By Jay D. Homnick on 2.16.05 @ 12:08AM
The U.S. is reacting in a major way to the Valentine Day's massacre in Beirut.
Our world was rocked yesterday; yes, while we were busy not
noticing.
The story began Monday with a Valentine's Day massacre in
downtown Beirut, Lebanon. Former (and aspiring future) Prime
Minister Rafik Hariri was riding in the center of his motorcade
when a massive bomb exploded, killing him and 14 others, injuring
135. Mr. Hariri, despite having no current official status, could
afford the security of motorcades because he was a billionaire
construction magnate who is given credit for rebuilding his
country's infrastructure after decades of civil war.
He had resigned as Prime Minister last autumn after a fairly
public wrangle with Syria over its undue influence in the
ostensibly sovereign affairs of Lebanon. It seems a safe
presumption that Monday's assassination was the fallout of this
fall falling-out. Other than Syria or a proxy supplied with
materiel and intelligence by Syria, there is no group operating in
Lebanon with this sort of firepower, infrastructure, and
penetration. Indeed many ordinary Lebanese citizens rioted in the
streets after the killing, chanting anti-Syrian slogans. It's a
fair assumption that they know whereof they speak in blaming Syria
for the blast.
Yesterday the United States, clearly acting on the theory that
Syria was guilty of this atrocity, sent an official diplomatic
demarche to Syria in protest and recalled our Ambassador to
Washington for consultation. This is the world-rocking step whereof
we spoke. It needs to be appreciated properly; it was a major,
major move that is sure to ramify for some time to come.
Let us jump back in time for a bit and set the stage. In 1982,
Lebanon was a country that had been riven by factionalism and
anarchy. The entire southern end adjacent to Israel was controlled
by Yassir Arafat and the PLO, who had moved there after being
expelled from Jordan by King Hussein in the Black September
military cleanup of 1970. The PLO actually had a system of taxation
in place, owning a piece of every single facet of economic
activity. Other parts of the country were divided between
Phalangist Christian and Druze control.
A presidential election had been called for September 14, and
the favored candidate was the charismatic Phalangist, Bashir
Gemayel. A few months before the election, Israel invaded Southern
Lebanon, capturing the area and expelling the PLO. This was called
Operation Peace In Galilee, designed to protect the communities in
northern Israel that had been shelled nightly by the PLO from their
Lebanon base. But Prime Minister Menachem Begin only agreed to let
Defense Minister Ariel Sharon undertake this ambitious venture
because he had a plan to get his troops back out in fairly short
order.
Begin had made a secret deal with Bashir Gemayel in expectation
of his being elected. The PLO would be routed, southern Lebanon
would be stabilized and placed mostly under the temporary
stewardship of Major Saad Haddad and his South Lebanon Army.
Haddad, a Christian, would cooperate with Gemayel and before long
the country of Lebanon would once again coalesce into a functioning
independent entity at peace with Israel.
Bashir won the election and he entered his campaign headquarters
to make his victory speech at the celebratory party that had been
prepared. Somehow a massive bomb had been planted right in the
heart of the festivities and Bashir was killed. I was sitting in
Jerusalem that night, huddled over my radio, and the bitterness of
the disappointment that characterized that moment will remain with
me forever.
After that, all hope died. The Phalangists freaked out and
massacred Palestinians at Sabra and Shatila. Major Haddad's power
shrank into a very narrow fiefdom, and he died of cancer not long
afterward. Hezbollah built an effective base for terrorism against
northern Israel in the area vacated by the PLO. And Menachem Begin,
whose wife died soon after, lost his taste for public life,
resigned as Prime Minister of Israel, and spent the last nine years
of his life as a sort of hermit.
Into this vacuum leapt Syria. It helped negotiate an arrangement
whereby Amin Gemayel, milquetoast brother of the dynamic Bashir,
became the titular president, and operated as a stooge for Syria.
The Marines were present in Beirut for a time as a stabilizing
force, but when their barracks were blown up by a massive truck
bomb in October 1983, killing nearly 300 Marines, President Reagan
brought them home. Since then, Syria has functioned as the de facto
suzerain of Lebanon, and the Lebanese government is an
administrative rather than a determinative body.
None of this is what Israel or the United States originally
wanted, but both have made uneasy peace with this reality for over
two decades. Now the Bashir Gemayel scenario has been repeated,
except this time the victim is Rafik Hariri, and this time the
people of Lebanon and the United States are not accepting it
passively. If indeed Syria is being challenged over its hegemony in
Lebanon, the Mideast calculus can veer off into all sorts of
unpredictable scenarios: we had best fasten our seatbelts.
topics:
Military, Israel
