defended a “Lebanon first” option when the Lebanon in question was one they dominated. Now that the community feels it is losing ground, the preference is for Christians to envelope themselves in a tight defensive shell.
“When Sami Gemayel speaks about the Christians “being stepped upon,” what does he mean? This is the language of demagoguery, and in some respects of war. Who has stepped on the Christians? Judging by Gemayel’s actions and statements, the simple answer is “the Muslims” whoever that may be. Yet being stepped upon is a very different concept than accepting the reality of Christian numerical regression. It is very different than grasping that Taif, the hated Taif, hands Christians representation well beyond their real numbers. When one feels stepped upon, the world looks like the bottom of a shoe, and it becomes very difficult to follow a sensible path away from one’s resentments.”
I agree with Young’s analysis. Listening to some of these Christian leaders — on both sides of the political divide — I often catch myself thinking: “What chutzpah!” Is it arrogance or naïveté (or a blend of both) that permits one to complain about the weakened powers of the presidency after Ta’if? In what sense is it reasonable to imagine that Lebanon could be governed today solely by a powerful Maronite president, when the Christians, as a whole, represent a minority of the population?
I recall meeting with Alain Aoun (Michel’s nephew) a few months ago, and discussing different potential electoral laws. He was a little bit cagey about what kind of law would be the FPM’s ideal formula, and when I pointed this out to him, he replied: “Well, obviously, we feel strongly about a law that maximizes the number of Christian politicans voted in by Christian voters.” I replied by asking him how this squared with the FPM’s purported desire to dismantle political confessionalism. His answer was revealing, particularly because of its subtle self-contradiction: “Yes of course the FPM’s goal is to bring about a nonconfessional state. By why not try to do this from a position of strength?”
Come again?
The notion of a “Third Republic” is not, in and of itself, a bad idea. But the problem with the FPM’s Third Republic was that it did not address the most crucial part of it — deconfessionalism — in a detailed enough fashion. March 14′s Christian leaders, on the other hand, have offered no meaningful discourse on this issue whatsoever, beyond support for administrative decentralization.
The current historical moment represents a rare window of opportunity for Lebanon. With the various foreign “sponsor” states seemingly recalibrating their relationships with the country as a result of a larger geopolitical reshuffling of power relations, a space has been opened up for a new grand bargain to be struck, or an old grand bargain to have its vows renewed (and fulfilled). However, the shared strategy of Lebanon’s Christian leaders — circling the wagons only to fight one another within a self-imposed confessional corral — does not inspire confidence in the future.
April 10, 2009
Michael Young had an article in yesterday’s Daily Star entitled “Syria Will Win Lebanon’s Elections.” Young-haters will gleefully read it as a sign of surrender by one of March 14th’s most ardent and eloquent spokesmen, while his fans will tell you that there’s nothing new about this latest offering: Michael Young has been sour on March 14th for a good long while. Here’s the take-away:
“The March 8-March 14 dichotomy no longer seems appropriate today, despite the furious debate in Lebanon over who will win next June. Whoever wins, Syria will emerge on top, its crimes forgotten and its interests protected. That may sound benign when expressed this way, but those interests will certainly expand in the future, to Lebanon’s detriment. So much for Lebanon’s so-called Cedar Revolution, never a revolution in the first place, and now as exposed as any old tree to being cut down.”
I seem to meet a lot of bitter March 14ers these days. Michael Young is not alone in his frustration with the coalition and its changing fortunes. The departure of the Bush administration and the Syrian-Saudi rapprochement have yanked the rug out (so people say) from beneath the feet of the Independence Intifadists, who now sit and wait for an election that will almost certainly give them a less convincing mandate than the 2005 polls, assuming that they even win at all. To be frank, I can identify with this embittered group, in certain ways. Sure, I seem to spend quite a bit of time and energy on this blog criticizing the leaders of M14 (both politicians and “messaging strategists”), but, at the risk of sounding duplicitous… I can explain.
(Exiting Syrian/Iranian apologist mode… entering USA/Saudi collaborator mode).
