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

by Michael Totten

  As a former revolutionary socialist, he pounced at the chance to join me and a handful of others for lunch with former revolutionary socialist Walid Jumblatt, especially since Lebanon’s Druze leader had so recently been involved in a shooting war with religious totalitarians—the kind of enemies Hitchens most loved to hate. Hitchens had gotten himself into a spot of trouble with his old comrades on the political left by championing the American invasion of Iraq, and though he was hardly enamored of Israel’s botched war in 2006, he nevertheless felt a keen sense of solidarity with those who struggled against the likes of Hezbollah.

  “Jumblatt,” he said, “is one of the Middle East’s real revolutionaries,” which was partly true, but not entirely true. Sometimes and in some ways Jumblatt was a real revolutionary, while at other times and in other ways he wasn’t at all. To understand him, you have to understand the Druze, and in order to understand the Druze, you have to understand what it was like to be a minority in Lebanon and in the Middle East generally.

  In the late 1980s, Saddam Hussein waged a war of racial extermination in the Kurdistan region of Iraq. Iran’s Baha’i community had been mercilessly persecuted by the government in Tehran ever since Khomeini replaced the Shah. The vast majority of Jews living in Arab countries were expelled to Israel, and many in the Arab world still hoped to expunge them from the region entirely. Egypt sidelined Coptic Christians as second-class citizens, and many Christian women in Iraq felt compelled by violent gangs of Islamists to wear headscarves even though the law didn’t require it. Libya’s Muammar al-Gaddafi repressed the indigenous Berber minority, and the Shias of Saudi Arabia lived under the boot heel of fanatical Sunni Wahhabis.

  The Druze minority communities in Lebanon, Israel, and Syria devised a survival formula that worked better than most. They’re weather vanes. They calculate. They, even more than other Arabs, side with the strong horse.

  In Syria, the Druze supported al-Assad—not because they liked him, but because he was the boss. Israeli Druze were fiercely loyal to the Zionist state and fought harder than most Israeli Jews against the likes of Hamas and Hezbollah in elite IDF units. Many Palestinians considered them traitors.

  It was trickier for the Druze people of Lebanon. Politics there had always been vastly more complicated, but you still usually could tell who had the upper hand locally and even regionally because the Druze were most likely their allies.

  Those who followed Jumblatt’s political trajectory since Hariri’s assassination knew that many thought of him as a Lebanese neoconservative. The description was apt in some ways. He was the head of the Progressive Socialist Party, yet neither he nor it were socialist any longer. He had moved from the political left to the political right—in Western terms, anyway—which was basically what it meant to be a neoconservative.

  During Lebanon’s civil war, he accepted backing from the Soviet Union. His home in the mountains was still decorated with posters and knickknacks from Communist Russia. Much later, in 2005, when he became one of the leaders of the Independence Intifada, he retroactively threw his support behind the Bush administration’s war against Saddam Hussein in Iraq. He even half-jokingly asked the White House to send car bombs to Damascus.1

  You could say—and many did say—that he changed because the political center of power and gravity changed. When Arab Nationalism and fervor for the Palestinian cause swept Lebanon before and during the civil war, his family championed both. When the Syrians ruled in Lebanon, he went along with that, too—not that he was happy about it. When Lebanon later turned against Syria, he helped lead the charge.

  None of this meant every idea in his head was cynically calculated to best represent the “centrist” position. Nor did it mean the rest of the Druze didn’t sincerely feel what they said they felt. Jumblatt and his people were complicated. He wasn’t a revolutionary in the usual sense, but he wasn’t strictly a weather vane either.

  The man was a bundle of contradictions who couldn’t be easily pigeonholed or even described. He was a quasi-feudal warlord, yet at one time he worked with the Soviet Union. He was an anti-Syrian revolutionary, yet he once collaborated with Syrian power. He masterfully gamed the sectarian system to his advantage, yet at the same time he hated that system because it restricted his power. (Since he wasn’t a Maronite, Sunni, or Shia, he could never hold any of Lebanon’s three most powerful posts.) He threw himself behind the Palestinian cause and had no warm feelings for Zionism, yet he fiercely opposed all who fought Israel.

