The Road to Fatima Gate: The Beirut Spring, the Rise of Hezbollah, and the Iranian War Against Israel

by Michael Totten

  Lee Smith surely knew what the Lebanese Forces leader was talking about. In his book The Strong Horse,6 he described the pattern of Arab history set out by the brilliant medieval-era Tunisian historian Ibn Khaldun, who explains how, as Smith put it, “history is a matter of one tribe, nation, or civilization dominating others by force until it, too, is overthrown by force.” Once group cohesion starts to fade, Smith wrote, “the regnant civilization becomes easy pickings for a younger one still adhering to its martial ethos.” One ruler after another “[rises] in the desert to replace his predecessor and rule until he, too, is put down by a more vital force.”

  It may seem obvious that this was how history worked in the Middle East and North Africa, at least during the medieval era when Khaldun wrote his Al-Muqaddima.7 That’s how history worked in Europe at that time, as well. That’s how history worked pretty much everywhere until liberal democracies were established to smooth transitions of power in the more fortunate parts of the world.

  No one could seriously believe that the Syrian Baath Party or the Khomeinist regime in Iran would still be in power after another 500 years. One way or another, al-Assad’s and Khamenei’s governments would, Ozymandius-like, follow the communists, the Latin American generals, the Shah, the Arab kings of Libya and Iraq, and so on, into oblivion.

  Something just short of that had already befallen the Lebanese Forces. They themselves once indisputably ruled parts of Lebanon, including the side of the mountain where Geagea hunkered down in his headquarters. The Lebanese Forces, in a way, was no longer the Lebanese Forces.

  I asked him how his political views had changed since the war and his own loss of power.

  “My old vision was one of separation between Christians and Muslims,” he said. “But now? I don’t know. Lebanese who want to live together should abide by that vision. I wanted a federal state, but now? No. I am open to whatever the people decide they want.”

  Nothing generated suspicion of the Lebanese Forces among Syria’s and Hezbollah’s supporters like its former alliance with Israel. Some Lebanese Forces members told me in no uncertain terms—anonymously and off the record, of course—that they still admired Israelis and secretly thought of themselves as Israel’s friends and allies. Not all Lebanese Forces members felt this way or would admit it, however, and I couldn’t get Geagea to even hint at it obliquely.

  “Our relationship with Israel was not a deep relationship,” he told me. “It was a relationship of convenience. The PLO was much more powerful than us. We were squeezed and had to look elsewhere for arms and training and support. We were obliged to go to the Israelis. Our relationship peaked when the Israelis drove the PLO out of Beirut and Bashir Gemayel was elected. It fell apart after Bashir was killed.”

  It was a careful answer. He did not have the latitude to say anything more, assuming he even wanted to say anything more. Hezbollah might push to put him on trial for treason or even have him assassinated if he described an alliance with Israel in anything other than the past tense. Many of his Sunni allies would also have been troubled by that kind of talk, and some might even break ranks.

  Lee Smith asked Geagea why he thought the Lebanese Forces had such a bad reputation with Western journalists—an excellent question. I was a bit suspicious myself when I first arrived in the country, partly because I disliked even former militias on principle, but also because his party was at times described as fascist. No self-respecting Westerner would dare write anything positive or even neutral about fascists.

  But how accurate was that label? The word “fascist,” over time, lost much of its meaning. It was so often used as an epithet instead of a properly understood and sparingly applied noun. Only totalitarian parties can be fairly described as fascist. Otherwise, the word is no more than a slur, like “pig” for “policeman.”

  “When Christians defended the first republic,” Geagea said, “some journalists thought we were like the apartheid regime in South Africa. There were abuses on our part in the war, but less than the Palestinians and the Syrians, even though the Syrians had a regular army and we were just a militia. After 1982, the Israeli media also turned against us because they thought we betrayed them. Our bad reputation continued after the war because I was arrested and subjected to trials while the others were not. Most journalists didn’t know these trials were rigged by the Syrians. It even took the embassies a while to figure it out.”

