Loud and Unclear: Nasrallah sends out mixed messages on Syria

Hussain Abdul-Hussain
The Majalla

The contending Lebanese factions have taken their fight from the streets of Beirut and Tripoli to those of Damascus and Homs. Yet, battling it out elsewhere does not mean that Lebanon is sailing toward stability or prosperity. Lebanon’s leaders continue to enjoy their fiery statements, often attacking each other and taking opposing sides on all issues, both domestic and regional. This infighting does little to alleviate Lebanon’s many political impasses, such as forming a new cabinet after the dissolution of the last one in late March.

Of Lebanon’s politicians, Hezbollah’s Hassan Nasrallah stands out for his firebrand orations, which have recently increased in both frequency and intensity. Defying whatever national sentiments the Lebanese might have, Nasrallah has in the past sworn allegiance to Iranian supreme leader Ali Khamenei. Nasrallah has openly taken sides with Syria’s embattled dictator, Bashar Al-Assad, and has stuck with his unrelenting threats against Israel.

Nasrallah’s statements count in a country where he has become the most influential man, and where his party, Hezbollah have become the de facto ruling party—even if unofficially. However, despite his amplified cries, Nasrallah’s political chest-thumping rings as hollow as ever. In private, the Hezbollah leader offers conflicting rhetoric on the crisis in Syria.

In a special report published by Kuwaiti newspaper Al-Rai, Nasrallah was quoted as saying that “Lebanon is crossing into a new phase with its [to be explored] oil and gas,” and that with its estimated fossil fuel fortune, the country “is heading toward prosperity, the improvement of living conditions of its citizens and the upgrading of its infrastructure so that it stands on par with modern nations.”

Nasrallah then contrasts this rosy picture of Lebanon with his prediction of open-ended strife in Syria. The report quotes Nasrallah as saying that there will be “no good outcome” for the conflict in Syria, an idea that echoes the view of Washington and other world capitals and their reasons for staying out of the crisis. The crucial difference is that Nasrallah is actively participating in the conflict by deploying fighters from his formidable militia to Homs suburbs in a bid to tilt the balance in favor of Assad. Yet despite Hezbollah’s involvement in Syria, the report suggests that Nasrallah believes that what happens in Syria should stay in Syria.

Two revelations in the report show that Nasrallah’s understanding of the conflict in Syria is skewed on many counts. He believes that the West is still focused on the Middle East’s oil resources, and that the West sponsors conflict in order to create jobs for its “arms factories” and post-war reconstruction companies, both suffering from the recession.

In fact it is in the interest of the West, and China and Japan, to keep Syria’s oil flowing in order to keep the world market price low. This requires stability, not revolutions. However, it is in the interest of Russia and Iran—both oil-producing giants—to take other oil-producing countries, even puny ones like Syria, offline, so that prices can go up, thus increasing their profits.

This scenario does not match the current alignment of Russia and Iran with Assad, who promises both dictatorship and stability, and the West that is pushing for more democracy even at the expense of stability. This means that Nasrallah’s theory on Syria’s oil production, a meager 385,000 barrels per day in 2010, does not compute with the realities of the Syrian crisis.

As for arms production, Russia has long been one of the top nations exporting arms to Syria. Russia’s contracts with Assad dwarf whatever arms the rebels may receive from the West. Nasrallah appears to be unaware that arming civil wars is not rewarding for the West’s military industry, which needs big contracts to turn profits. Such business is possible only with stable governments.

Nasrallah’s amateurish views of world politics and economics explain a lot about why, even though Lebanon is not going to war, it is not moving forward either.

Why Lebanon Matters

Hussain Abdul-Hussain
NOW

Apart from hosting Hezbollah and bordering Israel, Lebanon has little international significance. But with the alarming rise of radical Sunni Islamism – from Mali to Pakistan – Lebanon stands as the last bastion of moderate Sunnis, something that Hezbollah might have realized.

Lebanon's moderate Sunnis, however, face the risk of extinction. Like their Arab peers who were sidelined by fanatic generals after the Palestine defeat in 1948, they are under pressure to either stand up to Shiite bullying, or make way for those who can like Syria's Jabhat al-Nusra and similar organizations whose thought, politics and looks belong to medieval times.

