Is Iran reverting to one of the late Shah’s pet politics: An alliance between Shiites and Christians against the Sunnis and the Druze in Lebanon?
The question is not fanciful.
In a move that has surprised even the most seasoned observers of Lebanese politics the Lebanese branch of the Hezbollah movement has just forged an alliance with the main Maronite political coalition in the Parliament. Hassan Nasrallah, the Hezbollah leader, and Gen. Michel Aoun, the Maronite standard-bearer, met in Beirut last week to give the alliance their seal of approval.
The idea of such an alliance has been gestating in Tehran, Damascus and Beirut for weeks and was given the final boost it needed by Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad during his visit to Damascus last month. While in Damascus, Ahmadinejad received the Hezbollah leaders for what was described as a “brain storming session.” But the real purpose of the meeting was to convey Iran’s decision to counter attempts by the United States and France to foster a pro-Western regime in Beirut and work for regime change in Damascus.
Ahmadinejad considers Lebanon and Syria as part of Iran’s glacis in its struggle against the United States and its regional allies, especially Israel. He is, therefore, determined not to allow the US to bring veritable regime change in either nation.
Under the Shah, Iran considered Lebanon as part of its glacis against radical Arab regimes backed by the Soviet Union. At that time, however, the Lebanese Shiite community was weak and disorganized. So the Shah based his Lebanon policy on the Maronite Christian community while the Sunnis and the Druze sided with the radical pro-Soviet Arab regimes, including those in Damascus and Cairo.
Iran began organizing the Lebanese Shiites soon after the 1958 Lebanese civil war. Grand Ayatollah Borujerdi, then the Marjaa Taqlid (Source of Emulation) of the Shiite community dispatched one of his brightest pupils, Moussa Sadr, to Lebanon for the purpose. The Iranian government backed the enterprise with money and diplomatic support until the early 1970s. On the Maronite side Iran’s chief interlocutor in Lebanon was former President Camille Chamoun who was a frequent visitor to Tehran where he met the Shah and Prime Minister Amir Abbas Hoveyda.
The Iranian-backed alliance in Lebanon fell apart after the Khomeinist revolution in Tehran. And Iran’s view of the Maronites soured further when some of them, under Bashir Gemayel, forged an alliance with Israel while another group, led by Aoun, received money and arms from Saddam Hussein in Baghdad.
Many in Tehran must have worked hard at anger control to forget Aoun’s close ties with Saddam Hussein throughout the 1980s when Iraq was at war with Iran. But there is little sentiment in geo-strategy, and what matters for the present Iranian leadership is to contain the American advance in the Middle East until President George W. Bush is replaced by a more pliable adversary in Washington.
The strange alliance makes sense when we take into account the interests of those concerned. Aoun who had fought and then fled the Syrians makes his peace with Damascus. And that enhances his hopes of replacing Emile Lahoud as Lebanon’s president. The Maronite community as a whole will benefit by keeping the present constitutional arrangements in place under which the Christians, who now account for some 23 percent of the population, retain half of the political power at national level.
Nasrallah benefits from the deal not only by proving his usefulness to Iran once again but also by breaking his party’s political isolation inside Lebanon.
Since the start of the “Cedar Revolution” last year, Hezbollah had been shut out of the country’s mainstream politics and unable to side either with Syria or the rising democracy tide in Lebanon. More importantly, Aoun has now committed the Maronites to a policy of allowing the Hezbollah to retain all its weapons, including heavy ones that make its forces a veritable army alongside Lebanon’s national army. The Nasrallah-Aoun accord consolidates Hezbollah’s position not as a political party but as a bona fide regime with its own administration, army and territory inside Lebanon.
Outside Lebanon the chief beneficiary of the new alliance will be the Syrian government. It can now be certain that the Lebanese opposition, now consisting mainly of the Sunnis and the Druze, will not have enough votes to impeach Emile Lahoud let alone appoint a new president who might be hostile toward Damascus.
In fact, I would not be surprised if the Syrians were to jettison Lahoud and help Aoun win the presidency with support from Hezbollah. Throughout last year Aoun worked hard to win American and French support for his bid for the presidency. The Americans never warmed up to Aoun because of the ex-general’s long history of association with Saddam Hussein. The French, who had hosted Aoun in exile for 15 years, were not enthusiastic either because they know the ex-general to be unpredictable as friend and implacable as foe.
In the meantime Lahoud will keep the entire machinery of government in a state of paralysis by refusing to sign the laws passed by the Parliament and the decisions taken by the Council of Ministers. In fact, the Lebanese government is now an autopilot at a time that the economic situation is steaming toward crisis point while the threat of political violence looms larger.
Can the Nasrallah-Aoun duo, backed by Tehran and Damascus, offer Lebanon the kind of political stability it needs to rebuild its sense of nationhood? No one could know for sure. The alliance has taken Lebanese politics several steps back in time by putting the emphasis on sectarian rather than national strategies.
There is, however, no guarantee that the genies released by the “ Cedar Revolution” will simply return to the bottle. A majority of the Lebanese seem to favor policies that will end their nation’s isolation and reintegrate it into the mainstream of global life. The Hezbollah-Maronite alliance might not be able to offer an alternative vision if only because it must take into account the broader strategic interests of Iran and Syria.
By keeping the situation frozen in Lebanon, both Iran and Syria might wish to enhance their own protection against the threat of regime change. But that could have an unexpected result: Those interested in regime change might conclude that things in Lebanon will not change until they change in Syria and that, in turn, will not happen, until there is change in Iran.
All that could turn Lebanon into a regional battlefield, yet again. In the 1950s and then in the 1970s and 1980s Lebanon paid a heavy price because international and regional powers fought their proxy wars in its territory. And that is precisely what a majority of the Lebanese, including those supposedly represented by Aoun and Nasrallah wish to avoid.
