The third civil war has begun in Lebanon.
The first war was a short one. Sunni Arab Nationalists in thrall to Egyptian dictator Gamal Abdel Nasser wanted to attach Lebanon to the United Arab Republic – a brief union of Egypt and Syria. An even larger bloc of Maronite Christians resisted. A nation cannot hold itself together when a large percentage of its population – roughly a third – wish to be annexed by foreign powers.
The second war was a long one. This time, Yasser Arafat’s Palestinian Liberation Organization formed a state-within-a-state in West Beirut and South Lebanon and used it as a launching pad for terrorist attacks against Israel. Again, Lebanon’s Christians resisted, as did Lebanon’s Shias. The second civil war was actually a series of wars that were merely triggered by that first fatal schism.
The third civil war resembles both the first and the second. With Iranian money and weapons, Hezbollah has built its own state-within-a-state in South Lebanon and South Beirut which is used as a base to wage war against Israel. Hezbollah also wishes to violently yank Lebanon from its current pro-Western alignment into the Syrian-Iranian axis. Roughly one-fourth of the population supports this agenda. No country on earth can withstand that kind of geopolitical tectonic pressure. For more than a year members of Hezbollah have tried unsuccessfully to topple the elected government with a minimal use of force, but their patience is at an end and they have turned to war.
My old liberal Sunni neighborhood of Hamra near the American University of Beirut – the best in the Middle East – is now occupied by the private army of a foreign police state. Masked gunmen take up positions in a neighborhood of five star hotels, restaurants, and cafes (including a Starbucks) where students like to hang out while reading books by authors like Jean Paul Sartre and Albert Camus. They burned down Prime Minister Fouad Seniora’s Future Movement headquarters building. They stormed the offices of TV and radio stations and threatened to dynamite the buildings if the reporters refused to stop broadcasting. They seized the property of Saad Hariri – son of the assassinated former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri – and they control all the exits. Member of Parliament Ammar Houry’s house is now occupied. Al Arabiya says they attacked the Ottoman-era Grand Serail, the current prime minister’s office.
Hezbollah used automatic weapons, mortars, rocket-propelled grenades, and sniper rifles to seize all, if not most, of West Beirut. The only weapons its gunmen haven’t deployed are its Katyusha rockets, which are useless in urban warfare, and car bombs, which aren’t.
“Hezbollah is not mounting a coup,” Charles Malik writes from Beirut at the Lebanese Political Journal. “They do not want to control ALL of Lebanon. They have no interest in controlling state institutions.”
This is mostly right. As long as Hezbollah gets what it wants, taking over all of Lebanon is unnecessary, as well as most likely impossible. But this is still a coup d’etat of a sort. What happened is, literally, a blow against the state. Until this week, Hezbollah existed both inside and beside the state. Hezbollah now exists above the state, the parliament, the police, and the army. No member of Hezbollah will be arrested or prosecuted as they would in a normal and properly sovereign country.
The army is too weak and divided along sectarian lines to protect Lebanon from internal or external threats. It was sabotaged for more than a decade during Syria’s military occupation and was staffed at the highest levels with Damascus loyalists who have yet to be purged. It is a make-believe army at best, and a part-time tool of the Syrian state at its worst.
The erstwhile prevailing mentality of fragile coexistence and anti-war has all but evaporated. The restrained rhetoric Lebanese people are accustomed to hearing from their leaders is gone. “We are in war and they wouldn’t be able to predict our reaction,” Hezbollah Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah said. “Hezbollah has gained control over Beirut,” said Member of Parliament Ahmad Fatfat, “and has caused a Sunni-Shia conflict that will be extended for years.” “If no compromise is reached, we will be facing a long internal war,” said Suleiman Franjieh, Jr., a former member of parliament and leader of the small Marada militia in North Lebanon aligned with Hezbollah and the Syrians.
Lebanon is a country based on consensus between its more or less demographically balanced Christians, Sunnis, and Shias, and its smaller population of Druze. No sect is allowed by law or social contract to rule over the others. The system, when it works, provides checks and balances. Hezbollah has overthrown all of it. And when the system is overthrown, as it has been in the past, Lebanese have demonstrated that they can and will fight as viciously as Iraqi militias in Baghdad. Lebanon has no shortage of people from every sect and most political movements who will fight dirty urban warfare with little regard for unarmed civilian noncombatants.
Though Hezbollah still occupies West Beirut, the city is reportedly calm at the moment – but don’t expect that to last long. Hezbollah is a Shia army in league with the Islamic Republic of Iran, while West Beirut is mostly made up of hostile Sunnis aligned with Saudi Arabia, France, and the United States. Lebanese blogger Mustafa at Beirut Spring put it plainly: “Expect the fight for Beirut to begin in earnest later with the distinct trademark of an occupied population: Hit and run.”
