“Aoun’s calculations fail to take in some dangerous regional realities,” wrote Tony Badran at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. 3 “Syria is more than pleased to see Aoun attacking the anti-Syrian government. So is Iran, whose supreme guide, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, recently predicted the defeat of U.S. and allied interests in Lebanon. Wittingly or not, Aoun is serving these foreign masters for free.”
The strangest thing about Aoun’s alliance with Hezbollah and Syria was that Aoun was Lebanon’s most militant enemy of Syria when he was commander of the army in the latter part of the civil war.
“Why is it,” I said to Jack and Antonios, “that Michel Aoun is now pro-Syrian when for years he was the staunchest anti-Syrian leader in Lebanon?”
“Aoun is not pro-Syrian,” Antonios said. “He just wants normal relations with Syria. We can’t fight Syria.”
Of course Lebanon couldn’t fight Syria. Not militarily, at least, any more than tiny Kuwait could free itself from Iraq’s invasion and annexation in 1990. Aoun, you could say, had surrendered to Syrian power, or at least acquiesced to it.
“What do you two think of U.S. foreign policy here?” I said.
“We love America, but have doubts,” Jack said. “They let Syria come in here in 1991 for help in Iraq.” Jack was referring to former Secretary of State James Baker, who green-lighted Syria’s overlordship in Lebanon in exchange for “help” during the first Persian Gulf War in 1991. How Hafez al-Assad lent any meaningful assistance in ousting Saddam Hussein from Kuwait wasn’t clear.
“The U.S. will hand us over to the Syrians again for help in Iraq,” Antonios said. “That is what Washington is speaking of doing right now.”
Actually, the U.S. government’s Iraq Study Group (headed by none other than James Baker himself) explicitly said handing Lebanon back to Syria was off the table, that Bashar al-Assad could not expect any American support for his Levantine adventures.4 But this detail had been lost in the wash, and I could hardly blame Jack and Antonios for suspecting the worst now that Baker was back.
This wasn’t the first time Michel Aoun made a tactical alliance with those who had little or nothing in common with him instead of forging ties with more natural allies.
He formed an alliance with Saddam Hussein, Hafez al-Assad’s old Baathist rival, when he declared war against Syria in the 1980s. The Aounists were the last militant anti-Syrians in Lebanon before the country succumbed to Syrian domination. Aoun and his men fought hard, but they couldn’t hold off the Syrians forever. He was exiled to France after he surrendered.
The U.S. used diplomatic pressure to help get Aoun out of exile in 2005, but he never forgave the American government for green-lighting his defeat. He still harped on that point even in late 2006, as did his partisans. They seemed to believe Syria would have been unable to rule Lebanon if it hadn’t been for James Baker—a dubious assumption at best.
Even so, the U.S. did have a bad habit of being fickle with its friends in the Middle East. Many people in the March 14 bloc likewise were worried the U.S. might abandon them to Hezbollah, the Iranians, and the Syrians. Some anti-Americans in March 14 told me the reason they didn’t trust America wasn’t because they hated the U.S. but because Americans were unreliable allies who cared only about themselves and not about Lebanon.
In any case, Aoun’s alliance or détente with Syria, like his alliance with Hezbollah, was strictly tactical. He wanted to be president more than anything else, the March 14 coalition told him to get stuffed. Perhaps he figured that once he was in office, he could do whatever he wanted, that he wouldn’t owe a thing to the Syrians or to Hezbollah. Unlike the al-Assad-appointed Syrian stooge-of-a-president Emile Lahoud, Aoun was hard to control. The man was a loose cannon and always had been.
