Ajami on Lebanon: the "Garden Without Fences"

Fuad Ajami is from South Lebanese stock and his name "Ajami" means "Persian" in Arabic. Who better to understand the myriad complexities and contradictions of that beautiful cursed battleground of confessions, sects, religions, tribes, clans and militias?

The magisterial prose of Fuad's deconstruction of the Hezbollah mafia simply must be read in full to realize the pilgrimage that Fuad, whom I hung out with in DC when he was still suffering from a Pan-Arabism hangover, has made to a sane and mature understanding of the Middle East. Much like Christopher Hitchens, he has grown up in middle age and achieved the intellectual honesty most soft-headed liberals never achieve in their typical lifetime of delusions and hallucinatory simplicities.

Here are the first several paragraphs:

BEGIN QUOTE "Pity Lebanon: In a world of states, it has not had a state of its own. A garden without fences, was the way Beirut, its capital city, was once described.

A cleric by the name of Hassan Nasrallah, at the helm of the Hezbollah movement, handed Lebanon a calamity right as the summer tourist season had begun. Beirut had dug its way out of the rubble of a long war: Nasrallah plunged it into a new season of loss and ruin. He presented the country with a fait accompli: the "gift" of two Israeli soldiers kidnapped across an international frontier. Nasrallah never let the Lebanese government in on his venture. He was giddy with triumphalism and defiance when this crisis began. And men and women cooped up in the destitution of the Shiite districts of Beirut were sent out into the streets to celebrate Hezbollah's latest deed.

It did not seem to matter to Nasrallah that the ground that would burn in Lebanon would in the main be Shiite land in the south. Nor was it of great concern to he who lives on the subsidies of the Iranian theocrats that the ordinary Lebanese would pay for his adventure. The cruel and cynical hope was that Nasrallah's rivals would be bullied into submission and false solidarity, and that the man himself would emerge as the master of the game of Lebanon's politics.

"The hotels are full in Damascus," read a dispatch in Beirut, as though to underline the swindle of this crisis, its bitter harvest for the Lebanese. History repeats here, endlessly it seems. There was something to Nasrallah's conduct that recalled the performance of Gamal Abdel Nasser in the Six Day War of 1967. That leader, it should be recalled, closed the Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping, asked for the evacuation of U.N. forces from the Sinai Peninsula-- clear acts of war--but never expected the onset of war. He had only wanted the gains of war.

Nasrallah's brazen deed was, in the man's calculus, an invitation to an exchange of prisoners. Now, the man who triggered this crisis stands exposed as an Iranian proxy, doing the bidding of Tehran and Damascus. He had confidently asserted that "sources" in Israel had confided to Hezbollah that Israel's government would not strike into Lebanon because Hezbollah held northern Israel hostage to its rockets, and that the demand within Israel for an exchange of prisoners would force Ehud Olmert's hand. The time of the "warrior class" in Israel had passed, Nasrallah believed, and this new Israeli government, without decorated soldiers and former generals, was likely to capitulate. Now this knowingness has been exposed for the delusion it was.

There was steel in Israel and determination to be done with Hezbollah's presence on the border. States can't--and don't--share borders with militias. That abnormality on the Lebanese-Israeli border is sure not to survive this crisis. One way or other, the Lebanese army will have to take up its duty on the Lebanon-Israel border. By the time the dust settles, this terrible summer storm will have done what the Lebanese government had been unable to do on its own. END QUOTE

Fuad goes on a few paragraphs later to state the obvious: Hezbolloh is run by and for the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, who arm and train and maintain the high-end weaponry of this collection of misfits. And Syria is the transmission belt between Iran and the groundlings strutting on Israel's northern border. War criminal Nasrullah may be defended by the wooly-brained EU and the American MSM, who hem and haw about Hezbollah's being the cat's-paw of Syria and Iran. In their flight from reality, the Socialists everywhere hallucinate revolutionary "dream palaces" that Fuad wrote eloquently about in his books on the grand illusion of the Arabs.

BEGIN QUOTE "But Nasrallah was in the end just the Lebanese face of Hezbollah. Those who know the workings of the movement with intimacy believe that operational control is in the hands of Iranian agents, that Hezbollah is fully subservient to the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. The hope that Hezbollah would "go Lebanese," and "go local," was thus set aside. At any rate, Nasrallah and his lieutenants did not trust the new Lebanon to make the ample room that a country at war--and within the orbit of Syria--had hitherto made for them in the time of disorder. Though the Shiites had risen in Lebanon, there remains in them a great deal of brittleness, a sense of social inadequacy relative to the more privileged communities in the country.

