<html>
<head>
<META HTTP-EQUIV="Content-Type" CONTENT="text/html; charset=us-ascii">
<meta name=Generator content="Microsoft Word 11 (filtered)">
<style>
<!--
/* Font Definitions */
@font-face
{font-family:Verdana;
panose-1:2 11 6 4 3 5 4 4 2 4;}
/* Style Definitions */
p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal
{margin:0pt;
margin-bottom:.0001pt;
font-size:12.0pt;
font-family:"Times New Roman";}
a:link, span.MsoHyperlink
{color:blue;
text-decoration:underline;}
a:visited, span.MsoHyperlinkFollowed
{color:purple;
text-decoration:underline;}
p
{margin-right:0pt;
margin-left:0pt;
font-size:12.0pt;
font-family:"Times New Roman";}
span.EmailStyle17
{font-family:Verdana;
color:windowtext;
font-weight:normal;
font-style:normal;
text-decoration:none none;}
p.fp, li.fp, div.fp
{margin-right:0pt;
margin-left:0pt;
font-size:12.0pt;
font-family:"Times New Roman";}
span.fonttitle1
{font-family:Verdana;
color:black;
font-weight:bold;}
@page Section1
{size:612.0pt 792.0pt;
margin:72.0pt 90.0pt 72.0pt 90.0pt;}
div.Section1
{page:Section1;}
-->
</style>
</head>
<body lang=EN-US link=blue vlink=purple>
<div class=Section1>
<table class=MsoNormalTable border=0 cellspacing=0 cellpadding=0 width="100%"
style='width:100.0%'>
<tr>
<td rowspan=2 style='padding:0pt 0pt 0pt 0pt'>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=3 face="Times New Roman"><span
style='font-size:12.0pt'><a href="http://www.ft.com" target="_blank"><span
style='text-decoration:none'><img border=0 width=214 height=50
src="cid:image001.gif@01C50AF2.B80C3BA0" alt=FT.com></span></a></span></font></p>
</td>
<!--Partner Logo End -->
<td style='padding:0pt 0pt 0pt 0pt'>
<p class=MsoNormal align=right style='text-align:right'><font size=3
face="Times New Roman"><span style='font-size:12.0pt'> </span></font></p>
</td>
<td style='border:none' width=0><p class='MsoNormal'> </td>
</tr>
<tr height=19 style='height:14.25pt'>
<td style='height:14.25pt;border:none' width=0 height=19></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td colspan=2 bgcolor="#CCCCCC" style='background:#CCCCCC;padding:0pt 0pt 0pt 0pt'>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=3 face="Times New Roman"><span
style='font-size:12.0pt'><ILAYER id=layerTop visibility="hide"><img
border=0 width=2 height=2 src="cid:image002.gif@01C50AF2.B80C3BA0"></span></font></p>
</td>
<td style='border:none' width=0><p class='MsoNormal'> </td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td colspan=2 style='padding:0pt 0pt 0pt 0pt'>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=3 face="Times New Roman"><span
style='font-size:12.0pt'> </span></font></p>
</td>
<td style='border:none' width=0><p class='MsoNormal'> </td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td colspan=2 style='padding:0pt 0pt 0pt 0pt'>
<table class=MsoNormalTable border=0 cellspacing=0 cellpadding=0 width="100%"
style='width:100.0%'>
<tr>
<td style='padding:0pt 0pt 0pt 0pt'>
<p class=MsoNormal><span class=bigheadline><b><font size=5
face="Times New Roman"><span style='font-size:16.0pt;font-weight:bold'><!--Article Goes Here-->The
Last Fling</span></font></b></span><font size=5><span style='font-size:
16.0pt'><br>
</span></font><span class=all><i><span style='font-style:italic'>By David
Gardner</span></i></span><i><span style='font-style:italic'><br>
</span></i><span class=all>Published: February 4 2005 15:29 | Last updated:
February 4 2005 15:29</span><br>
<br>
</p>
<p class=fp><font size=3 face="Times New Roman"><span style='font-size:
12.0pt'>It is midnight on Saturday in downtown Beirut and the Buddha Bar is
heaving. A cavernous copy of its Parisian namesake, with a 20ft-high Buddha
statue as its presiding spirit, the bar is just the latest incarnation of
the Lebanese craving for novelty and gift for fun.</span></font></p>
<p><font size=3 face="Times New Roman"><span style='font-size:12.0pt'>The
