Opinion & Commentary:

The Cedar Devolution

By Seth Mandel

It was the ultimate betrayal: "al-umm al-hanun" -- shouted from the mouths of the Maronites.

Yet the musical Arabic may also have encapsulated all the hope that today seems to have been drained from the mountains and cedars of Lebanon that, throughout history, would bow to no conqueror.

The year was 1918, and French military forces had just landed in Beirut to pull the plug on Sharif Faysal's Arab government. The Maronites had come to greet them as heroes, chanting that France was the "tender, loving mother" in Arabic. The Christian Lebanese -- of whom the majority were Maronite -- may have spoken Arabic, but they didn't consider themselves part of Greater Syria, which constituted most of the Levant and was considered to be the great pan-Arab territory. It planted the seeds of a conflict that, unfortunately, may be coming to an excruciatingly disappointing end.

After the allies defeated Turkey in WWI, France and Britain got to work carving the turkey -- the post-World War I Middle East landscape.

But in France's and Britain's haste to mark up the desert, Syria found itself with a Lebanese hole in it, and the Hashemite kingdom wasn't even within shouting distance of the actual Hashemite kingdom -- the one containing Muslim holy cities Mecca and Medina -- from its new location, in something the British kept telling them to call "Transjordan". Mecca and Medina were to be incorporated into what would soon be called -- apparently according to the same uber-descriptive guidelines as Transjordan -- Saudi Arabia.

Freed from the yoke of Ottoman Turk rule, the Arab nationalists were given a healthy dose of self-rule in those countries. But Tranjordanian founder Emir Abdullah appreciated the self-rule not as an end, but as a means to restore Greater Arab Syria. After all, from Abdullah's perspective, he was given land that was a combination of the former Vilayet (province) of Damascus and parts of Arabia. So the revolution was only halfway there. Syria, naturally, agreed.

But Lebanon was different. Sure, they spoke Arabic. But they viewed Arabic culture as relatively recent, especially in comparison with their Phoenician ancestors, who were believed to have inspired common-language transference to Greece and Rome. Further, the Lebanese generally and the Maronites especially had cultural and historical ties to Greece, but spiritual ties to Rome. Add in their default loyalty to and semi-dependence on France, and Greater Arab Syria moves farther down the list.

Lebanese historian Kamal Salibi, a Christian who studied under Bernard Lewis, proudly trumpets that the Christian Lebanese majority "were socially far more developed or, more correctly, far more familiar with the ways of the modern world," than were the Lebanese Muslims or Syrian Arabs. (His way of saying that he descends from the linguists, not the heathens). Outside of Egypt, Salibi claims, the only other such "social gloss" existed among the Jews in Palestine.

Fast-forward to today, and it's pretty clear the social contemporaries of the modern world did not win out in Lebanon: in July, Israel left phone messages for Lebanese civilians warning them not to cooperate with the Hezbollah terrorists who, with the help of the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon, were moving into towns and villages throughout south Lebanon.

The phone messages all ended with the words "the State of Israel". Lebanese Telecommunications Minister Jibran Bassil, confused by the term "Israel" and at a loss to explain just how a piece of Zionist colonial land could vocally infiltrate the Lebanese answering machines, complained to the U.N. that it was a "flagrant aggression against Lebanese sovereignty."

But leaving aside the irony and the humor of such a statement, the incident raises an important question: What is "Lebanese sovereignty"? Or, more to the point: To whom does Lebanon belong?

On July 16-17, the date of the two-day prisoner swap between Israel and Hezbollah, it appeared that Lebanon now belongs to Hassan Nasrallah, the bloodthirsty maniac who calls the shots (literally) for the world's premier terrorist outfit, the Shiite Hezbollah.

Nasrallah engineered the prisoner swap that brought home to Lebanon the child killer Samir Kuntar, a Druze. Prime Minister Faoud Saniora, a Sunni, was a hapless participant in the celebrations that followed. Ditto for Maronite President Gen. Michel Suleiman.

Suleiman is resigned to it; there will be no "tender, loving mother" France to save the dwindling Maronites from their Arab rulers this time. After all, the most powerful man in Lebanon isn't even an Arab, he's Persian. And in his spare time, he conducts dramatic public readings of the private religious and scholarly declarations emanating from the mosques and seminaries of Qom. His name is Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and he is the eccentric mouthpiece of the ayatollahs, a position known in their native Farsi as "President of Iran," and he is known mostly by his very public pursuit of a second Holocaust. As part of that pursuit of a new Jewish genocide, Ahmadinejad makes sure Nasrallah is well armed and well paid.