Even if Hezbollah does withdraw and real calm prevails in the near term, Lebanon has crossed a threshold from which there likely will be no recovery. Quiet may resume, but it will be the quiet of cold war rather than peace.
Hezbollah has always said its weapons were pointed only at Israel, though many knew better. Hezbollah even brags (although it’s not true) that they did not turn their weapons against Lebanese during the last civil war. Both of these lies have now been exposed before the whole world.
There may be lulls in the violence, but there will be no real peace in Lebanon until Hezbollah is disarmed or destroyed.
Its a new day and Republican votes are not needed to get this package enacted. Obama should treat Republicans with the same deference as Bush treated Democrats in 2003.
“Deference”? Does this ass have access to a dictionary?
Don’t you know it’s time to put away childish things?
Don’t you know it’s time to set aside partisan bickering?
Big Brother knows what’s best.
Bipartisan means everyone sings from the same hymnal and cheers for our new leadre.
It seems to me that talk of making bipartisanship a goal from any politician qualifies as one of those lies that are so obvious as to be harmless. There’s just an unspoken universal agreement that politicians will occasionally say stuff like that on the understanding that no one will ever take it seriously. In the case of bipartisanship, I don’t know why anyone ever feels the need to tell this particular lie. If you believe some bill is absolutely the right bill to address a particular problem, then you should try to pass it regardless of which groups agree with you.
Yeah, gosh, why did the most liberal member of the Senate and most liberal presidential candidate in US history allow the most liberal Speaker of the House to have her way? Who could have seen that coming? This is so completely unexpected and unpredictable, I just don’t know what to believe in anymore.
Thankfully, conservatives can look forward with confidence to Eric “My Incompetence in the Clinton Justice Dept. Will Make Me a Better AG” Holder and Tim “Tax Cheat” Geithner not receiving confirmation.
What, you mean there are no conservatives in the Senate to stop those confirmations either?
Shocking.
“Bipartisan” is an oxymoron. Politics is partisanship, pure and simple. In the case of the U.S., bipartisan means, “Do it like the democrats want to do it.” It never works the other way.
So 75% of the “stimulus” bill will actually stimulate, and 25% is just a colossal waste of $250 billion of taxpayer money on political pork to pay back Obama’s fatcat special interest supporters? That’s the acceptable ratio, Robert Gibbs? Twenty-five percent waste is the “taste” the unions and other big donors get whenever Obama makes a new deal?
Tony Soprano would kill for those numbers.
You have some good points in here, especially about the use of funds for seeding grass on the mall and whether it’s stimulative. And the spokesman clearly avoided answering the question about the lack of any votes from the Republican party.
But really, at this point…is it helpful for anybody, from any political party, to point the finger at the others and say “they’re not being bi-partisan!…We’re victimized by the other party’s lack of bi-partisan cooperation…! Wah-h-h-h. I’m going to take my votes and go home!”
There’s plenty of material for members of both parties and their followers to point the finger at the other on this point. We, politcal parties and their followers, have tried the absurd partisan, tit-for-tat, nanner-nanner, you-did-I-did-not, strategy. And look where it got us. And the voters should point their fingers at both parties and their leaders, except we the voters allowed it.
Our choice now, as it was in 2000 and 2002, 2004, 2006….is to decide what’s best for our country. Now, we need leaders in both parties to say “you know what? It’s time one of us started putting the country first, not our political party.”
Maybe we can get something done. Then there’ll be plenty of credit to take and be shared. ’cause right now there’s only plenty of blame and finger pointing.
I hope your commentary here pushes that discussion along.
Someone has to mow that grass, Nancy would reply. That’s a job, isn’t it?
man i wish they would tell me what is going on, becuase there is a big difference between spending and a stimulus, I wish somebody would Gimme $785 Billion
Zane Safrit unintentionally raises the right point: whether we need to “get something done” so badly that all else should — must — be brushed aside.
What, exactly, is going to change with the passage of the Pelosi pork package? Indeed, what, exactly, is wrong now that needs to be changed?
Housing values have declined? Will this bill cause them to go back up?
Americans are buying far fewer cars, pairs of jeans, and new kitchen appliances than we were two years ago? Will this bill cause us to buy more? If the 500,000 people whose jobs have been lost in the last five quarters get new jobs mowing grass on the Mall, or serving school snacks, will they immediately run out and buy new cars made in Detroit? What is the anticipated sequence of events here?
Lending institutions that relied on people taking out easy, irresponsible credit have seen their customer base evaporate? How will this bill address that? Will it make the price of housing rise again, so that people again have home equity to borrow against? And why SHOULD there be lending institutions that rely on people taking out easy, irresponsible credit? What purpose is served by government trying to recapture that situation with artificial stimuli?