  Did that answer the charge? I’m afraid it did not. At the same time, though, I never heard anyone in the Lebanese Forces say anything that could fairly be described as totalitarian. They could be parochial and use obnoxious sectarian rhetoric to denounce their enemies, but almost every party in Lebanon was guilty of that from time to time, and it would be absurd to say they were all fascists just for that reason. Besides, if anyone in the country deserved a label like that, it was Hezbollah and the Syrian Social Nationalist Party. Their ideologies really were totalitarian.

  Still, the Kataeb militia—which was aligned with the Lebanese Forces during the war—committed an infamous massacre in the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila, and it did so with Israelis in a background support role. Between 300 and 3,000 people were killed, depending on who you want to believe. Many, if not most, were civilians. It triggered the largest political demonstration in the entire history of Israel, and it brought about the downfall of Defense Minister Ariel Sharon. Most Western journalists, including me, wouldn’t forget it.

  There was more to complain about. During the war, Geagea and the Lebanese Forces fought other Christians and even, incredibly, the Lebanese army under the command of General Michel Aoun—which partly explained why Aoun had recently established a modus vivendi with Hezbollah and the Syrians. Aoun had to sidle up to one old foe or another whether he liked it or not, and he decided it would not be his old nemeses Samir Geagea or Walid Jumblatt.

  So the Lebanese Forces was hardly innocent, even if it did take the international press a bit longer than it should have to realize the group had mellowed out during peacetime like most of the others. One could say all kinds of unpleasant things about every armed faction during the civil war with considerable justification. Many Lebanese liberals did, and the most idealistic were dismayed that the Independence Intifada wasn’t able to toss out the whole lot of them along with the Syrians. What made leaders like Hariri and Siniora so admirable to so many, whatever else you might say about them, was that they had no dried blood under their fingernails. They were practically pacifists, which was not something you could say about many Sunni Arab leaders in the Middle East.

  What kind of people made up the Lebanese Forces was an important question. It wasn’t enough that they were Christians opposed to Hezbollah. Antun Saadeh, founder of the Syrian Social Nationalist Party, was a Christian. Michel Aflaq, one of the founders of the Baath Party, was a Christian. If the Lebanese Forces had even latent fascist tendencies, they might become a genuine menace if hostilities broke out again. Surely the radical Sunnis in the Nahr al-Bared camp would be a serious problem if they were turned loose against Hezbollah. They were the types to hate and kill Shias for being Shias, just as they were the types to hate and kill Jews and Americans for being Jews and Americans. No one in the West should hope to see a Christian version of that sort of force emerge in Lebanon to counter Hezbollah.

  “I told the Kataeb and the Lebanese Forces that they should change their names,” Lebanon Renaissance Foundation founder Eli Khoury told me. “They sound like they’ve come out of the 1940s.” He did not, however, think it was fair to dismiss them as fascists. “They saw that the number of Christians in Lebanon was decreasing. And they dug in because the region was on fire. They want to preserve themselves.”

  Many, if not most, Lebanese Christians still worried about their future in an Arab and Muslim region. How could they not? It had been decades since they were the majority in their own country. A plurality of Lebanese who emigrated were Christians. Palestinian and Iraqi Christians had been fleeing the regi
on for years. Coptic Christians in Egypt lived as second-class citizens. The Middle East has always been a hard place for minorities. The only thing that may save Lebanon’s minorities in the end is that every sect in the country is a minority.

  Geagea, though, wasn’t as concerned as some of the others. He took the long view.

  “I am not too worried about the future of Christians in Lebanon,” he said. “We have survived much worse. When the Mamluks invaded, they massacred us, demolished our homes, and burned down our forests. The world is much more open now. We will be okay.”