That raid into Israel, the capture of the two Israeli soldiers, was a deliberate attack against the new Lebanon. That the crisis would play out when the mighty of the G-8 were assembled in Russia was a good indication of Iran's role in this turn of events. Hassan Nasrallah had waded beyond his depth: The moment of his glory would mark what is destined to be a setback of consequence for him and for his foot soldiers. Iran's needs had trumped Hezbollah's more strictly Lebanese agenda.END QUOTE

This war is Syria's way to get back into Lebanon after Boy-Assad skedaddled last year after he had Rafiq Hariri assassinated. [The feckless UN insists the jury is still out, but Assad ordered the hit, for sure.] And this is Iran's way of saying that it will get the bomb and will deploy it against Israel. Clearly, if the powerless EU frets and Russia and China veto harsh sanctions against Iran, direct action to halt the nuclearization of the Arab/Israeli struggle.

What the Bushes and Blairs and Merkels understand and the rest of the EU ignores is the reality of appeasement's butcher's bill in the end. When a pompous bumbler like Chirac condemns Israel, you know that the Izzies are in the right. Chirac still hasn't recovered from losing his share of the cash flow from the UN Oil for Food kickbacks.

Fuad ends his piece, which must be read in full to appreciate the nuances understood by Ajami from his own Shi'ite origins in South Lebanon, with a plea for international support for the ideal of Lebanon in the face of Iranian-Syrian meddling:

BEGIN QUOTE:"In an earlier time, three decades ago, Lebanon was made to pay for the legends of Arabism, and for the false glamour of the Palestinian "revolutionary" experiment. The country lost well over a quarter-century of its history--its best people quit it, and its modernist inheritance was brutally and steadily undermined.
Now comes this new push by Damascus and Tehran. It promises nothing save sterility and ruin. It will throw the Lebanese back onto a history whose terrible harvest is well known to them. The military performance of Hezbollah, it should be apparent by now, is not a performance of a militia; nor are unmanned drones and missiles of long range the weapons of boys of the alleyways. A formidable military structure has been put together by the Iranians in Lebanon. In a small, densely populated country that keeps and knows no secrets, Hezbollah and its Iranian handlers have been at work on this military undertaking for quite some time, under the gaze of Lebanese authorities too frightened to raise questions.

The Mediterranean vocation of Lebanon as a land of enlightenment and commerce may have had its exaggerations and pretense. But set it against the future offered Lebanon by Syria, and by Tehran's theocrats seeking a diplomatic reprieve for themselves by setting Lebanon on fire, and Lebanon's choice should be easy to see.

The Lebanese, though, are not masters of their own domain. They will need protection and political support; they will need to see the will and the designs of the radical axis contested by resolute American power, and by an Arab constellation of states that can convince the Shiites of Lebanon that there is a place for them in the Arab scheme of things. For a long time, the Arab states have worked through and favored the Sunni middle classes of Beirut, Sidon and Tripoli. This has made it easy for Iran--overcoming barriers of language and distance--to make its inroads into a large Shiite community awakening to a sense of power and violation. To truly turn Iran back from the Mediterranean, to check its reach into Beirut, the Arab world needs to rethink the basic compact of its communities, and those Shiite stepchildren of the Arab world will have to be brought into the fold.

Lebanon's strength lies in its weakness, went an old maxim. And the Arab states themselves were for decades egregious in the way they treated Lebanon, shifting onto it the burden of the Palestinian fight with Israel, acquiescing in the encroachments on its sovereignty by the Palestinians and the Syrians--encroachments often subsidized with Arab money. Iran then picked up where the Arab states left off. Now that weakness of the Lebanese state has become a source of great menace to the Lebanese, and to their neighbors as well.

No one can say with confidence how this crisis will play out. There are limits on what Israel can do in Lebanon. The Israelis will not be pulled deeper into Lebanon and its villages and urban alleyways, and Israel can't be expected to disarm Hezbollah or to find its missiles in Lebanon's crannies. Finding the political way out, and working out a decent security arrangement on the border, will require a serious international effort and active American diplomacy. International peacekeeping forces have had a bad name, and they often deserve it. But they may be inevitable on Lebanon's border with Israel; they may be needed to buy time for the Lebanese government to come into full sovereignty over its soil.

The Europeans claim a special affinity for Lebanon, a country of the eastern Mediterranean. This is their chance to help redeem that land, and to come to its rescue by strengthening its national army and its bureaucratic institutions. We have already seen order's enemies play their hand. We now await the forces of order and rescue, and by all appearances a long, big struggle is playing out in Lebanon. This is from the Book of Habakkuk: "The violence done to Lebanon shall overwhelm you" (2:17). The struggles of the mighty forces of the region yet again converge on a small country that has seen more than its share of history's heartbreak and history's follies." END QUOTE