So, the strings of the puppet leaders in Beirut are being pulled by the puppet leader in Tehran. This should incense the actual leader in Damascus, Syrian Baathist strongman Bashar al-Assad, who believes he -- or rather his late father -- earned the right to pull some strings. But his predecessors chose instead to remove the word Lebanon from their lexicon. Assad's father, Hafez al-Assad, never set foot in Lebanon, according to an editorial in Egypt's Daily News by Sami Moubayed. Hafez wasn't exactly a pioneer of pettiness, either: until 1918, degrees from the American University of Beirut said "Granted in Beirut, Syria."

So if the answer to the first question -- to whom does Lebanon belong -- is Hassan Nasrallah, the next question must concern what outside forces meddle in Lebanese affairs. We have Iran and Syria, but the reality is more complicated. Syria, a cartoonishly cantankerous police state, has unsurprisingly found itself with no Arab friends. So much for Greater Arab Syria.

Instead, North Korea was (until last fall, when Israel destroyed it) building a nuclear reactor in the Syrian desert, to replace the one it closed down in Yongbyon. And Russia has been annually updating Syria's air defenses. The Russians will be providing anti-aircraft missiles and other air defense systems to Iran to preserve Iran's quest for nuclear weapons, and both Russia and China have been cooperating with Iran on energy and oil-related projects, with some of that money going back to Nasrallah's Hezbollah.

So that's in one corner. And in the other corner? Well, that corner is almost empty. It should come as no surprise that the British washed their hands of the Middle East decades ago, and France has been steeped in sweetheart oil deals -- none of which come from Lebanon -- so French bread is buttered elsewhere.

It should also come as no surprise that the United States remains in Lebanon's corner, albeit with hands somewhat tied. In January 2007, the Associate Press reported, "the United States pledged $770 million in aid for Lebanon at a Paris donors' conference that raised a total of $7.6 billion. The money is on top of $230 million Washington pledged at a meeting on reconstruction after the Hezbollah-Israel summer war [of 2006]."

The U.S. also stepped up its military supplies and offered its own intelligence personnel to help protect Lebanon from Hezbollah and Syria. But there are quite obvious limits to what America can and has done; it cannot, for example, "buy the pot" by throwing money at one side of the Lebanese conflict, because Iran can provide substantial sums to Nasrallah. And because Nasrallah is actually Lebanese -- born in Beirut -- his money goes farther; the U.S. cannot match the PR power of a Lebanese cleric handing out money to Lebanese citizens who suffered at the hands of the U.S.-backed Zionists.

Two recent developments have delivered an all-but-knockout blow to the West's influence in Lebanon. In May, a deal reached among the political factions in Lebanon -- which was without a president due to political stalemate -- gave Hezbollah veto power. Hezbollah holds 11 percent of the seats in Lebanon's parliament, so the deal was a crushing defeat for democracy in the country. A minority terrorist faction was given de facto control over the government.

The second development was the recent revelation that Hezbollah has been funding political campaigns of Sunni politicians in southern Lebanon, where the Shiite Hezbollah has been less popular. This would come as a surprise only to the reality-deprived consumers of mainstream American and British print and broadcast news services. Unfortunately, that is quite a large number of people.

In March, presidential candidate Sen. John McCain, while speaking to reporters in Amman, Jordan, mentioned that Iran was assisting al-Qaeda in Iraq and in the broad conflict in the Middle East. The media jumped on the statement, calling it a "gaffe." Iran is Shiite, the media lectured McCain, and al-Qaeda is Sunni; the two would never help each other.

As we have noted in these pages, Sunni-Shiite alliances -- especially Iran-al-Qaeda -- are an undisputed fact of Middle Eastern culture. McCain seemed genuinely shocked that such common knowledge was missing from the minds at the largest news outlets in the world.

But a Sunni-Shiite alliance in Lebanon -- between the Shiite Hezbollah and the Sunni Future Movement -- would be particularly devastating. It would be, very simply, a consolidation of Nasrallah's power. It would also be dangerous to Israelis in the North, since Hezbollah would likely need Sunni assistance to mount rocket or terror attacks on or from the Shebaa farms, a northern Israeli neighborhood that the delusional Nasrallah claims belongs to Lebanon. (It was once on the Syrian tax rolls, but Lebanon has very clearly never had any reasonable claim to it.)

Take a step back and look at what the three years since the Cedar Revolution -- which earned Lebanon semi-independence from Syria -- has wrought. It's not a pretty picture. Kuntar, who has a habit of making a heil Hitler-like salute to his adoring fans, recently told Lebanon's Future TV, according to the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), "Allah willing, I will get the chance to kill more Israelis."

That is the Lebanon of 2008 in a nutshell: Druze, Sunni, Shiite, Maronite -- one big, happy family. Nothing has, over the years, united the bickering Arab and Islamist factions like the prospect of killing Jews.

It's a shame that the newest example of this is Lebanon; it's a shame the mighty cedars and the majestic mountains have appeared to finally bow to a conqueror; and it's a shame that conqueror is Hassan Nasrallah.

Seth Mandel is the managing editor of The Jewish State.