I know few people who were not, at one point or another, if only for a day, “believers” in the March 14th movement. This includes many people who have long since drifted away from their earlier convictions, or indeed renounced them vehemently. However, what I’ve found is that even when speaking with people who currently define their political alignment in terms of being against March 14th, the conversation usually winds up producing, curiously enough, some kind of conciliatory position vis-à-vis the “original spirit” of the movement: a spontaneous social uprising against a perceived historical injustice. I wrote an article on the psychological effect of this phenomenon, about a year ago for Syria Comment. Here’s an excerpt.
“What is often lost in the day-to-day analysis of Lebanon’s current despair and hopelessness, is the extent to which its paralysis stems, paradoxically, from two moments of staggering hopefulness. Beneath the surface clutter of parliamentary sessions postponed, foreign sponsors maligned, and electoral laws rejected, lie two emotional currents of deep nationalist aspiration, two currents which flow beneath the landscape of Lebanese politics like parallel subterranean rivers, welling up and intersecting at various points, then diverging once again and disappearing from sight.
I am speaking, of course, of the two monumental events which precipitated the current conflict, namely the “Cedar Revolution” of March 2005 and the “Divine Victory” of July 2006… In many ways, these two episodes were twin revolutions, remarkably similar to each other in their structural outlines and emotional resonance. They each represented a defining moment for a sizable portion of the Lebanese population, in which a dense set of accumulated resentments, anxieties, and righteous anger was focused upon a single historical injustice, and then exorcised – successfully – through a shocking and sublime victory. These twin revolutions made visible, for many Lebanese, a political reality previously unimaginable in Lebanon, a reality in which ordinary citizens were the masters of their own fate, where the dominance of foreign powers could be resisted successfully, and where national unity was not a purely hypothetical construct.
For the hundreds of thousands of people who would come together under the March 14 banner, the assassination of Rafiq al-Hariri was a great crime, not against one sect but against the nation as a whole. The huge “Independence 05” rallies displayed an unprecedented degree of national unity… Having yoked their hopes and aspirations to the idyllic prospect of a new national beginning in Lebanon free of foreign tutelage, these citizens could not bear to see their gains dashed by what they perceived to be Syria’s attempt to bring Lebanon under its wing, once again.”
I suppose that this is my way of saying that I can understand Young’s bitterness vis-à-vis the state of the March 14th coalition and his paranoia about what the coming months will bring. However, at the same time, I think that he does not lay enough blame for the movement’s demise at the feet of its leadership. Like Young’s own editorials, March 14th’s leaders have continually looked beyond Lebanon’s borders to situate the source of the movement’s inertia. This was a state of affairs that the United States and the Sunni Arab regimes were only too happy to exploit in order to destabilize a despised regional opponent. As such, the movement never focused its energy on attending to Lebanon’s systemic dysfunctions, and instead tried to shoot the moon by exorcising all of Lebanon’s problems through regime change in Damascus.
It’s probably slightly unfair of me to give Joshua Landis the last word in an article about March 14th and Michael Young, but I believe that he made a strong point along these lines, in a recent email to me. He writes:
“Syria is both a blessing and curse to Lebanon. It is a blessing because it acts as the Sultan, stepping in to halt the damage done by Lebanon’s za`ama system and emulous factionalism It is a curse because it is the Sultan. Authoritarianism is good for stability but not for freedom.
Lebanon has proven that its political system does not produce stable self-government. Its za`ims need an outside arbitrator to mediate their squabbles which turn to violent. Whether the Ottoman Sultan, the French, the Americans or more recently the Syrians, an outside authority has been drawn into Lebanon’s battles to resolve conflicts that Lebanese politicians seem incapable of resolving on their own.
Obama, like Clinton, will buy Syrian good behavior in Lebanon through the promise of lifting sanctions that Bush imposed and by pushing for peace with Israel and the return of the Golan. This will work for a period of time.
Ultimately, the only cure for Lebanon, in my humble opinion, is to reform the confessional system that pits one Lebanese community against another in such a fashion as to undermine a common sense of national identity and purpose. Only then will the Lebanese abandon their need for an external arbiter and inoculate themselves against Syrian influence. So long as the za`ama system leads to deadlock and a zero sum approach to politics, Syria will remain a blessing and curse to Lebanon.