son of a Maronite Christian warlord assassinated, allegedly by the Syrians,
during the 1975-90 civil war, thrusts his way through the throng to the bar
with the help of a bodyguard out of central casting: black T-shirt,
tailored leather jacket, wrap-around shades and designer stubble.</span></font></p>
<p><font size=3 face="Times New Roman"><span style='font-size:12.0pt'>A
vast Johnnie Walker whisky icon towers over the bar itself, causing one
regular patron to observe that, “almost everything that takes place
in this city happens under the eyes of Johnnie Walker”.</span></font></p>
<p><font size=3 face="Times New Roman"><span style='font-size:12.0pt'>Beirut</span></font>,
it would appear, is back in business, restored to its pre-war position as
the playground of the Arab world.</p>
<p><font size=3 face="Times New Roman"><span style='font-size:12.0pt'>The
city’s downtown area, reduced to rubble by 16 years of inter-communal
warfare, has been rebuilt. Though a few shell-shattered hulks, such as the
old Holiday Inn, still scar the skyline, the core of the city is now
resplendent with restored or faux-Ottoman buildings, gleaming sandstone,
limestone and marble, recreated churches and mosques, and streets of bars,
cafes and restaurants, the sweet smoke of hubble-bubble pipes wafting
between them.</span></font></p>
<p><font size=3 face="Times New Roman"><span style='font-size:12.0pt'>Blocks
of $5m apartments stand back from a shoreline re-sculpted by landfill to
accommodate their owners’ yachts. The hotels are still full at the
end of a record year for tourism, with tanned guests eagerly discussing the
prospects for a good skiing season in the nearby mountains that rise
dramatically from the Levantine littoral.</span></font></p>
<p><font size=3 face="Times New Roman"><span style='font-size:12.0pt'>The
wine-producers of the fertile valley that lies between Mount Lebanon and
the Anti-Lebanon range that dips down to Syria - the Bekaa hitherto best
known for the quality of its hashish and as a stronghold of the militant
Shia Islamist movement Hizbollah - are struggling to meet demand. In few
cities of the world will you see so many trophy cars, not just top-of-the
range Mercedes, BMWs and Porsches, but Lamborghinis, Maseratis and
Ferraris, racing homicidally on the cramped highways, as though their
owners had hit on a novel means to continue the civil war.</span></font></p>
<p><font size=3 face="Times New Roman"><span style='font-size:12.0pt'>For
the first time since before the war, Europeans can be seen in numbers. The
international music festivals at Baalbeck, Byblos and Beiteddine, set in
Roman, Greek and Lebanese Ottoman splendour, play to full houses. For the
Gulf Arabs who make up the bulk of Lebanon’s visitors the city has
other allures. One hotel, punctilious in its service even by Lebanon’s exacting standards, allows a catalogue of call-girls to circulate for its
clients’ convenience. Even a senior minister cannot resist remarking
to a visitor that Beirut will always have an edge on rival destinations in
the region because of the famed beauty of its women.</span></font></p>
<p><font size=3 face="Times New Roman"><span style='font-size:12.0pt'>The
Lebanese themselves party hard. At Crystal, another over-the-top bar
currently in vogue, conspicuously consuming socialites and scions of the
political elite vie with each other in nightly auctions of Champagne costing thousands of dollars. At 1975, a bizarre addition to Beiruti nightlife, a
bar with sandbags, newly bullet-pocked walls and waiters in designer fatigues
offers the amnesiac Lebanese a tasteless time-capsule of the year war broke
out.</span></font></p>
<p><font size=3 face="Times New Roman"><span style='font-size:12.0pt'>”It’s
like Wall Street at its most excessive in the late 1980s and 90s, but here
they do it harder,” says one keen observer of local social mores.
