<span style="font-weight: bold;" class="manchettebig2">The somber dream of a garrison state</span><br>
<br>
<span class="blue3"> By Michael Young </span>
<br>
<span class="links">Daily Star staff</span><br>
<span class="manchettebig"><span class="red">Thursday, August 17, 2006</span></span>
<br><br>Near
the end of his speech on Monday, Hizbullah's secretary general, Sayyed
Hassan Nasrallah, began sounding, ominously, like a president. I say
ominously, because Nasrallah has not been elected president, though the
current tenant of that office does make us pine for better. In
outlining his vision of a stronger state, the Hizbullah leader plainly
implied he intended to help reshape that state, and how else would he
do so except by bending it around his own party's priorities?<p class="articletext" align="justify"><span name="KonaBody"><p class="articletext" align="justify">On
the same day there was an intriguing headline in the new daily
newspaper Al-Akhbar, which, once you've worked out the intricacies of
its financing and the identity of its journalists, mainly situates
itself in the March 8 camp, close to Hizbullah, with some splashes of
Aounism. The headline read: "A Government of National Unity, to Prevent
'Faulty Calculations.'" Given that the story cut to the national unity
government idea editorially, without it being based on a specific news
item or quote, it seemed more a warning than anything else.</p><p class="articletext" align="justify">Then
on Tuesday we heard Bashar Assad effectively call for a coup d'etat
against the March 14 majority. The Syrian president declared that
Hizbullah should transform its military "victory" in the South into a
political victory in Beirut, and accused March 14 of being the intended
beneficiaries of Israel's onslaught. The Druze leader Walid Jumblatt,
sensing a Syrian effort to re-impose its control over Lebanon, will
hold a press conference this morning to start mobilizing the majority,
which has seemed extraordinarily faint-hearted in recent weeks.</p><p class="articletext" align="justify">Yet
March 14 should profit from Hizbullah's constraints. Unless
implementation of Resolution 1701 fails and the war resumes, in the
foreseeable future Hizbullah will be cut off from its vital space in
South Lebanon. This doesn't mean the party intends to withdraw its men
from the South or crack open its weapons caches to the Lebanese Army
and the expanded United Nations force. If anything, Hizbullah seeks to
empty the UN resolution of its content. And unless Prime Minister Fouad
Siniora takes a firmer position in favor of a complete demilitarization
of the area south of the Litani River, he risks losing his credibility
at the Security Council. But there is a good possibility that one thing
will change in the short term, namely Hizbullah's ability to raise and
lower the temperature in the border area. Nasrallah may be declaring
victory, but with hundreds of thousands of his coreligionists
rebuilding their homes and lives, Hizbullah's latitude to fire at
Israel, and to do so amid a UN force reflecting an international
consensus, will be relatively small.</p><p class="articletext" align="justify">This
raises the question of whether Nasrallah will compensate by turning his
attention to the domestic front. If the secretary general is so keen to
build up a strong Lebanese state, presumably he intends to contribute
to that effort from a position of authority. So, is Nasrallah on the
verge of taking that authority, flush from his tactical triumphs in the
South and motivated by an understandable desire to draw attention away
from the devastation inflicted on the Shiite community since July 12? </p><p class="articletext" align="justify">If
the answer is yes, then we must consider the mechanism of a sudden
accumulation of greater power. This brings us back to a government of
national unity. For some time, the Aounists have regretted their
decision to be an opposition party in Parliament, without power. But
what they have regretted more is that Hizbullah has done nothing at all
to bring them into the Siniora Cabinet. Now this may change. If there
is anything explaining Michel Aoun's fresh rabidness against the
government (in an Al-Akhbar interview, no less), it is that he feels,
apparently like Assad, that the time is ripe to do away with the
present government majority.<table align="left" border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="4" width="255"><tbody><tr><td> </td></tr></tbody></table></p><p class="articletext" align="justify">Nasrallah
may soon agree, insisting that Hizbullah, along with the Aounists and
other groups in the country, particularly those close to Syria, are
entitled to more ministerial portfolios. He could justify this on the
grounds that Lebanon's reconstruction demands national concord. Would
Nasrallah succeed? Maybe not, because Parliament would still need to
vote confidence in a new government, and the March 14 majority does not
want to lose its dominance. But the pressure could mount, so that the
fallback position would be to grant Hizbullah and the Aounists a third
of Cabinet seats plus one, allowing them to block votes on major
policy. Lurking over this would be Hizbullah's militants, angry with
the majority and eager to build up a system defending the "resistance
option."</p><p class="articletext" align="justify">That's, of course,
just one scenario. There are those who will argue that Nasrallah is
more cornered than his coolness suggests. He may have declared a
historic victory, but Lebanon has already started focusing on the price
of that victory, whether in monetary terms or in terms of unemployment,
emigration, opportunity costs, investor confidence, and much else.
Nasrallah's supporters might buy into his rhetoric, but businessmen
won't. With a debt of some $40 billion and losses estimated at between
$6 billion and $10 billion, for a GDP languishing at just above $20
billion, the shadow of a general economic collapse remains near.</p><p class="articletext" align="justify">Shiites
would suffer as much as anyone else from such a calamity - probably
worse given their current vulnerabilities. And the reality is that when
international donors or investors look to Lebanon, they don't feel
particularly comfortable with a political and paramilitary organization
that announces its passion for martyrdom; they look to those people
that Nasrallah has criticized for failing to adequately defend his
choices: Siniora and the bland technocrats of the Hariri-led
reconstruction era. Whatever Nasrallah and Aoun think of this reality,
neither man has the credibility to put Lebanon on even a tolerable
economic footing.</p><p class="articletext" align="justify">So, what
did Nasrallah mean by a strong state? You have to imagine that he was
in part thinking of his "defensive plan," whereby Lebanon would
essentially ask Hizbullah to be a vanguard in facing down permanent
Israeli threats. But since that plan has gone nowhere, since it
effectively brought Israel back into Lebanon, Hizbullah must have a
newer version in hand. But would the Lebanese go along with seeing
their languid Mediterranean playground transformed into a somber
garrison state?</p><p class="articletext" align="justify">That's where
Nasrallah must be more amenable to the odd psychology of Lebanese
society, all compromises and consensus and winks and nods. The
Hizbullah leader is no aficionado of this. As he remarked at a May 2003
rally, Lebanon needed "great men and great leaders, not leaders of
alleyways, of confessional groups, of districts." But that's who
Nasrallah will have to deal with if he decides to transform the state
into something stronger, and he'll have to accept that many of his
countrymen don't want a stronger state if it means living in a gigantic
Hizbullah barracks.</p><p class="articletext" align="justify">It is
doubtless time for everyone to be modest, both Nasrallah and his March
14 rivals. Lebanon will fall back into civil war before it accepts the
hegemony of one side over the other, before one side imposes its
version of the state over that of the others. One truth stands out,
though: Lebanon can no longer afford to be a playground for proxy wars,
since what will emerge is not a stronger state, but no state at all.</p><p class="articletext" align="justify"><em><strong>Michael Young</strong> is opinion editor of <strong>THE DAILY STAR.</strong></em></p> </span>
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