Michael Young at Beirut’s Daily Star thought Aoun would almost certainly fail.5
“The general knows he and his own are the weakest link in the campaign against Prime Minister Fouad Siniora. The Aounists cannot long endure an open-ended sit-in, both because they are not earning salaries to do so and probably because the looming holiday season threatens to melt their momentum. And there is something else: Aoun realizes that as package deals are unwrapped left and right to resolve the ongoing crisis, his chances of seeing the presidency diminish. Indeed, the latest basket of ideas from Arab League Secretary General Amr Moussa includes a proposal for the March 14 coalition and the opposition to consent to a compromise president. If that process goes through, Aoun will not be the chosen one . . . can the general then convince Hezbollah and the Syrians that he’s their man? If the Syrians are back in town by then, their preference will be for someone more controllable; and if they are not, this will mean that all sides must accept a compromise candidate. In neither case does Aoun fit the bill.”
Jack and Antonios didn’t seem particularly interested in foreign policy or the presidency. They kept steering the conversation back to corruption.
“According to the people ruling Lebanon,” Jack said, “money is the only thing that matters.”
“Nasrallah is honest,” Antonios said. “He takes care of his people. Sure, he gets money from Iran, but everyone gets money from outside.”
“Does Mr. Bush pay taxes?” Jack asked me.
“Of course,” I said.
“Hariri doesn’t,” he said. “This is justice?”
“No,” I said. “Of course it isn’t justice.”
“Siniora has been in government for fifteen years,” Antonios said. “We have no medical scheme, no national education, fifty-five billion dollars in debt, and no retirement system. Why? Two hundred dollars a month is the minimum wage. We try to increase it, but they say they have no money. Then they spend 800 million dollars on a new company. This is why we are with Aoun. Our government is not a government. It is like we are ruled by a private corporation for the benefit of the boss.”
I liked these guys, and I sympathized with some of their complaints. They weren’t fascists or terrorists. They were liberals, basically, although most of the March 14 bloc parties were more or less liberal by Middle East standards, too.
“Foreigners should stop sending money to Lebanon,” Jack said. “The government will just steal it. They should send someone like you here to watch exactly what happens to that money.”
“Thanks, guys,” I said and laughed. “But accounting isn’t really my specialty.”
The waiter came by our table.
“Do you want another coffee?” Antonios said.
“Get another coffee!” Jack said.
“I’ll have another coffee,” I said to the waiter.
Jack puffed on his cigar.
The main reason Hezbollah wanted veto power was so it could sabotage the United Nations tribunal that would indict and punish the assassins of Rafik Hariri. Why on earth, though, would the Aounists want to block that when they were originally part of the March 14 movement that ousted the Syrian occupiers from Lebanon in the first place?
“So, what about the tribunal?” I said to Jack and Antonios. “Do you really want to block the investigation?”
“We are worried,” Antonios said, “that [Saad] Hariri wants to use the tribunal to go after people whose faces in Lebanon he doesn’t like.”
I think I must have audibly sighed when he said that. Saad Hariri had no control over whom the U.N. would indict. But these two lived in a part of the world where politics had always been a ruthless and murderous business. Political enemies really did disappear into dungeons. Voicing the “wrong” opinion in a newspaper column could get you car bombed on your way to work in the morning. Foreign powers really did manipulate local governments for their own craven gain. Paranoia naturally thrived in environments like Lebanon’s, and I was surprised it wasn’t a bigger problem than it already was.
“We are not against anybody,” Antonios earnestly said. “We just support our country. We are normal people and we work every day.”
“Do you think there will be more war in Lebanon?”
I said.
“No!” Jack said. “Not with ourselves, and not with Israel. I think there is a deal under the table between the Israelis and Hezbollah. Both sides lost and don’t want to do it again. The situation in the south is finished. If it happens again, Nasrallah will lose his case.”
I hoped Jack was right, but I feared he was not. Hezbollah had restocked its Iranian arsenal in a matter of months. If Nasrallah wanted peace or at least an armistice, he kept his intentions very much to himself.
If Hezbollah were to increase its share of government power, more war with Israel would only be that much more likely. And the more official state power Hezbollah had, the more incentive the Israelis would have to attack central Beirut and the state’s institutions during the next round.
Jack and Antonios were in a bad spot. At some point, Hezbollah would have to be mainstreamed. But if Hezbollah became mainstream because Lebanon joined the “resistance,” rather than because Hezbollah was disarmed and reformed, nowhere in Lebanon would be safe from Israeli reprisals.