“But it’s the same crowd of people, definitely not more than
50,000 or so, that keep all this spinning; it’s really just a
revolving door.”</span></font></p>
<p><font size=3 face="Times New Roman"><span style='font-size:12.0pt'>Behind
this splendid facade, however, a politically unreconstructed Lebanon is
lurching towards crisis, weighed down by huge debts and trapped in a
looming confrontation between western powers and Syria, which has not just
dominated but micro-managed the country’s affairs since the war it
helped bring to an end. Nor has Beirut anything like recaptured its pre-war
pre-eminence.</span></font></p>
<p><font size=3 face="Times New Roman"><span style='font-size:12.0pt'>Before
the fighting started in 1975, Beirut had been the region’s
unchallenged entrepot. Reaching back almost into pre-history, to the
Phoenicians and beyond, the coastal settlements of the Levant were an
entrepreneurial bridge between the civilisations emerging along the Nile
and between the banks of the Tigris and the Euphrates. It has been well
said that the flag of modern Lebanon should contain a dollar sign instead
of a cedar tree, for it is by vocation a merchant republic.</span></font></p>
<p><font size=3 face="Times New Roman"><span style='font-size:12.0pt'>Before
its descent into tribal war, its gifted bankers recycled petrodollars
seeking a remunerative home in the west and its canny middlemen reeled in
westerners seeking to sell anything from technology to arms to the east.
Beyond the cliches about the “lost Paris of the Orient” or the
“Switzerland of the Middle East”, it was an authentic,
east-west interface, facilitated by a mixed Muslim-Christian culture, laid
out in an intricate Byzantine mosaic of its 18 different religious sects.</span></font></p>
<p><font size=3 face="Times New Roman"><span style='font-size:12.0pt'>As
well as being the financial and services hub of the region, it was its
media and publishing capital, as well as an education centre. It was
freewheeling, more or less democratic and thus a magnet for the emigres and
exiles spat out by the Arab autocracies surrounding it - and for the
Israeli state to its south that needed to monitor them. These elements also
combined to make it a den of regional intrigue, listening post as well as
playground for hundreds of international journalists and spies - somewhere
between Bogart’s Casablanca and Batista’s Havana by way of Noriega’s
Panama.</span></font></p>
<p><font size=3 face="Times New Roman"><span style='font-size:12.0pt'>In a
delightful memoir of the celebrated St George Hotel’s bar* -
“the centre of the centre of the Middle East” - the Palestinian
writer Said Aburish recaptures how notorious spies such as Kim Philby and
Archie and Kermit Roosevelt sat drinking cheek-by-jowl with regional
potentates, oilmen, arms-dealers and reporters (from one of whom, New York
Times correspondent Sam Pope Brewer, Philby stole his wife Eleanor), while
plots were hatched and coups planned. The Buddha Bar, not to mention Crystal and 1975, has a long way to catch up.</span></font></p>
<p><font size=3 face="Times New Roman"><span style='font-size:12.0pt'>Glittering
though Beirut Redux now looks, it is in substance a shadow of its former
self. Then, the city and its preoccupations were regional and
international. Now, even though its people speak several languages and are
well-travelled, it is pretentious and provincial - international mostly in
the sense that it risks being the meat in the sandwich between a seemingly
unreformable Ba’athist regime in Syria and a regionally aggressive
US, which on this occasion is being egged on by France, the main holdout
against President George W. Bush’s war of choice against Saddam
Hussein’s Ba’athist tyranny in Iraq.</span></font></p>
<p><font size=3 face="Times New Roman"><span style='font-size:12.0pt'>The
Lebanese emerged from the long years of bloodletting somewhat surprised to
find they still had a country. Despite the destruction of cities and
villages, the 145,000 dead and perhaps double that number wounded, 17,400
“disappeared”, 3,614 car-bombs and the retreat into homogeneous
sectarian communities, there was a palpable will among ordinary Lebanese of
nearly all persuasions to try to find a new way forward. Alas, they have
yet to find it.</span></font></p>
<p><font size=3 face="Times New Roman"><span style='font-size:12.0pt'>One
of the reasons for that is Syria, and what one Lebanese political leader
characterises as its creeping Anschluss to absorb a country no pan-Syrian
or pan-Arab nationalist has ever really accepted as a stand-alone entity.