  The world changed. Lebanon changed. Geagea himself apparently changed. He still thought of himself as a confrontational warrior, but he was no longer a warlord. He and his men no longer shot at their enemies, not even when Hezbollah, Amal, and the SSNP laid siege to Beirut. They almost certainly would pick up their rifles again if their neighborhoods, streets, and homes were invaded, but they hated the very thought of it now. Geagea himself hated it more than some of his followers. Prison and age seemed to have massaged most of the violent impulses out of him, and there was always, despite appearances, a part of him that was haunted by war.

  “There is an image I cannot get out of my mind,” he said to Lebanese journalist Giselle Khoury.8 “One time there was a meeting held in Aley between the Progressive Socialist Party officials and ours. I was in the jeep. It was the winter of 1983. I saw a girl of six, seven, or eight years old, blonde, walking barefoot in the rain and playing. The image remained in my mind all the time. She was playing in all her childhood innocence. I asked myself, what if the bombing started? Isn’t it possible that a bomb could kill, disfigure, or injure that child? The image of that girl is still in my mind even now.”

  He and his party did nothing when Hezbollah invaded Beirut. Neither the Party of God nor its Amal and SSNP allies attacked Christian areas, but that’s not the only reason. Geagea didn’t want to fight in the civil war either. He resisted resisting for years before he enlisted.

  “I was twenty-one when the war started,” he said to Khoury.9 “I was a student at one of the most prestigious universities in Lebanon, the American University of Beirut. I wasn’t in the streets playing marbles. My major was one of the hardest—medicine. When the war started, I was in my fourth year. And despite the war, I continued two more years. I’m saying this because it’s not true that we’re responsible for the war. The whole situation and conditions in Lebanon led to the war, a violent and harsh war as you saw. Some of us chose to stay out of this war, and that was their choice, but it wasn’t the best choice for me. One should do his best to prevent his society from facing war, but if a war starts without him doing anything to help start it, he must defend himself and his society. And when peace comes, he should do his best to make peace.”

  Hezbollah and the Syrians feared him politically, as they should have, but they had little to worry about militarily as long as they left his people alone and didn’t seize power outright. Prison taught him patience, and living in the east gave him longtime horizons.

  “Hezbollah is a transient phenomenon in the history of Lebanon,” he told me. “We cannot judge whether coexistence is possible because of Hezbollah. Coexistence will be between Christians and Muslims, not between March 14 and Hezbollah.”

  Nasrallah’s army surely was a transient phenomenon in the history of Lebanon. The Iranian regime would one day either fall or reform itself out of all recognition, as Mao Tse-tung’s Chinese Communist Party finally did. Ali Khamenei’s overseas brigade in Lebanon wouldn’t last long, at least in its present form, after its patrons in Tehran were overthrown or replaced.

  Geagea, however, no longer sounded like the kind of man who thought he would ever again try to overthrow or replace anyone.

  “The one who wants life to be straight and true should not avenge himself or hold a grudge against anyone,” he said to Khoury. “I barely got out of prison and didn’t have time to do anything, and the ones who put me in jail are now in jail themselves. He should let everything go by itself and justice will be done.”

  He sounded like a Taoist, almost. If this was what Hezbollah’s fiercest Christian opponent was saying, Westerners no longer needed to worry about their own coreligionists in Lebanon acting like Iraqior Bosnian Serb-style death squads. The mystic in his bunker might make an excellent companion to be stuck with in a foxhole, but he had no intention of digging one ever again.

  Hassan Nasrallah—as long as he left the Christians alone—had little to fear from his Maronite countrymen.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  the arabist in his palace

  You are not our Lord.

  —FOUAD SINIORA TO HASSAN NASRALLAH

  A man in Jerusalem once summed up Middle Eastern politics for me in one sentence. “If someone in this region isn’t afraid of you,” he said, “you will do what he wants.” This was hard for me to hear as a Westerner, but I couldn’t deny the Middle East had its own set of rules.

  Hassan Nasrallah had little to fear from Samir Geagea. He had even less reason to fear the Sunni prime minister. Fouad Siniora was a bit like Rafik Hariri in some ways, only with less charisma, less money and power, and more hang-ups. He was one of the least imposing figures in the entire Middle East, an arthritic gazelle among young and fit lions.