The alternative, though, was also quite grim.
“If Israel can’t defeat Hezbollah, how can Siniora and Jumblatt?” Antonios said. “We have to negotiate with them. If we don’t, then we will divide on sectarian lines and we will no longer have a country. Look at that mosque next to the church.”
He gestured toward the Mohammad al-Amin Mosque, where Hariri was buried, and the Maronite Cathedral of St. George right next door.
“We need this,” he said. “Christians need Muslims. And Muslims need Christians. That is what Lebanon is.”
Hezbollah’s rally downtown lasted only a couple of hours, but thousands of hard-core supporters stayed behind after the others went home. They built a tent city, set up camp with blankets and sleeping bags on the sidewalks in front of businesses, and settled in for a long occupation that would last almost a year and a half.
The so-called Freedom Camp built by young anti-Syrian activists after Hariri was killed wasn’t disruptive, but Hezbollah shut down the city center entirely. These people weren’t just college kids. Though the guns were out of sight, Hezbollah was the most powerful armed force in the country.
Militant Party of God supporters also tried to seize and occupy Prime Minister Siniora’s office. Siniora warned Hezbollah that if the building was taken, he would no longer have control of his “street.” Translation: If you seize the state’s institutions, Lebanon’s Sunnis will declare war.
Hezbollah knew this was true. Many rank-and-file Sunnis, Christians, and Druze did want to declare war and were only held in check by their more temperate leaders.
So Hezbollah backed off, but the occupation and shutdown of the city center looked as though it might drag on indefinitely. The government, business owners, and the majority of Beirut’s citizens braced themselves for a long and bitter siege of the capital.
I ventured downtown again the day after the media-friendly protest was over. Hezbollah didn’t want any more attention from journalists by that point. Ubiquitous Hezbollah security agents with the telltale sunglasses and earpieces stared at me coldly and tracked my movements as I walked past.
Hundreds of tents were set up all over the place. Most were made of white canvas. I snapped a few pictures, and nobody stepped in to stop me.
One group of tents in a parking lot across from the Mohammad al-Amin Mosque were all made of black canvas. What’s up with the black tents? I wondered. I walked over and raised my camera to take a picture.
Five earpieced Hezbollah agents with sunglasses descended on me at once. They surrounded me and screamed “No!” Then they pushed me away from the tents and got in my face so I could not see behind them.
Nothing like that ever happened to me at the March 14 Freedom Camp.
I had been accused of spying many times while in Lebanon, though often only half jokingly, so it wouldn’t surprise me in the least if that’s what the men of Hezbollah thought I was doing. Many Lebanese were paranoid—sometimes with good reason—but no one was as paranoid as Hezbollah.
“Sahafi!” I yelled back at them. Journalist!
“No, no, no!” they yelled and pushed me again. I lowered my camera, threw up my hands, and turned to walk away. Then they left me alone.
Hezbollah, by this point, was developing a seriously bad reputation among Western journalists. A reporter friend was harassed by the media relations department over an entirely innocuous article he wrote about the party for a mainstream left-wing American magazine. Time magazine’s Christopher Allbritton wrote the following on his blog during the July War:6 “Hezbollah is launching Katyushas, but I’m loath to say too much about them. The Party of God has a copy of every journalist’s passport, and they’ve already hassled a number of us and threatened one.” USA Today reporter Charles Levinson would have his own troubles later. “My experience with Hezbollah this week has left an unpleasant taste in my mouth,” he wrote on his blog Conflict Blotter.7 “I had heard this from other journalist friends who have recently returned from Lebanon, but discovered it for myself this week: their interaction with the press borders on fascist.”
That’s how Hezbollah rolled. There were a couple of reasons more journalists didn’t mention this sort of thing in their articles. Allbritton touched on one—they were intimidated. A simpler reason, though, was because most journalists didn’t write first-person narratives. Industry rules generally didn’t allow reporters to describe these kinds of incidents. Most editors required journalists to write themselves out of their stories. Others didn’t want to be blacklisted like I was. They needed, or thought they needed, quotes from and access to Hezbollah.