Hezbollah has seemingly understood the Sunni conundrum: Shut out the Hariri family and the moderates and you will have to deal with firebrands like Ahmad al-Assir and soon enough with Jabhat al-Nusra. Perhaps this made Hezbollah unclench its fist and allow the nomination of lawmaker Tammam Salam, a member of the Hariri bloc and descendent of one of Lebanon's best-known Sunni families.

To be sure, Hezbollah has not given up its control of Lebanon's security. It has been less than six months since the assassination of Information Branch Chief Wissam al-Hassan, who had put together a competitive intelligence agency that threatened the party's dominance.

But anything less than threatening Hezbollah's control of security now looks permissible. By allowing moderate Sunnis some room, Hezbollah has broken with a template that it inherited from the Syrian rulers of Lebanon.

When Bashar al-Assad intended to extend the mandate of former President Emile Lahoud in 2004, many of his allies counseled him to the contrary, but his response was to threaten to break Lebanon on the heads of late Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri and former French President Jacques Chirac. Assad doubled down on his show of force, and lost, a step he would imprudently repeat when families of Deraa's tortured children tried to reason with him against an undeserved harsh punishment, the incident that is believed to have been the spark of the Syrian revolution.

Hezbollah's leadership, for its part, looks smarter than Assad. It sends its ‘black shirts’ to the streets only sparingly and seemingly does its best to avoid unnecessary fights. Thus, with the incompetent Special Tribunal for Lebanon (STL) now history and Hezbollah's undisputed dominance of the nation's security, the party feels secure enough to let Lebanon politics run its course and keep Sunni moderates stronger than their militant rivals.

This is good news for Lebanon. It shows that Hezbollah understands the shortcoming of its power, especially as the Arab Spring makes it harder for the practice of absolute authority.It is good news for the Levant too. Lebanon's Sunni leaders are the only remaining cosmopolitan politicians from Ottoman times. They are mostly college graduates and self-made businesspeople, which sets them apart from other Lebanese sects whose leaders mostly come from the army corps, the religious establishment, or civil war militias.

Those who saw Salam's picture kissing his mother might have noticed that for someone her age, mother Salam was not veiled. This is not to judge veil, but to argue that Lebanon's Sunnis are still diverse rather than uniformly attached to an austere interpretation of Islam like in most of the region.

In fact, it was Salam's paternal aunt, Anbara, who caused a stir when she took off her veil in public in 1927. Born in 1897 and dead in 1986, Anbara was among the first Arabs to advocate women's rights, long before there were radical takfiris or other distractions.

The majority of Lebanon's Sunnis are known for their peaceful temper to the extent that it becomes hard to imagine them forming militant groups or producing the likes of Abu Hafs al-Libi, of Syria's Jabhat al-Nusra, or of Abu Omar al-Baghdadi, of Iraq's Islamic State.The mere fact that over the past decade almost none of al-Qaeda leaders held the surname "al-Lubnani," or the Lebanese, speaks volumes. While some Lebanese Sunnis, mainly on the fringe, might have joined al-Qaeda, their number seems insignificant.

Since he was forced out of Lebanon in 2005, Assad tried to sponsor radical Lebanese Sunni groups, a tactic that he replicated in Syria in 2011. Assad reasoned that if his enemies are radical Sunnis, rather than moderate ones, he would be justified to use brutal force against them and sell such effort to world powers striving to fight these same groups.But this is another tactic on which Assad and Hezbollah diverge, and therefore where MP Michel Aoun disagrees with Hezbollah over Salam. The Party of God has enough of a Shiite base to remain in power without the need for radical Sunni enemies to justify its power. Hezbollah might also believe that Assad’s tactics could backfire: Pretend radical Sunni groups might become real, snowball and turn into a formidable enemy that the party can do without.
With Hezbollah so far proving saner than blood-drenched Assad, and with Lebanon's moderate Sunnis getting a chance at resurgence, Lebanon should matter. Relations between its Shiites and Sunnis, though still tense, might be better than how things are in Syria and Iraq. The world should take notice.