We are enduring what is quite possibly the least inconvenient economic downturn ever suffered, with nothing like the catastrophic, life-changing losses of the 1929 crash and the ensuing Great Depression — which saw bankers jumping out of windows, 25% unemployment, bread lines, Hoovervilles, and the farming communities of the West devastated by the Dust Bowl. With our unemployment soaring to over 6% and our reduced retail consumption — not to mention our thousands of foreclosed homeowners who, unlike the period of the S&L collapse in the ’80s and the housing downturn of the early ’90s, are NOT living in their cars or under bridges — we today demand government intervention to… do what? Prop up our consumption? That’s what it all seems to boil down to.
Consider this: government funds itself largely off of the taxes and regulatory expenditures incident to consumption and home ownership. Moreover, government’s most vocal constituencies — e.g., unions, the activists who seek regulatory sinecures — depend on consumption to fund their livelihoods.
If the people are saving money instead of consuming, government and its best-organized constituencies are not getting their cash transfusions. Some of the best-known examples of this are the decline in auto sales and its effect on the UAW, or the decline in cigarette sales and its effect on tax revenues. Many states are now seeing the same dynamic in the decline of housing prices and its effect on state and local revenues across the board, California being a prime example.
The priority of government’s leaders in California is more starkly obvious than the federal government’s. California is not even considering roll-backs or elimination of the welfare and health entitlements that are most responsible for putting the state budget out of balance. (When bugdet deficit predictions are as widelly disparate as $28B to $42B, only one kind of expenditure can be at issue: entitlements. Only entitlements are so potentially volatile.) California’s leaders quite nakedly want to de-slugify business in California, get consumption and the housing market on the upswing again, because that’s the only way to keep the revenue coming in so that state spending habits don’t have to change.
Our Congressional leaders are not stupid either. They know that when factories close because of declining consumption, the federal government loses not only fees and taxes but, with each factory, a piece of its regulatory charter: environmental, occupational health and safety. It also loses unionized voters. Government’s own livelihood, and even the raison d’etre of much of its executive arm, is deeply embedded in the particular form of consumption and debt economy we have had for the last 30-40 years. If the factories close, what does government regulate? How does it collect fees, and execute its environmental programs? If there are fewer economic transactions of every kind each day, from where does government leverage its costly mandates: for unemployment payouts, for disability payouts, for regulated, cost-shifting health care, for school district bureaucracies that employ more people than there are teachers in the classrooms?
Of course our governments at each level want to stimulate consumption. They don’t make money off of savings. We pay for our regulatory, cost-shifting state through the taxes and fees that depend on continued consumption. Even if millions of the people have decided that it is most prudent to cut their consumption for now, and save, government is going to tell us we’re wrong, that we simply HAVE to go back to consuming at the level we used to. Goverment revenues, government programs, government’s ability to intervene, all depend on it.
J.E.Dyer, I couldn’t agree more that this is the least inconvenient economic downturn ever. Government bodies, local, state and federal, are the main “victims.”
But also notice how the Democrats and progressives in the media have been talking down this economy for the last year. That’s because a downturn is also an opportunity for governments to expand–to get more heavily into the school snack business, etc. It’s an opportunity to get people like Zane to urge an end to prudent questioning, and to stampede voters into measures that don’t really stand up under careful questioning, as even Tapper sees.
Maybe if the goal is for us to all unite about something that urgently has to get done, we should consider restructuring Social Security, so our children won’t be stuck paying for a bloated entitlement on top of a bloated debt from this year’s “economic recovery package.”
Glenn Reynolds on Rush and Obama: “I’m picturing Rush delirious with glee, pacing the cavernous rooms of his mansion, booming out monologues to his kitty cat Pumpkin, as he waits for Monday noon to finally roll around. This will be good.”
Let’s see, open borders and lots of new landscaping to do. Hmmm. This is stimulus for who?
Seriously, though, there is only one way to “fairly” stimulate the economy. Cut taxes. This is the one and only way Americans will have more money to spend. $44 million for the NEA does me no good. $200 million for work on the National Mall won’t give me more money to spend each month. Building bridges and roads only helps those in the construction industry. CUT TAXES!! Dangit, it’s so stinkin’ simple even a Texan like me can understand it. But hell will have to freeze over before an Obama administration and a Democrat-led Congress sign on to that idea.
It’s Punkin’. Punkin’ Limbaugh.
Didn’t candidate Obama claim he would be using the equivalent of a line-item veto to ensure that bills don’t get larded up? Why is he abandoning that now that he’s President? Within a week of taking office, he’s sending strong signals that we can expect more of the same old partisan, broken, government-as-usual. This is so distressing to people like me who genuinely want him to be great.
Most larded up spending since FDR.
Bill, don’t say we didn’t warn you.
720 mill for after school snacks to the fattest children in the world.
More blubber .