The Wider Middle East

On the heels of the President's speech defending America's determination to transform the political culture of the Middle East, beginning with a democratic and, one day, peaceful Iraq, it's useful to take a broader look at nascent democratic moves within the region. The Summer, 2005, issue of the Middle East Quarterly, an excellent source of information and analysis on that volatile, yet key, region, offers an insightful look into two countries lately much in the news: Lebanon and Syria.

In Lebanon, citizens weary of Syrian overlordship, with its attendant corruption and stifling of liberties, came to a head this past spring in the aftermath of what was certainly the Syrian-backed assassination of Rafik Hariri. But, as William Harris demonstrates in "Bashar al-Assad's Lebanon Gamble," Lebanese agitation against Syrian rule began with the death of long-time dictator Hafez al-Assad in 2000. The West, including America, had long since acquiesced to Syrian dominance of Lebanon, and no small number of observers expected Bashar to liberalize his father's Baathist regime. His subsequent actions, however, dashed those hopes, even if they did little to bring about Western demands for change toward Lebanon.

As Harris demonstrates, Syrian rule in Lebanon, though initially reliant on 30,000 troops, gradually came to make use of diplomatic tricks employed by the Romans, Byzantines, and, more recently, the British and French. These centered around the formation of alliances with various members of Lebanon's warring tribes and parties: Druze, Maronite, Orthodox, Shiite, and Sunni. Eventually, military might became less important to maintaining control, as organized criminal outfits centered around the above parties, along with powerful families, served to lock Lebanon into a seemingly permanent state of weakness -- much of it self-induced through its long civil war.

[As one who spent years reading Renaissance history, I'd add that the chaotic situation in Lebanon resembles that faced in many of the Italian city-states of the fourteenth through sixteenth centuries. Families vied for control of trade, raised private armies, and alligned themselves with stronger foreign powers (France, the papacy, the Holy Roman Empire). Not to draw too direct a parallel, but viewed historically, Lebanon's troubles are neither unique nor unsolvable. I examined some solutions to these perennial problems in this review.]

Harris thinks that Syria's bungle in Lebanon may cost Assad his rule. Internally, Syria is weak, with a per capita income of only $1,130 US; compare that to the $16,000 enjoyed by Israelis, by far the highest in the region, and to the $3,900 in Lebanon. Assad fils and pere were long able to use the situation in Lebanon as an outlet for internal pressure at home; repression was excused by the need to prevent a return to chaos within Lebanon, and pan-Arabism has long since been a mainstay of repressive Arabic regimes (witness Saddam's Iraq or Arafat's Palestinian territories).

Harris calls the Syria built by the Assad's a "wasteland," and he's certainly correct. Poor, humiliated by their withdrawal from Lebanon, they haven't given up on ruling Lebanon again, and yet their loss of face has been dramatic. It's useful to recall that, only a few years ago, pre-9/11, Assad's regime was given a green light by the administration for its continued intrigues in Lebanon:

As the opposition coalesced in Lebanon, Washington turned a blind eye. The Syrian regime interpreted Washington's lack of interest as a green light to crack down. The critical moment came in March 2001 when Secretary of State Colin Powell and other senior officials refused to meet Maronite patriarch Sfeir during his visit to Washington. In August 2001, when Sfeir visited Jumblatt amid large crowds to launch again Lebanon's old Maronite-Druze partnership, Lahoud's Syrian-backed regime struck, arresting hundreds of activists. Syrian defense minister Mustafa Tlas, delivering Bashar's address at an officers' graduation ceremony, announced that Damascus "stands beside President Lahoud and brotherly Lebanese army commander General Michel Suleiman" in facing "suspicious movements whose linkage with foreign elements hostile to Lebanon and the Arab nation has been confirmed."

The failure of this style of diplomacy should be clear for all to see, although we know all too well that the reactionary left still pines for a return to the days when America ignored, and even supported, tyranny abroad. The administration changed its foreign policy in order to deal with the new reality that 9/11 so brutally ushered in. Its actions are based on the belief that liberty can be gained universally, over time and with regional variations, and America is unquestionably the foundation for democratic theory and practice in the modern world. Perhaps this fact explains the left's hatred for Bush and his policies: if America is fundamentally evil, as they claim, then the exporting of liberty itself must be evil, too.

Harris ends his essay on a hopeful note: Lebanon's fractious political culture has largely united in opposition to continued Syrian meddling, and Syria's brutal regime is floundering at home and abroad. Given that the terrorists now killing Americans and Iraqis have been welcomed by Damascus, the administration is unlikely to grant Damascus even more wriggle room, either in Lebanon or along the border with Iraq.

Further reading: Also see the work of two other scholars in the Summer issue of the MEQ. Michael Rubin's review of Natan Sharansky's The Case for Democracy, and Suzanne Gershowitz's short essay on Egyptian dissident Ayman Nour, are posted on the American Enterprise Institute's main web site.