Greg Sheridan, Foreign editor
June 11
WAS the surprising Lebanese election result, in which the pro-Western government won a clear victory over the Hezbollah-led opposition, the first flower of Barack Obama's new spring for the Muslim and Arab worlds? Were enough Lebanese voters won over by the charm and eloquence of the handsome young American President to give the fading Western power one more try?
I am tempted to write a wholly optimistic column. I want to declare "Let Lebanon be Lebanon", as Ronald Reagan at the height of the Cold War so famously and effectively declared "Let Poland be Poland". Lebanon, its sons and daughters will tell you, used to be the best country in the world. Beirut was the Paris of the east. It was the cradle of much civilisation. Its offspring have been magnificent citizens of Australia, from the last Victorian premier to the incumbent NSW Governor.
Can this glory come again? Well, sadly, it is better to tell the truth.
This election result is good news, but it is very modest good news.
Hezbollah won all the seats it contested. The alliance it leads will have just under a half of the parliament. Hezbollah is a devoutly Shi'ite terrorist group controlled by Iran.
It will continue to wield by far the most powerful army in Lebanon. It will continue to receive weapons and financial support from Syria and Iran at will. It will continue to possess 50,000 rockets deployed on Israel's border. It will continue to exercise dominance within Lebanon whenever it wants to by force of arms.
The best piece of writing on Lebanon in recent months was a brilliant cover story in the May 20 issue of The New Republic. In it, journalist David Samuels recounts an interview with former Lebanese president Amin Gemayel, in which he outlines Hezbollah's strategic value to Iran.
Gemayel says: "In the form of Hezbollah, they (Iran) get a brigade on the Mediterranean and on the border with Israel. So $100 million a year they spend here is nothing."
In 2007, Hezbollah's leader Hassan Nasrallah made a famous speech in which he answered directly the charge that Hezbollah was not complying with UN resolutions that forbade it from bringing armaments into Lebanon.
Nasrallah said: "We are being very clear and we have arms. We have arms of all shapes and sizes. The resistance (Hezbollah often refers to itself as the resistance) has arms. It is saying it in public, adding that it is rearming and increasing the scope of its armaments in order to get more dangerous arms ... We are transporting the arms secretly and in straw trucks so as not to embarrass you (the Lebanese government). I am saying we will remain on the border, in Beirut and everywhere in Lebanon."
You've certainly got to hand it to Nasrallah and Hezbollah generally: they say what they mean, even if athousand Western commentators try to find some other meaning in their words.
One of the most striking features of Samuels's long essay is his description of his interview with Saad Hariri, son of Lebanon's assassinated former prime minister, Rafik Hariri, and the leader of the winning coalition in the recent election. Hariri, the successful and just-elected senior politician in Lebanon, lives behind a fortress, seldom leaving his stockade, with street traffic kept at least a block away so no car bomb can kill him as it killed his father.
If he wants to go out for an evening meal at a restaurant, he goes overseas.
Of course, much normal life goes on in Lebanon. The Lebanese have a national genius for making the most of what normality is afforded to them. But giant, convulsive and violent forces are at work within their society, and from outside.
In one sense, the Lebanese election was the latest episode in what is becoming a fairly clear cold war in the Middle East. On one side of this cold war are the US, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and, despite Arab unease with them, the Israelis. On the other side are Iran, Syria, Hezbollah and Hamas, which rules the Gaza Strip. Communal, ethnic, religious and national identities and loyalties are infinitely more complex than these cold war divisions, naturally, but the strategic competition between the US and Iran is a central axis around which the region revolves. Read the rest here.....
Source: The Australian
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