April 19, 2010 - Now Lebanon - New Opinion: But what conspiracy?

PSP leader Walid Jumblatt has surprised few with his recent trips to Damascus and conspiracy-centered rhetoric. (AFP photo/ Joseph Eid)

The good ship Lebanon is being buffeted in a perfect storm. Regional tensions have ratcheted, and Lebanon’s internal priorities are no longer the concern of the international community. The political rhetoric has also shifted. No longer to do we hear talk of consolidating democratic principles, of achieving greater sovereignty of reform and greater freedoms. Instead we hear messages.

Walid Jumblatt, once the darling of the 2005 anti-Syrian Independence Intifada, has returned from his second trip to Damascus in recent weeks full of the language of Arab defiance, calling on all Lebanese to fight what he called the conspiracy that threatens to divide Lebanon like it has divided Iraq and Palestine. One assumes he was calling for Arab solidarity in the face of Western (read Zionist) interference in the region.

Jumblatt’s views are no longer startling to those who were initially nonplussed by his ideological volte face. He forgets that it was “Western interference” that backed Lebanon’s pro-democracy movement in 2005. But he is the supreme survivor, and if any politician can be said to personify the prevailing political winds it is he.

The “conspiracy” of which he talks is the one that has been sold to the Arab street for generations: the American-backed Zionist scheme whose plotters are hell bent on spreading mayhem. Certainly Israel is no friend of Lebanon, and certainly it has Lebanon, Syria and Iran in its crosshairs. The recent media reports that Hezbollah has acquired Syrian-supplied sophisticated weaponry will only have whetted its appetite for confrontation. We should be concerned.

But surely there is also the other side of this coin: We should call it the Iranian conspiracy in which Lebanon has become a strategic weapon in Tehran’s arsenal, a front in a regional standoff. Tensions in the South are at their highest in years, and Israeli planners are very aware that any preemptive strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities would result in Hezbollah attacking its northern border with Lebanon.

If there were anything that would destabilize Lebanese solidarity, this would be it, especially with half the country opposed to the party’s weapons. This was made very clear at the parliamentary ballot box in 2009. But at last week’s national dialogue session, Hezbollah MP Mohammad Raad also made it very clear that his party’s weapons are non-negotiable and are here to stay. The internal response to a war ignited by the presence of these weapons does not bear thinking about. And we all know what war does to solidarity.

And let us not forget the Syrian conspiracy in which Syria wants a “return” to Lebanon. We have seen how Damascus has meddled in Lebanese affairs in the months since the new regional understanding with Saudi Arabia. It has shown how it can control security in Lebanon (this weekend’s spate of shootings were clearly no coincidence) by stalling the unpopular national dialogue (ditto Speaker Nabih Berri’s outburst on alleged leaks from the recent discussions), while over the weekend we heard of claims that parties within the presidential palace tried to convince the international community to stop funding the Special Tribunal for Lebanon because its outcome would cause unrest in the country. It no secret that Damascus would like to put an end to or indefinitely delay the Special Tribunal, the court tasked with investigating the 2005 murder of former PM Rafik Hariri, a crime in which Syria is still a prime suspect. Killing the process would also not be good for Lebanese solidarity, especially if you believe that the STL is important to setting a new judicial precedent in a country where the bullet and bomb have ruled for decades.

Thus it appears Lebanon is a country riddled with conspiracies. It may be naïve to suggest, but the Lebanese solidarity of which Jumblatt speaks can only be achieved if the Lebanese state is allowed to evolve into a fully-functioning entity, free to forge its own foreign policy on its own terms and control all its institutions, including the military as the final arbiter on matters of defense. Its politicians must be accountable to their people and the electorate and not their regional patrons.