  He hosted me, Hitchens, Lee Smith, Jonathan Foreman, and a handful of others at his home in the small town of Mukhtara. He lived there in luxurious Ottoman splendor with a view out his windows of the Chouf Mountains around him. You might call his home a palace or a castle, but you would not call it a house. It’s hundreds of years old and big enough that you could get lost in it if you wandered around on your own. Much of the interior was a museum for living in, decorated with real Roman Empire sarcophagi. Hundreds of antique rifles and swords adorned the walls. Ancient artifacts from all over the Eastern Mediterranean were professionally displayed in built-in glass cabinets. His library was bigger than many bookstores, and I noticed an entire shelf holding decades’ worth of Foreign Affairs magazine bound specially for him in leather. He kept a pistol and two full clips within easy reach on his desk atop the current New York Review of Books.

  “You know one thing I really like about Lebanon?” I whispered to Jonathan Foreman.

  “What’s that?” he said.

  “Cultured warlords,” I said. “You won’t find anyone or anyplace like this in Iraq or Afghanistan.”

  Jumblatt’s mountain home was more luxurious than any normal man ever dare wish for, but he looked distinctly ill at ease. He lived in breathtaking opulence, but with a sword of Damocles over his head.

  “How can we control our own destiny,” he said after inviting us to sit in his salon, “when we have a state within the state called the state of Hezbollah? When we have open borders to all kinds of traffic and weapons and people from Syria to Lebanon? Hezbollah has said it before and will say it now: ‘Thank God the Revolutionary Guards in Lebanon defend the interests of the Iranian Revolution.’ As long as we have this Syrian regime next door, we won’t have a sovereign Lebanon.”

  He could have added that there could be no sovereign Lebanon as long as the Khomeinist regime existed in Tehran, although he implied it. Lebanon regained some of its sovereignty after the Syrian military was driven out in 2005, but the Cedar Revolution in Lebanon had yet to defeat the Iranian Revolution in Lebanon.

  “You did a good job in Iraq,” he said, “so why don’t you do the same thing in Syria? Yesterday, one of our guys was assaulted in Beirut. He died today, and I have to go this afternoon to cool things down. We are living with action and reaction. We could respond by attacking a Shia, and it will again become a vicious circle. The Lebanese army is doing its best, but it is unable to impose its authority, its dominance. It’s unable to fix up being a part of the state of war and peace, unable to look at carloads of weapons coming into Lebanon. Next to Hezbollah you also have the Palestinian bases inside the camps. There are, I think, facilities for all kind of hostilities hiding in bunkers and in tunnels.”

  Jumblatt was no friend of Israel and never had been, even though his coreligionists who lived in Israel were. It was clear, however, that in 2008 he had a serious problem with everyone who actually fought against Israel and would opt out of the Arab-Israeli conflict entirely if he could. Lebanon suffered far more death and pain and destruction from that conflict than any other country around.

  “The other issue is the Shebaa Farms,” he said, “which are not Lebanese. Officially, legally, they are not Lebanese. They were taken from the Syrians in the late 1960s, and by pretending that they are Lebanese we are still hooked into the Arab-Israeli conflict. The Shebaa Farms are still under U.N. Resolution 242. And we have nothing to do with the 242 Resolution, because in 1967, Lebanon did not go to war against Israel. The S
yrian and Iranian policy is to hook Lebanon into the 242 Resolution and the Arab-Israeli conflict. If you look back to the so-called Baathist theory or ideology from the Atlantic to the Gulf, they have never accepted the fact that Lebanon would be independent. Never accepted that.”

  Jumblatt’s history with the imperial Baath government was a long and twisting one. He recounted to us one of his favorite anecdotes, one he told most journalists who interviewed him. Shortly after his father, Kamal, was assassinated, he was summoned to Damascus by the ruthless Hafez al-Assad. When he meekly objected to what the Syrian ruler expected of him, al-Assad smiled and wolfishly said, “Walid, you remind me so much of your dear father.”

  And so he surrendered. Before either principle or politics, his first order of business was his own survival and that of his family and his community.

