Crisis in the Levant: Lebanon at Risk?

Syrian president Bashar al-Asad's determination in August 2004 to force an extended Lebanese presidential term for his ally Émile Lahoud inaugurated a multifaceted crisis in the Levant. Bashar mistakenly assumed that he could railroad the West and the Lebanese into accepting a fait accompli, on the basis of Syria having had its own way through almost fifteen years of command of Lebanon, blessed by the United States in 1990. In late 2004, the United States and France surprised Damascus by refusing to bend any more to Baathist Syria's strategic self-importance, and a majority of Lebanese stirred against Syrian tutelage. Up to early 2007, the crisis has involved a relentless march of extraordinary events without a decisive outcome. So far it has encompassed two principal shocks.

First, on 14 February 2005 came the assassination of Rafik al-Hariri, long-time Lebanese prime minister, billionaire magnate, and political colossus of the Lebanese Sunni Muslim community. Hariri opposed Lahoud's presidential extension and had turned against Syria's hegemony in Lebanon. His assassination outraged the international community and provoked Lebanon's Sunni, Christian, and Druze communities against the Syrian regime. It led to the first ever United Nations murder inquiry, which gradually assembled evidence through 2005 and 2006 and principally targeted the Lebanese/Syrian security apparatus.

In the meantime, Syria and its Lebanese allies suffered serious reverses, losing control of the Lebanese parliament and government. The United States and France mobilized the international community to compel Syrian military withdrawal from Lebanon in April 2005, which facilitated Lebanon's first parliamentary elections free of external steerage since 1972. Syria's allies, most prominently President Lahoud and the Shiite religious radicals of Hezbollah, retained formidable capability, but they were on the defensive. The Hariri murder inquiry, and the prospective "tribunal of an international character" to try Hariri's assassins, threatened their Syrian patron. A threat to the Syrian regime was a threat to Hezbollah and its autonomy in southern Lebanon, where the Party of God faced Israel. How, therefore, could Syria and Hezbollah turn the tables on Lebanon's "new majority" and its foreign backers? Provoking a destructive Israeli return to the Lebanese arena was an obvious temptation.

The second shock, the Israel-Hezbollah war precipitated by Hezbollah on 12 July 2006, could therefore be seen as an extension of the Lebanon-Syria crisis inaugurated by Bashar in August 2004. When it crossed Lebanon's border with Israel to kidnap Israeli soldiers, Hezbollah presumably calculated a response that would truncate Lebanese criticism of "resistance" weapons, destabilize the "new majority," and refocus world attention on Lebanon's problems with Israel, sidelining problems with Syria. To suppose that Hezbollah did not calculate a major reaction to an unprecedented infraction in the Galilee, far from the disputed Shebaa farms on the Golan Heights, is laughable. Further, there was the prospect that sustained hostilities and their difficult aftermath would disrupt the Hariri murder inquiry. Hezbollah secretary-general Hasan Nasrallah indicated in a wartime speech that the party had entered battle on behalf of the whole umma (Arab and Islamic community), and that damage along the way was of small account.¹

Hezbollah gained kudos by surviving the bloody, muddled Israeli offensive of July and August 2006, but the scale of Israeli bombardment brought an international intervention in southern Lebanon uncomfortable for Hezbollah and Syria. The Lebanese government dominated by the new majority survived, buttressed by Saudi Arabia and Egypt, while the Americans and French made sure that the Hariri inquiry suffered no body blow. After the 14 August 2006 cease-fire, Hezbollah moved overtly to overturn Prime Minister Fouad Sinyora's cabinet of ministers, but the Lebanese stalemate persisted, with the risk of eventual checkmate for Syria's ruling clique and its Lebanese friends.

In this essay the two main dimensions of Lebanon's contemporary affairs are explored: the Hariri story as an expression of Lebanon's problematic relations with Syria, and Hezbollah's confrontation with Israel. The intersection of these dimensions in the crisis inaugurated in August 2004 and the implications for Lebanon and the Middle East are...