Another, equally important, reason is the craven corruption of much of the
Lebanese political class, who interlock as clients with the Syrian
nomenklatura in their shared pillage of what should be a much more vibrant
economy.</span></font></p>
<p><font size=3 face="Times New Roman"><span style='font-size:12.0pt'>Lebanon</span></font>
is, indeed, a geopolitical oddity, something that has a lot to do with its
topography. In a region that abounds with religious sects spawned by
millennia of doctrinal controversy, Mount Lebanon has for centuries offered
a secure fastness for the most heterodox among them. The Maronite
Christians, aligned with the Catholic Church and originally from Syria’s Orontes valley, fled to the mountains to escape Byzantine (Christian) persecution
- not, as their subsequent myth-making had it, Muslim oppression. The Druze
- whose precise religious beliefs are known only to their elders and
initiates but who appear to derive from the heterodox Shi’ism
associated with the Fatimid Muslim dynasty a millennium ago - also found
refuge in Mount Lebanon. These were the original core communities of the Lebanon, to be joined by Sunni and Shia Muslims in the coastal plains and the valleys, as
well as by Greek Christians, Orthodox and Catholic, Armenians (Catholic and
Orthodox), Chaldeans et al.</p>
<p><font size=3 face="Times New Roman"><span style='font-size:12.0pt'>The
Sunni prospered under the Ottomans who, nevertheless, ruled by proxy
through a mountain emirate of almost interchangeable Maronite and Druze
notables. The Shia, originally inhabitants of the mountain as well as the
valley, were gradually driven south.</span></font></p>
<p><font size=3 face="Times New Roman"><span style='font-size:12.0pt'>The
Maronites and the Druze, however, were structurally tribal and highly
fissiparous. The earliest known document referring to the Maronites is a
papal bull from 1216 absolving the losers in a civil war provoked by the
allegiance of part of the community to the Franks, or Crusaders. The Druze
were also known to hedge their bets. In the mid-13th century, the Druze
Buhturid dynasty had forces fighting on both sides when the Mamluks drove
the Mongols out of Syria at the battle of Ayn Jalut near Lake Tiberias.**</span></font></p>
<p><font size=3 face="Times New Roman"><span style='font-size:12.0pt'>The
pivotal modern change came as a result of the Maronite-Druze civil war of
the mid-19th century. That sucked in European powers led by the French who,
in 1920, carved out “Greater Lebanon” from post-Ottoman Syria. An ostensibly “Christian” triumph, this added to Mount Lebanon territory
and peoples who were not Christian. That, in turn, necessitated the
National Pact of 1943 to launch Lebanon’s independence. This
prescribed an inter-communal power structure extrapolated from the last
ever census taken in 1932, which gave a proportional majority and political
predominance to the Christians on the arithmetically assisted assumption of
a 6-5 population balance in their favour.</span></font></p>
<p><font size=3 face="Times New Roman"><span style='font-size:12.0pt'>It
was a bluff, but a magnificent bluff, that enabled the Lebanese to revel in
their heterogeneity for three golden decades. What brought it to an end is
as much disputed as the fanciful history each sect has manufactured to
embellish its own antecedents. The seeds of conflict - within as well as
between each community - were visibly there long before a shot was fired.</span></font></p>
<p><font size=3 face="Times New Roman"><span style='font-size:12.0pt'>In
the then-ruling Maronites’ view, the arrival of the Palestine
Liberation Organisation - ejected from Jordan after losing the 1970-71
Black September war against the late King Hussein - tipped the delicate
confessional balance unacceptably in favour of the Muslims. The PLO did
indeed behave with all the arrogance of a state-within-the (extremely
fragile)-state, and invited Israel’s retribution by using south Lebanon as a base to confront its enemy. But Muslims, and especially the Shia, had long
been pressing for a fairer share of power, and the PLO only joined the
Muslim-Druze alliance after Maronite militias had launched their attempt to
reaffirm Christian hegemony.</span></font></p>
<p><font size=3 face="Times New Roman"><span style='font-size:12.0pt'>Syria</span></font>
entered the fray as a result, to prevent Christian defeat, abort the
emergence of a Palestinian stronghold on its border, and reassert its
pan-Arab (as well as pan-Syrian) credentials.</p>
<p><font size=3 face="Times New Roman"><span style='font-size:12.0pt'>The
conflict moved from the cities to the mountains, from the hotel towers to
the refugee camps. The lethal kaleidoscope of sectarian alliances kept
shifting and re-combining, amid fathomless sub-plots of intra-sect
vendettas - the Maronites were especially prone to slaughtering each other.
