Up to No Good

As violence persists in Lebanon and escalates to civil war in Gaza, it would be foolish to minimize the turmoil as merely more of the same. The events in Lebanon and Gaza, though separated by a few hundred miles, are closely related. They were ignited from the same source--Syria, and by extension Iran--and they are all part of a renewed regional offensive against the United States and Israel, a strategic campaign whose coherence has gone unnoticed, and therefore unanswered, for over two years.

The latest fighting in Lebanon began on May 20, when investigations of a bank robbery ended in a standoff between the Lebanese Armed Forces and the al Qaeda affiliate Fatah al Islam, holed up in a Palestinian refugee camp near Tripoli. To this day, the standoff continues. A series of bombings, meanwhile--most recently one on the Beirut waterfront on June 13 that killed an anti-Syrian Sunni member of parliament, his son, and 8 others--have heightened fears of a renewal of the Lebanese civil war (1975-90), which also began when Palestinian militias challenged the government's authority.

Fatah al Islam is a pro-Syrian Palestinian Islamist group that, according to Lebanese and Israeli officials, is supported and directed by Syria and Iran. It timed its attack to coincide with the Lebanese government's petition to the U.N. Security Council to establish an international tribunal to prosecute the suspected killers of former prime minister Rafik Hariri, assassinated on February 14, 2005. (Hariri had been a strong spokesman for a free Lebanon, and his killing is widely believed to have been Syrian work. It backfired, triggering the Cedar Revolution, a series of peaceful mass demonstrations that culminated in the expulsion of some 14,000 Syrian troops and intelligence agents from Lebanon in April 2005 and the holding of new democratic elections.) But the Fatah al Islam attack failed to intimidate the government of Lebanon into withdrawing its request and letting Syria off the hook. Despite the bloodshed, the Security Council voted on May 30 to establish a tribunal.

Syria is bent on reestablishing its hegemony in Lebanon, but it cannot attack directly. The government of Prime Minister Fouad Siniora, which came to power after Hariri's assassination, enjoys not only wide international support, but also domestic support from many of Lebanon's Christians, Sunnis, and others. Instead, to challenge Lebanon's government, Syria must delegitimize it domestically and isolate it within the Arab world and Sunni politics. The easiest way to do that is to portray the Lebanese government as an agent of the United States and Israel, and then orchestrate events to bear this out.

Syria's surrogates in Lebanon

It is a fair inference from the actions and statements of Syria's clients that Damascus has been dabbling in Sunni jihadist politics in order to implement this plan. Specifically, it has striven to ensure that the clash between Fatah al Islam and the Lebanese army was not narrowly defined as a Lebanese government-al Qaeda struggle, but rather was cast as a Lebanese-Palestinian clash. When the army attacked the Islamists' base of operations inside the camp, it could be portrayed as assaulting Palestinian refugees, whose cause is the emblematic grievance of Arab nationalism. In the process, Lebanon's government would lose standing both at home and in the Arab world.

Another Syrian/Iranian client, the militant Lebanese party Hezbollah, has also behaved in a manner consistent with the strategy outlined here. Several days after the outbreak of violence, Hezbollah's leader, Hassan Nasrallah, warned that the Lebanese military, by attacking the Islamists inside the camp, had flouted the longstanding ban on entering the camps and thus had crossed a red line. On Lebanese TV Nasrallah said, "We will not agree to be partners to the military entering the camps. . . . We mustn't turn Lebanon into a battlefield in which we fight al Qaeda for the Americans."

This should raise eyebrows. To protect Sunni extremists like Fatah al Islam is uncharacteristic of the Shiite Hezbollah; indeed, Hezbollah and al Qaeda have been open enemies, and in the past Fatah al Islam has threatened to assassinate Hezbollah leaders. Even the pro-Palestinian, old style pan-Arab nationalist tone of his speech is atypical for Nasrallah. As the scholar Fouad Ajami has shown, since the 1970s Lebanese Shiite politics has been defined in opposition to pan-Arab nationalism, particularly that represented by armed Sunni Palestinians. Hezbollah seems not to be guided strictly by its local interests.