Bonfire of the Cedars

Lebanese prime minister Saad Hariri’s planned trip to Tehran Saturday, November 27, is perhaps best understood as a coda to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s tour of Lebanon two months ago. With that visit, the Islamic Republic of Iran effectively declared that the tiny country of 4.1 million on the Eastern Mediterranean is nothing more than an Iranian victory garden, to be chewed up in the next round of war between Israel and Iran’s Lebanese surrogate, Hezbollah.

Ahmadinejad’s trip finally awakened the Obama administration to the fact that its Lebanon policy had gone awry. The White House dispatched Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs Jeffrey Feltman to Lebanon and Saudi Arabia to consult with allies, and now Lebanon is back on Washington’s front burner, almost as in the heyday of the Bush administration’s freedom agenda. The U.N. Security Council’s Special Tribunal for Lebanon (STL) is due to hand down indictments in the 2005 assassination of former Lebanese prime minister Rafiq Hariri. The threat of Hezbollah—Iran’s client and Syria’s partner in murdering Hariri—to take over all of Lebanon has the White House up in arms.

But the Obama administration may be too late to save an independent Lebanon. Hariri, the Lebanese Sunni leader, has shown by his journey to the citadel of Shia power that if you want to contest the fate of Lebanon, as with so much else in the Middle East these days, the doors to knock on are in Tehran.

This is an unhappy turn of events for Lebanon, which just celebrated the 67th anniversary of its independence. President Obama marked the day with a cursory promise to protect that independence, even as his policy ideas have undermined that goal since the earliest days of his candidacy. Unlike Bush, we were told, Obama would reach out to Syria and find common ground. After all, as the senator from Illinois explained on the campaign trail, talking to your enemies is not a reward for them. Maybe not in theory, but in practice, talking to Damascus meant selling out the anti-Syrian politicians of Lebanon’s Cedar Revolution.

Fearing that Washington was about to sacrifice its Lebanon policy in the name of entente with Syria, as it had done throughout the 1990s, the one-time pillar of Lebanon’s pro-democracy March 14 movement, Walid Jumblatt, changed sides, traveling to Damascus to kiss the ring of Bashar al-Assad. Perhaps more important, Saudi Arabia, patron of Lebanon’s Sunni community, actually chose friendship with Syria over its Lebanese partners.

Oddly enough, after all of this jockeying for Syrian favor, Damascus turns out to be a distraction. “Hariri’s trip highlights the fact that Damascus is no longer a central actor,” says Tony Badran, research fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. “The Syria-Saudi initiative is a sideshow, and the Iranians have been saying this for a while: The Saudis have to negotiate with [Tehran], but the Saudis don’t want to consecrate this fact.”

Iran is now the power on the ground in Lebanon, via Hezbollah’s arms. Its general secretary, Hassan Nasrallah has renewed his warning that Hezbollah will cut off the hands of anyone who tries to touch the weapons of the “resistance,” in part no doubt to scare off the Hariri assassination tribunal from issuing indictments of Hezbollah members. In the event of such indictments, the Party of God’s reputation would suffer another blow in the court of Arab opinion for murdering a Sunni leader. 

But many analysts inside and outside Lebanon believe that Nasrallah is bluffing. It’s not clear that Hezbollah has anything to gain by extending its South Lebanon satrapy over the whole national territory. It already proved itself capable of doing so in May 2008 when it overran Sunnis loyal to Saad Hariri in West Beirut and surrounded Jumblatt’s Druze in the Chouf Mountains. Indeed that near-coup so damaged Hezbollah’s reputation with the region’s Sunni majority that it is hard to see how indictments might further tarnish it, or how a genuine coup against the Sunnis would protect it. Maybe more to the point, the Iranians would prefer to keep their asset in reserve for the next round of fighting with Israel rather than spend it for uncertain gain.

In any case, it is difficult to see how indictments of Hezbollah would be enforced: Who is in a position to arrest suspects and bring them to account? The Lebanese Armed Forces is already penetrated by Hezbollah. The chief of the Internal Security Forces, one of Saad Hariri’s confidants, has himself just been identified as a possible accomplice in the murder of Saad’s father by a Canadian Broadcasting Corporation report. Surely neither the U.S. government, nor the U.N., nor the “international community” is going to lay its hands on suspects.