Saudis and Syrians, Iraqis and Libyans, Iranians and Israelis used Beirut as the address to communicate with each other by car-bomb and as the arena for
proxy war, as western powers including the US and France blundered in only to be truck-bombed out. The idea of Lebanon went up in smoke. The
long war and Israel’s invasion in 1982 - when the then defence
minister Ariel Sharon almost destroyed West Beirut as he sought to crush
the PLO - shattered the country into cantonised fragments. When the
shooting eventually stopped, Syria was left holding most of the pieces.</span></font></p>
<p><font size=3 face="Times New Roman"><span style='font-size:12.0pt'>The
Lebanese republic was supposed to be relaunched by a new national entente -
the 1989 Taif Accord. This rearranged the confessional balance to give
Muslims and Christians parity in parliament, where a Shia speaker presides,
and to transfer executive power from a presidency still held by the
Maronites to a Sunni Muslim prime minister. Most militias were disbanded
and partly folded into a new national army, while Syria was to redeploy its troops to its border and eventually leave. In practice, Israel’s continuing occupation of south Lebanon gave Syria an alibi to stay. Damascus licensed
Hizbollah, arguably the most effective guerrilla movement in the world, as
the spearhead of resistance to the Israelis. It then set about recreating Lebanon in its own image, the better to loot it.</span></font></p>
<p><font size=3 face="Times New Roman"><span style='font-size:12.0pt'>Far
from withdrawing, Damascus reconsecrated the pre-war sectarian system in a
way designed to highlight its own role as indispensable arbiter and bulwark
against a relapse into conflict. It cultivated political clients, including
warlords and rival forces within each community, using lucrative patronage
and divide-and-rule tactics to prevent the emergence of a
cross-confessional national force. Samir Franjieh, a left-of-centre
opposition leader from a leading Maronite clan, puts it this way:
“The state should be based on all rights for individuals and all
guarantees for [the 18] communities. What we have now is all rights vested
in the communities but usurped by their leaders.”</span></font></p>
<p><font size=3 face="Times New Roman"><span style='font-size:12.0pt'>The
arrival of Rafiq Hariri, a billionaire construction magnate who has spread
into banking and media, raised hopes that at last a Lebanese champion would
articulate a national project to revive the country. Hariri, a Sunni who
made his money in Saudi Arabia and helped negotiate an end to the war, has
been prime minister for 12 of the past 14 years. He resigned in October
after Syria forced him, his cabinet and parliament to change the
constitution so that the ineffectual but pliant President Emile Lahoud
could stay on another three years.</span></font></p>
<p><font size=3 face="Times New Roman"><span style='font-size:12.0pt'>But
Hariri’s advent in 1992 raised great expectations. The currency
stabilised, Lebanon’s credit was restored, and the prime minister
mobilised his network of international contacts, not only in the Gulf but
among European leaders such as Jacques Chirac and Silvio Berlusconi. During
the war, “infrastructure” meant little more than holding the
high ground, a few power generators and each militia having its own port.