  “I was obliged to fix up a cynical compromise,” he said, “because I needed allies and I needed routes for weapons and ammunition. At that time I had an important ally called the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union saved me. It trained my people. I had a small militia and they supported me through Syria. So, of course, I shook al-Assad’s hand. I knew that he killed my father, but I tried to forget for some time.”

  “When was the first time that you publicly accused Syria of killing your father?” Christopher Hitchens said.

  “From 1977 until, let’s say, 2000, I had to keep silent,” Jumblatt said. “In 2000, I challenged the Syrian president, and the patriarch of Lebanon said it’s time for the Syrians to get out of Lebanon. That was a crucial year because the south of Lebanon was liberated from Israel. Hafez al-Assad died in June. I was accused by the Syrians of betrayal and treason. Later on we had to postpone our language. We still have some among us who take the romantic approach of Arab Nationalism. And later on came September 11 and the news that the Americans were about to invade Iraq.”

  “You said the intervention in Iraq might have been helpful for the March 14 movement,” Hitchens said. “Would that still be your view?”

  Whether it was true or it wasn’t, quite a few Lebanese thought the invasion of Iraq convinced al-Assad he might be destroyed if he did not get out of Lebanon.

  “It depends now on the outcome,” Jumblatt said, “after America reduces its troops in Iraq. There are some signs in the last week that again the terrorists are blowing themselves up and trying to create chaos. It’s a very unstable situation. If there’s no compromise between the powers surrounding Iraq—meaning the Iranians, the Turks, plus the Americans—I don’t know how Iraq can be stable. Also the Syrians, unfortunately, have been importing jihadists to the Damascus airport and exporting them to Iraq, where they blow themselves up to go to heaven. Barack Obama should be careful. He should be careful here and in Iraq. And he should be much more careful, of course, in the land that nobody was able to conquer, Afghanistan.”

  Unfortunately, Obama administration officials, like so many others before them from both the Democratic and Republican parties, failed to understand Syrian foreign policy. They figured what al-Assad wanted most was the return of the Golan Heights, as he so often publicly claimed, and that he felt compelled to seek an alliance with Tehran against both his wishes and his real interests. The truth about the Middle East, though, was often concealed behind misdirection and bombast. What Arab leaders said publicly only rarely lined up with what they thought privately.

  “Assad doesn’t care about the Golan,” Jumblatt said. “Suppose we go ultimately to the so-called peace. Then later on, what is the purpose of the Syrian regime? What is he going to tell his people? Especially, mind you, he is a member of the Alawite minority. This minority could be accused of treason. It’s not like Egypt or Jordan, whereby the government has some legitimacy. Here you get accused of treason by the masses, by the Sunnis. So using classic slogans like ‘Palestine will liberate the Golan with Hezbollah’ is a must for him to stay in power.

  “I had a friend at the time—he is still my friend—when I was in Syria. He was the chief of staff of the Syrian army and is now living in Los Angeles. He was quite an important guy and honest with the media. He was a Sunni from a big family in Aleppo. And when Hafez al-Assad was about to fix up the so-called settlement through Bill Clinton, and before they met him in Geneva, a prominent Alawite officer in the Syrian army came to al-Assad and said, ‘What are you doing? We will be lost if you make peace. We will be accused of treason.’”

  The U.S. and France all but brought the hammer down on Syria after Rafik Hariri was killed, but French President Jacques Chirac—one of Hariri’s personal friends—was replaced at the helm by Nicolas Sarkozy. The Israelis thought Sarkozy an improvement, but the Lebanese didn’t. The new French president thought isolating Syria diplomatically was counterproductive and that engagement might yield better results. The United States government came around to Sarkozy’s point of view when Barack Obama replaced George W. Bush. Both hoped to lure al-Assad away from his alliance with Iran and into the nominally “pro-Western” Sunni Arab mainstream.

  Jumblatt thought the idea was preposterous. “The interests are too interconnected between the Syrian regime and Persia,” he said. “And I think Persia is now stronger.”

  Syria had been cunningly outwitting Americans and Europeans for decades, and most Western leaders seemed entirely incapable of learning from or even noticing the mistakes of their predecessors. Al-Assad cared not a whit for peace or the Golan. In his privacy of his own mind, he may not have cared much for Ahmadinejad and Khamenei, but he needed terrorism and a simmering state of war just to survive.