  After studying business administration at the American University of Beirut, he embarked on a distinguished career in Levantine capitalism and politics. His work at Citibank, the Lebanese Central Bank, and in Hariri’s corporate empire led to his job as Lebanon’s finance minister in the 1990s, and the March 14 bloc in parliament chose him as prime minister after the election in 2005.

  As a staunchly pro-business free-trader, Siniora was, unlike most Pan-Arab Nationalists, entirely uninterested in and even hostile to economic socialism and the bullying state apparatus that came with it in his part of the world. He paid his respects to the revolutionary regimes in Syria and Libya, and even to Nasser’s Egypt and Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, but he broke with them sharply when it came to the day-to-day business of economics and governance. He had his detractors, but any suggestion that he was a tyrant was hysterical. Most Arab countries had way too much government, but Lebanon hardly had any.

  I finally had a chance to meet him in his office in the Grand Serail, a beautifully restored palatial Ottoman-era military headquarters overlooking downtown. He wore a perfectly pressed charcoalgray suit and tie, and he came across a bit stiff, his handshake limp, his crooked smile a little perfunctory.

  He was a liberal in the general sense of the word, but at the same time he was loaded down with ideological dead freight common among Sunni Arabs of his generation. Few people described him as fresh, though he actually was compared with the likes of Bashar al-Assad and even Egypt’s more reasonable Hosni Mubarak. He filed off the rough edges of his Nasser-era Pan-Arabism, making his view of the world suitable for the modern sort-of democracy he partially governed.

  Michael Young described Siniora brilliantly and concisely in The Ghosts of Martyrs Square.1 “He saw himself as a quintessential Arabist politically and culturally, but an Arabism shorn of the radicalism of yesteryear, of any renovatory yearning; his Arabism was that of the courts and presidential palaces, with their old men, wedding cake furniture, and sealed windows, an Arabism of ornate compromises and weighty silences, of coagulated immobility.”

  “Let me tell you something and put things straight,” he said as he sat down and folded his hands on the table in front of him. “Lebanon is an Arab country. It has a sense of belonging to the causes of the Arab world, but at the same time, Lebanon cannot carry the burden of the whole Arab world on its shoulders.”

  He spoke for the overwhelming majority in his Sunni community when he said that, but not for the majority in his country. Many, if not most, Maronites couldn’t give two figs about Arabism or its causes. Hezbollah, at the same time, was perfectly willing to shoulder as much of the Arab world’s burdens as possible for the street cred its Shia constituents n
eeded in a region with an otherwise hostile Sunni majority.

  He did, however, know how to speak for the majority and sound like a statesman instead of a sectarian zaim when he had to.

  “Lebanon is composed of so many groups,” he said. “It is like a piece of mosaic of different colors that live in harmony together without a single dominant color. For a long period of time it has been a place of refuge and belonging. For millennia it has been a crossroads and has played a role in the interface between the west and the east, the north and the south. It has developed certain ways of behavior and ways of life, certain principles and values—democracy, openness, tolerance, and moderation.”

  Tolerance was something the Middle East painfully lacked, and Siniora felt this acutely. He was, like his country, an exception in his part of the world. He even thought the likes of Hezbollah deserved tolerance, and he was endlessly patient and generous with that tolerance, something Hezbollah did not appreciate and did not reciprocate.

  “This mosaic is beautiful as long as it fits well together,” he said. “If, for one reason or another, the glue that brings the pieces together is loosened, something else happens. It doesn’t mean you should curse the loose piece of mosaic. You should try to add a little more glue to make it work.”

  Siniora was facing one of liberalism’s greatest dilemmas—how much do the intolerant deserve tolerance? He was perhaps a tad less naive, though, than he sounded. He realized Lebanon’s greatest virtue was also its weakness.

  “The glue comes loose,” he said, “because of the pressures and the passions coming in from the outside. Lebanon is an open country and a democracy where people can speak their minds, so some use the country as an arena for fighting the wars in our region.”