Hussain Abdul-Hussain is the Washington Bureau Chief of Kuwaiti newspaper Alrai. Follow him on Twitter @hahussain.

Stopping Saddam

An Iraqi journalist commemorates the tenth anniversary of American troops toppling an Arab despot.

Hussain Abdul-Hussain

The Weekly Standard

Ten years ago today, the day Baghdad fell to American troops, I wrote that with the downfall of Saddam Hussein, I finally felt free as a journalist to criticize the Iraqi regime under my own byline without fear of reprisal from Saddam’s henchmen in Beirut, where I then lived. The evening that I called "my first day of freedom," when Iraqis pulled down Saddam's statue in Fardous Square, I decided to return to Baghdad. It was my first trip back in 21 years. Reconnecting with relatives, I was at my aunt's when her husband, Jaafar, said Saddam's demise was the end of a nightmare. "The new Iraq belongs to you and Sadeq," he said, referring to his son, my cousin.

The next morning, Jaafar was gunned down by looters who ransacked his house. Though grieving for his death, I decided the murder was a hiccup in the bigger scheme of things. American friends had just arrived from Beirut to launch an English-language magazine. I offered them the family house to use as a dorm and an office and as part of my investment in the project that we called the Baghdad Bulletin.

Iraq's looting metamorphosed into organized crime and an insurgency. By September 2003, it had become too dangerous for foreign journalists to stay in Iraq. Investors too pulled out. The Baghdad Bulletin had to shut down. As disappointed as I was, I never stopped defending the moral imperative behind the Iraq war: There was not, and will never be, anything wrong with toppling a dictator, let alone one as bloody as Saddam.

When I moved to Washington in 2004, I found a different debate, with rampant finger-pointing, and one-time supporters of the war turning against it. Opponents of the war argued, among other things, that the United States had committed a fatal mistake by disbanding the Iraqi army. That myth needs to be debunked. Saddam's army was divided into two: the loyalists and the corrupt. Had Coalition Provincial Authority chief Paul Bremer reconstituted brigades like Fidaeyee Saddam or the Republican Guard, such a step, with their commander-in-chief still at large, would have been akin to inviting Saddam to return to lead his troops one more time. Other Iraqi brigades, though not loyal to Saddam, were too corrupt to stand, and even if they did, they would have had a hard time policing the country without the intelligence branches, and Saddam diehards.

In retrospect, we know that post-invasion lawlessness helped breed civil war. Perhaps the United States should have trained an Iraqi police force before the invasion, and inserted it into the country after. But even that could not have guaranteed law and order. Neighboring Syria is proof of that. Even without foreign invasion, Syria has become a bloodbath that—judging by the numbers of casualties and refugees—makes the Iraq civil war look like a picnic.

Moreover, the continuing violence in Iraq, even after the U.S. withdrawal, is proof that not all of the Iraqi rage was because of American occupation. Self-criticism is good, and there are lessons to be learned from American mistakes in Iraq—whether the error was abandoning the Kurds and the Shia in 1991, or not planning for lawlessness in 2003. Nonetheless, America handed back to Iraqis a country that, by the standards of the Arabic-speaking Middle Eastern, is closest in the region to being a normal one. Americans paid dearly for that, not only in lives lost, and money spent, but also because of a bruising debate that divided Americans and made them lose faith in their country's power and role on the world stage.

Now it’s time for Americans to stop feeling guilty about Iraq. The United States went to war in good will and wanted to spread democracy. But the Iraqis were not, and are still not, ready for democratic government. The fact that the whole Middle East has devolved into a Sunni-Shia war tells us that the chaos in Iraq that followed the U.S. invasion was only a small reflection of the problems in a region that was on fire long before 2003. We should also recognize that the United States still has a large role in influencing events in its interests, and shaping them according to its ideals.

Over the last ten years, the pull that Iraq once exerted on me has lessened. The house the family has owned for half a century is up for sale, and now I call America, the country where my son was born, home. When my son reads the history of the Iraq War, I want him to know that his father, and many like him, Iraqis and Americans, tried to spread freedom there. As we move on to other things, other concerns, we still leave evidence of our fight.