Now there was a plan to recreate central Beirut, and Solidere, a company
part-owned by Hariri, would do it. The core idea was to make the city the
region’s uncontested capital market.</span></font></p>
<p><font size=3 face="Times New Roman"><span style='font-size:12.0pt'>But,
while Hariri has rebuilt much of Lebanon, he has left it politically
unreconstructed. He and his friends complain that Syria meddled from the first, leaving them little margin for manoeuvre. The prime minister’s
critics are harsher. Michel Moawad, son of Rene Moawad, the president
assassinated in a bombing widely attributed to Syria as the war drew to an
end in 1989, says: “The Syrians employ Hariri as a marketing
director. He’s good, but the problem is their system is no longer
marketable.”</span></font></p>
<p><font size=3 face="Times New Roman"><span style='font-size:12.0pt'>The
cost of reconstruction was huge, and has saddled Lebanon with a debt of
nearly $35bn, almost twice its gross domestic product. The lifeblood of
remittances repatriated by the Lebanese diaspora, perhaps four times as numerous
as the roughly 4m who live in the country, has started to dry up. Current
prosperity depends heavily on Beirut as an alternative destination for Gulf
Arabs seeking to avoid visa problems in the west after 9/11.</span></font></p>
<p><font size=3 face="Times New Roman"><span style='font-size:12.0pt'>With
its banks, mostly smallish family affairs, growing fat and lazy on
government borrowing, Beirut is losing ground to rival financial centres
such as Dubai and Bahrain. Its stock market remains tiny, dominated by the
banks and Solidere. The regional media business is also heading for Dubai and Qatar, and Lebanon could even start losing its niche in areas such as education
and health to these city states, whose dynamism, ironically, is partly
powered by an inflow of Lebanese emigres. A lot of energy pulsing through Beirut, by contrast, is the energy of dissipation. Lebanon’s descent into a miasma
of corruption and clientilism under Syrian tutelage, the parcelling out of
post-war institutions as booty for the warlords, and the paralysis of
government caused by the president, prime minister and speaker vying
together as though they were Roman triumvirs, are all part of the reason.</span></font></p>
<p><font size=3 face="Times New Roman"><span style='font-size:12.0pt'>”Twelve
years after the start of reconstruction you come to the realisation
you’ve rebuilt some of the infrastructure - by no means all and by no
means in all regions - at a very high cost,” says Nasser Saidi, a
former economy minister. “Very little effort went into the building
of institutions or into learning the lessons of the war and making people
accountable for what they did. Maybe there were too many people to punish,
but that doesn’t mean you should reward them by putting them in
power. It’s obvious we could have built something better without
them. It’s not just the high debt and so on, it’s that
there’s no participation in political life.”</span></font></p>
<p><font size=3 face="Times New Roman"><span style='font-size:12.0pt'>Each
community, by contrast, has carved out a share of the state. The Council of
the South to develop southern Lebanon and the national electricity company,
for instance, are fiefs of Amal, the Shia militia-turned-party led by Nabih
Berri, Syrian ally and speaker of parliament. The ministry of the displaced
is the preserve of the Druze, the main reconstruction council of the
Sunnis. One party levies surtaxes of up to $200 for each container coming
through the port of Beirut, a racket worth an estimated $350m it shares
with its patrons in Syria’s intelligence services and their
sorcerer’s apprentices in the Lebanese security services. Since
Bashar al-Assad succeeded his father Hafez al-Assad as Syria’s
president four years ago, those in charge in Damascus - including Ghazi Kenaan,
the military intelligence chief who ran Lebanon for 20 years - appear most
interested in the economics of Lebanon.</span></font></p>
<p><font size=3 face="Times New Roman"><span style='font-size:12.0pt'>”This
is no more than a giant racket,” says one opposition leader.