I walked across the street deliberately in full view of Hezbollah’s security agents, sat down on the sidewalk in front of heavily armed Lebanese soldiers, and furiously began taking notes. I wasn’t actually angry, and I chuckled inside as I did this because I knew they could see what I was doing.
They wouldn’t do anything to me. I wanted to let them know their obnoxious behavior had just earned them bad press. They violated my first rule of media relations: Be nice to people who write about you for a living.
I scribbled my furious notes, looked them in the eye, scribbled more furious notes, looked them in the eye again, and scribbled more furious notes.
Hezbollah wasn’t half as media savvy as its officials liked to believe. Harassing foreign journalists may have kept some of them in line, so to speak, but it backfired with the rest of us. Bullying writers who were free of the old-school media constraints of third-person “objectivity” was the media war equivalent of dropping a hand grenade down your pants.
One of the security agents was smart enough to figure this out. He slowly walked up to me.
“What?” I said in as pissed-off a tone as I could muster as I looked up at him. I was not really angry. It was just theater, and I was having fun.
He pointed at my camera, said something unintelligible, then pointed at the black tents.
“Yeah, yeah,” I said. “I know, I know.” I went back to writing furious notes.
“No, no, no!” he said.
“What?” I said, genuinely annoyed now.
A group of six teenagers saw the commotion and came over to see what was happening. One offered to translate.
“He said it is okay to take pictures,” he said.
“It’s okay?” I said, and completely dropped my affected hostility. I could not help but smile. I had just taught Hezbollah security agents that there were consequences when they weren’t nice to journalists.
“Yes, yes,” another kid said. “Come on.” He offered his hand and helped me up.
“Thanks, guys,” I said.
“Don’t worry about them,” a third teenager said. “They are handicaps.”
“Come on!” another said. “Come with us! We’ll show you around!”
They led me back across the street to the black tents. I lifted my camera and snapped a quick photo. The picture was not particularly interesting. It
had no real value. But I almost lost it. Another Hezbollah security agent saw me take the picture and ran up to me.
“No!” he screamed and waved his arms. He menacingly put his face four inches from mine. “How many pictures did you take!” he yelled.
“Just one,” I said.
“Delete it right now!” he screamed. “You were told not to take pictures!”
Who were these guys to tell me what to do, anyway? Lebanon was, at least theoretically, a free country. Hezbollah wasn’t the government, and I was taking pictures in a public parking lot.
“No,” I said, “I was just told that I could take pictures.” I looked at my new teenage friends, waiting for them to back me up.
“Yes, yes, it’s okay,” one of the kids told the security man.
“No!” the agent said. “You delete it right now!”
“Fine,” I said. “I’ll delete it on one condition—if you tell me why I can’t take a picture. What are you doing here that you want to hide?”
The truth is I would have deleted it without any conditions. I didn’t actually care about having that picture, and the last thing I needed was to get in a fight with these people. I just wanted to know what he would say when I asked him why he was paranoid. I doubted very much that he would know how to answer.
“Never mind!” he said as he threw his hands in the air, turned around, and stormed back into the tents.
“What on earth is their problem?” I said to the kids who stuck up for me and offered to show me around.
“Don’t worry,” said the one who had taken my hand. “They are handicaps.”
They were, indeed, “handicaps,” at least mentally. If they actually thought I was a spy—but I don’t know, maybe they didn’t—their behavior would have told me all I needed to know. It was obvious which part of the tent city housed the leadership. It was the one place, the black-tented section, where security completely freaked out when I showed up with my camera. If I were to call up the CIA or the Mossad and give them air-strike coordinates—or whatever it was Hezbollah was afraid of—all I’d have to say was “aim for the black tents.”
The Road to Fatima Gate: The Beirut Spring, the Rise of Hezbollah, and the Iranian War Against Israel Page 17