Apologies for a long and rambling post. Happy Easter.
February 26, 2009
Michael Young, opinion editor of the Daily Star, has an interesting op-ed today (“On Not Debating Christopher Hitchens”) about Hitchens’ visit to Beirut and the lecture he gave, entitled “Who are the Revolutionaries In Today’s Middle East?” In the article, Young sets his sights on a surprising target: the audience at the lecture, the majority of whom were students at the American University of Beirut. From Young’s perspective, Hitchens’ talk was a sad exercise in throwing pearls before swine, such was the ingratitude and boorishness of his interlocutors:
“You could distil his argument down to one sentence: The Arab world is better off without Saddam Hussein, and the US, alongside the true “Arab revolutionaries”, is responsible for this outcome. Instead of addressing that point, many in the audience resorted to the oldest of rhetorical subterfuges: When you don’t like an argument, change the subject; which only tended to show how we in the region seem incapable of engaging in constructive self-doubt about our own affairs.”
I was at the lecture, and while I might agree with Young about the lackluster quality of most of the questions, I think he does a disservice to the intelligence of most of the attendees when he accuses them of failing to lap up whatever slop Hitchens threw before them.
And slop it was, if we are being fair. Christopher Hitchens is a deeply learned man and one worth listening to on a great many subjects, but his performance at AUB that night was one that a younger version of himself would have brilliantly and mercilessly eviscerated. The subject matter at hand – the moral prerogative of interventionism, the role of the United States in overthrowing dictatorships and spreading democracy, the utter bankruptcy of the Arab nationalist project, the oppressiveness of various theocratic movements, etc. – are all worthy and serious themes for debate. And this is precisely why I was so disappointed to hear Hitchens make his case, because he did it so poorly and childishly. Rather than laying out a thoughtful and carefully-reasoned answer to the important question of what it means to be a revolutionary in today’s Middle East, he waxed on endlessly about Kurdistan, Walid Jumblatt, Kurdistan, head scarves, gas chambers, and Kurdistan. It was a flashy, overbearing, and jingoistic performance that really fooled no one. Except, surprisingly, Michael Young.
The problem with the lecture was not its thesis (“The Arab world is better off without Saddam Hussein, and the US… is responsible for this outcome”), but rather Hitchens’ unwillingness or inability to outline the corollaries and conclusions that derive from it. Should Middle Eastern revolutionaries pledge themselves to the cause of the United States even when it does not act “in the defense of universal liberal values”? What about in the vast majority of cases where it acts in direct opposition to those values? Does the acceptance of Saddam’s deposal validate the means by which it was achieved, and exonerate the mistakes made in the course of the war effort? These were not questions meant to evade Hitchens’ thesis; rather, they constituted one invitation after another (consistently rejected and evaded by the real master of rhetorical subterfuges in that room) to make his case for an America-centered theory of Middle Eastern revolution.
At one point in his article, Young argues that Hitchens is one of the few Western public intellectuals to confront the burning question that has faced the left in recent years, namely:
“If a tyrannical leader is abusing his own people, is it the duty of the left to confront him in all ways possible, including force, because that may be the only course open in defending human rights and human liberty, even if this requires depending on the United States for its success?”
A valid question, but a naïve one? After all, in how many cases can leftist revolutionaries depend on the United States to confront tyrannical and abusive leaders in our region? No one made this point more convincingly and thoughtfully than Rami Khoury, who argued that while many people would agree with Hitchens about the failure and oppressiveness of the existing state system, they cannot count on a muscular and principled stance against tyranny from the United States in the vast majority of cases. The entire hall erupted in applause when Rami made his point. Hitchens’ response? A sulking one-liner about moral equivalency.
Mr. Young, Christopher Hitchens did not come to Beirut to debate anyone. He came to make a spectacle of himself on the streets of Hamra and in the newspapers. There are many eloquent and sensible advocates of the United States out there; the Lebanon Renaissance Foundation shouldn’t confine itself to an opportunistic and glib ex-communist who “once wrote a book with Edward Said.”
What I’m reading…