“Under Hafez al-Assad Syria saw Lebanon as political patrimony to be
used in the larger Middle East game. But these people are no longer even
interested in the politics.”</span></font></p>
<p><font size=3 face="Times New Roman"><span style='font-size:12.0pt'>There
is a certain whiff of class animus in all this, of patrician scorn towards
new money grubbily acquired and contempt towards ostentation because,
although the civil war had no decisive outcome, it certainly engendered
social mobility.</span></font></p>
<p><font size=3 face="Times New Roman"><span style='font-size:12.0pt'>”One
reading of the war is that it was a social revolution,” says Samir
Franjieh. “It was not strictly speaking about poverty, but about
relative poverty and relative wealth - it was an attempt to settle the
question of rank and standing in society. The problem is that these people
know they lack legitimacy and the Syrians know that and find it easy to
play on their sense of insecurity.”</span></font></p>
<p><font size=3 face="Times New Roman"><span style='font-size:12.0pt'>Such
is their greed that Lebanon does worse than Syria in the Transparency
International Corruption Perceptions Index, where last year it dropped 19
positions to rank 97th among 146 countries, tied with Algeria, Nicaragua
and Serbia. “There is no normal economic relationship between Syria and Lebanon,” says Walid Jumblatt, the hitherto Syrian-allied leader of the Druze and of
the opposition. “It’s their mafias and local clients
overmilking our cow.” Jumblatt was speaking at Mukhtara, his
ancestral palace in the Chouf mountains, transformed into an armed camp
after the October car-bomb attack on his close ally Marwan Hamade, another
former economy minister who pulled out of the government in protest at Syria’s decision to extend President Lahoud’s mandate. Jumblatt’s father,
Kamal, leader of the Muslim-Left alliance in the war, was assassinated in
1976 just as the Syrian army was beginning its push into Lebanon. The son, by denouncing the Syria-Lebanon set-up as police states run by clans and
mafias, risks a similar fate.</span></font></p>
<p><font size=3 face="Times New Roman"><span style='font-size:12.0pt'>Damascus</span></font>
accuses him and Hariri of inciting France to ally with the US in pushing Resolution 1559 through the UN Security Council last September. This calls on
Syria to end its meddling in Lebanese politics, withdraw its remaining
troops, and for the disarmament of remaining militias, meaning Hizbollah.</p>
<p><font size=3 face="Times New Roman"><span style='font-size:12.0pt'>Jumblatt
says: “I originally proposed they keep their troops here as long as Israel occupied any of the country but that they stop interfering in Lebanese affairs. But
they just can’t do it. Now they’re accusing me of colluding
with Hariri to provoke the French into 1559. According to them, Marwan
Hamade actually wrote [the resolution] in Sardinia [Hariri’s holiday
retreat]. I appear to be Public Enemy Number One and we have gone backwards
28 years [to his father’s murder]. Now they’re like Bush -
you’re either with us or against us.”</span></font></p>
<p><font size=3 face="Times New Roman"><span style='font-size:12.0pt'>Jumblatt
and Hamade’s real crime, however, has been to foster cross-communal
unity. Three years ago the Druze leader received the Maronite Patriarch,
Cardinal Nasrallah Sfeir, in a historic reconciliation between the two
communities that devolved into an alliance between Jumblatt’s
parliamentary bloc and the mainstream Christian opposition. That was bad
enough from the Syrians’ point of view, but they got really spooked
once Hamade became the link-man in the emerging alliance between
Hariri’s powerful Sunni bloc and the opposition. As Nayla Moawad,
widow of the president who died for doing much the same thing, puts it:
“The great taboo for the Syrians is to have any bridge between the
communities.”</span></font></p>
<p><font size=3 face="Times New Roman"><span style='font-size:12.0pt'>Four
different government and opposition sources, moreover, confirm that the
Syrian leadership reacted implacably to Lebanese hostility to its enforced
extension of President Lahoud’s mandate. It said it would burn Beirut rather than leave it: “We destroyed the country once and we can do it again -
we will never allow ourselves to be pushed out,” was the precise
threat.</span></font></p>
<p><font size=3 face="Times New Roman"><span style='font-size:12.0pt'>While
Syria’s methods in Lebanon are crude, its diplomacy has been a
fiasco. In late 2002, after giving its assent to the first UN Security
Council Resolution 1441 on Saddam Hussein’s regime, Damascus had the
opportunity to build bridges to the Americans and reinforce links with the
Europeans, preparing what Beirut newspaper publisher Jamil Mroue calls
“a soft landing for its political system”. Instead, it stands
accused by Washington - rightly or wrongly - of allowing Saddam loyalists
to foment insurgency in Iraq from Syrian territory. The neo-conservative
cabals in Washington that helped crank up support for the Iraq war are now
baying for Bashar al-Assad’s blood.</span></font></p>
<p><font size=3 face="Times New Roman"><span style='font-size:12.0pt'>”They
can’t see the American train coming down the track; they think
it’s like in the desert, a mirage,” says one Beirut politician.
