On Thursday, Saad Hariri, Lebanon’s prime minister-designate, stepped down, bringing a long-simmering political crisis to a head. The next day, there were riots in Tripoli over shortages of fuel, electricity, and medicine, while the Lebanese pound, which has rapidly been losing value, hit on a new low. The central bank is meanwhile heading towards collapse and a potentially devastating new wave of the coronavirus threatens. Jonathan Spyer asks the obvious question:
What went wrong? What went wrong was discernible [in 2007, if not earlier]: there were two powers in Lebanon. The first, represented by the March 14 movement, was ostensibly forward looking, oriented toward the West, toward commerce [and] normality. The other power was that of Iran, via its oldest franchise, the Lebanese Hizballah movement. [It] had its own military power, which outmatched that of the state and dwarfed the other irregular military presences in the country. It had its own economy, too, its own sources of income, its own smuggling routes.
The project of the Iranian element was that the two Lebanons should continue to exist indefinitely. The former was to provide a convenient carapace of normality and legitimacy beneath which the latter could continue its allotted tasks in Teheran’s long war against Israel. Supporters of the March 14 project had a tendency to avoid the discussion of hard power issues. This in retrospect was to prove fatal.
Any chance that the Lebanon of March 14 might mount a defense in arms of its vision of the country ended in the events of May and June 2008. In a brief conflict on the streets of Beirut, the forces of Amal, [another Shiite militia group], and Hizballah contemptuously brushed aside the haphazard military mobilizations of the pro-March 14 Sunni and Druze forces. From this point on, the die was cast.
From Israel’s point of view, there is little to be done but to continue to guard the borders. . . . [I]nternational aid should be made contingent on the disarming of the Iranian proxy, and the thoroughgoing reform of the political system. Any other remedy runs the danger of offering support to Lebanon’s current Iran-created dysfunctionality.
Read more on Jonathan Spyer: https://jonathanspyer.com/2021/07/18/the-slow-death-of-lebanon/