  No basket of carrots Barack Obama or anyone else could offer would change his calculation of his own strategic interests. His weak military and Soviet-style economy would instantly render his country as geopolitically impotent as Yemen if he scrapped his alliance with Iran, Hamas, and Hezbollah. In 2009, though, he was the most powerful Arab ruler in the Levant. Because he contributed so much to the Middle East’s instability and started so many fires in neighboring countries, he managed to make himself an “indispensable” part of every fantasy solution Western diplomats could come up with. He wouldn’t be where he was without Iranian help, and that help would become more valuable than ever if and when Tehran produced nuclear weapons.

  The alliance worked for both parties. While al-Assad’s secular Arab Socialist Baath Party’s ideology differed markedly from Khomeini’s Velayat-e Faqih, “resistance” was at the molten core of each one. Syria’s and Iran’s lists of enemies—Sunni Arabs, Israel, and the United States—were identical.

  Syria was no more likely to join the American-French-Egyptian-Saudi coalition than the U.S. was likely to defect to the Syrian and Iranian side. Trying to peel Syria away from the axis of resistance was like trying to pry East Germany out of the Soviet bloc before the Berlin Wall came down.

  Al-Assad wasn’t just a state sponsor of terrorist groups fighting Israel. He also, as Jumblatt said, aided and abetted terrorists and insurgents from all over the Middle East who were willing to die in Iraq. It was a brilliant move, frankly, so long as the Americans were bogged down and felt reluctant to fight back. Al-Assad could effectively “deport” the most dangerous radical Sunnis from his own country to Iraq, where they would make trouble for somebody else, and he could earn street cred in the rest of the Arab world as a result.

  There was a third rationale, too, that was perhaps the most sinister.

  “For Assad and the Alawis,” Lee Smith wrote in The Strong Horse,2 “the Iraqi insurgency amounted to a debate over the nature of the Middle East. The Bush administration thought that the region was ripe for democracy and pluralism, and that its furies could be tamed by giving Middle Easterners a voice in their own government. Syria countered that the Middle East could only be governed through violence. Its support for the insurgency was, at least in part, intended to give Washington no choice but to put away dangerous ideas like Arab democracy.”

  All this served Iran’s interests, as well.

  “Before the A
merican invasion,” Jumblatt said, “the overthrowing of Saddam, we had an Arab state between us and the Persians called Iraq. Now the Persian Empire is in Lebanon.”

  “Will Lebanon change if Iran gets nuclear weapons?” I said.

  “It will not change,” he said. “But it will give the Iranians more prestige, of course, with their allies. It will provoke a series of armaments—an arms race—in Saudi Arabia, maybe Egypt. It will be crazy. We will have bombs everywhere.”

  “Are you concerned about a replay of what happened up here on the mountain?” Lee Smith said, referring to Hezbollah’s aborted invasion of the Chouf the previous May.

  “They can do anything on the mountain,” Jumblatt said. “Just twenty miles from here you have the area of Jezzine, which is the second line of defense of Hezbollah. What is left of Jezzine is, of course, in a Christian area. Still, in ten years’ time or maybe more, it will be a Shia area. Five hundred years ago it used to be Shia. On this side, you have my old supply lines from the Bekaa Valley. They are cut, but they are there. And they have Beirut’s southern suburbs. They can squeeze anything through, and it would be foolish on my behalf to go to a so-called civil war. This is why last time, when the clashes started, I did my best to stop the clashes. Anybody can fight when they are squeezed. Anybody can fight. But we don’t have supply lines. We don’t have weapons. We will end up emigrating from Mount Lebanon. To where? The sea? No. To Syria.”

  That was the Druze nightmare—to be driven from their lands to live out their lives as refugees with no rights or future. Nothing much mattered when held up to this.

  “Hezbollah inflicted the Israeli army with big losses,” he said. “And they were good fighters. But, of course, three years later, I don’t think doing the same thing would be very popular in the south of Lebanon. It’s not every day that you can rebuild your house. The fighters of Hezbollah can hide. They have caves; they have their own expertise. But they also have got to be accountable to the population.”