“They are walking down the same track as Saddam Hussein.”</span></font></p>
<p><font size=3 face="Times New Roman"><span style='font-size:12.0pt'>But
what ranks as an almost gratuitous act of political vandalism was the way Syria burnt its bridges with France and Jacques Chirac. This relationship, facilitated by
Hariri, was Damascus’s only real window on the world. Yet the
Ba’athist leadership not only rebuffed insistent French suggestions
it withdraw from Lebanon, Assad simply ignored letters from Chirac,
including one lobbying for a $700m gas contract that instead went to a
little known consortium with ties to the nomenklatura. “This is the
inebriation of corruption,” says one person familiar with the
details.</span></font></p>
<p><font size=3 face="Times New Roman"><span style='font-size:12.0pt'>”They
did nothing to prevent [Resolution] 1559,” says an indignant former
Syrian ally. “What the extremist Christians failed to do in two
decades, to internationalise the Lebanese situation, these people managed
to do in two days.” Trapped in its time warp, Syria has floated the idea of reviving peace talks with Israel. This, after all, had worked in the
past. As long as it was negotiating with Israel during the 1990s, no one
but the Lebanese raised the question of the Syrian occupation. Some keen
observers of Syria now suspect Damascus may withdraw its remaining roughly
14,000 troops - and then foment unrest to demonstrate how indispensable Syria’s stabilising presence was. Sheikh Naim Qassem, number two in the leadership of
Syria-aligned Hizbollah, alludes rhetorically to this scenario. “Are
they [the Americans] ready for the consequences of [a Syrian] withdrawal?
If they corner Syria, maybe it will make them a present [by leaving Lebanon].” Brave words. But Syria has managed the improbable diplomatic feat of
pushing France and the US together. That makes Syria more
“doable” than Iran, much the greater preoccupation in Washington but a much harder nut to crack.</span></font></p>
<p><font size=3 face="Times New Roman"><span style='font-size:12.0pt'>Whatever
happens, this looks like a turning point for a still ambitious and hopeful Beirut and a fearful if reckless Damascus. As Mroue puts it: “The situation is a bit
like a huge boil: it’s ugly and it’s livid but it’s only
when it bursts that you’ll know whether it’s benign or
malignant. Either way, this is the end of an era.”</span></font></p>
<p><font size=3 face="Times New Roman"><span style='font-size:12.0pt'>David
Gardner is an FT leader writer.</span></font></p>
<p><font size=3 face="Times New Roman"><span style='font-size:12.0pt'>*
“The St George Hotel Bar: International Intrigue in Old Beirut” by Said K. Aburish (Bloomsbury 1989);</span></font></p>
<p><font size=3 face="Times New Roman"><span style='font-size:12.0pt'>**
“A House of Many Mansions: The History of Lebanon Reconsidered”
by Kamal Salibi (I.B. Tauris 1988).</span></font></p>
</td>
</tr>
</table>
<p class=MsoNormal></p>
</td>
<td style='border:none' width=0><p class='MsoNormal'> </td>
</tr>
</table>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=3 face="Times New Roman"><span style='font-size:
12.0pt;display:none'> </span></font></p>
<!--Article End--><!--Bibliography Goes Here-->
<table class=MsoNormalTable border=0 cellspacing=0 cellpadding=0 width="100%"
style='width:100.0%'>
<tr>
<td style='padding:0pt 0pt 0pt 0pt'>
<p class=MsoNormal><span class=fonttitle1><b><font size=2 color=black
face=Verdana><span style='font-size:10.0pt'><br>
Find this article at:</span></font></b></span><font size=1 color=black
face=Arial><span style='font-size:9.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> <br>
http://news.ft.com/cms/s/7e9d34c2-74ed-11d9-9608-00000e2511c8,ft_acl=,s01=1.html
</span></font></p>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td style='padding:0pt 0pt 0pt 0pt'>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=1 color=black face=Arial><span
style='font-size:9.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> </span></font></p>
</td>
</tr>
</table>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=2 face=Verdana><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Verdana'> </span></font></p>
</div>
</body>
</html>