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Aoun and Jumblatt
Barry Rubin
July 12, 2005
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times--said Charles Dickens of the French revolution in A Tale of Two Cities. Consider a tale of two Lebanese politicians--Michel Aoun and Walid Jumblatt--in the aftermath of that country's anti-Syrian revolution and consider Dickens' phrase.
Aoun may be about the most moderate a politician in the Arab world. A real Lebanese nationalist, as a general he rebelled against Syrian control and fought that country's army--about the gutsiest thing one could do. After all, unlike his radical leftist and Islamist rebel counterparts, he could not count on either foreign aid, romanticization in the media, or any mercy from his opponent. Defeated, Aoun went into exile in France.
A long time thereafter, when most of his countrymen were ready to join in pushing out Syria, he made a triumphal return to Lebanon earlier this year. Leading his own ticket into the elections, he won an impressive triumph in the Maronite Christian community. But now he has to play politics.
In a July 3, 2005, interview on Dubai television [see http://www.memritv.org/search.asp?ACT=s9&p1=739], the interviewer asked Aoun if he wanted to make peace with Israel, which was such a real threat to the Arab world. Aoun's answer was probably the best he could do. On one hand, he suggested that the Arab world was already moving in this direction, saying Egypt, Jordan, and Tunisia have made peace with Israel and the Palestinians are discussing doing so. Aoun also noted the conflict's high costs for Lebanon, including economic damage and instability.
But the framework for his analysis was that Lebanon wanted to keep on battling but the other Arabs were letting it down. He insisted that he was not calling for peace with Israel and in fact stated that Lebanon would be the last country to sign such an agreement.
Aoun knows his audience. Within Lebanon itself, the largest single community is the Shia Muslims and the main leadership of that group is Hizballah which openly calls for never making peace with Israel but fighting on forever to destroy it. If Aoun were to be too honest publicly in showing the ridiculousness of this type of politics, his rivals would use it to denounce him and his enemies to attack him.
So Aoun must say, whatever he believes personally, of course we do not want to make peace and we desire to continue the battle but how can we do so when the other Arabs are hypocrites? The point here is not that Aoun is intransigent but rather the atmosphere is so hardline that he is very limited in what he can do. While Aoun is not lacking in courage, he also knows that the last Lebanese politician to seek openly peace with Israel--President Bashir Gemayel--was assassinated by the Syrians.
We have now reached the point--and remember this is in 2005, a dozen years after the Oslo agreement--when some Arab politicians understand the need and benefits of peace with Israel but still dare not admit this to clearly or implement this too fully. That conclusion also applies to Palestinian leader Mahmud Abbas and even to the majority of Arab liberals. It is important that these changes do give Aoun and others the basis for arguing in favor of peace, but it is still hard in the Arab political context to make publicly the point that making peace with Israel is legitimate and beneficial for the Arabs.
Perhaps a more mainstream figure in this regard is Jumblatt. He, like President Bashar al-Assad in neighboring Syria, attained his position due to inheritance rather than merit. His father, Kemal, was the unrivaled leader of the Lebanese Druze. It is ironic, but telling, that Kemal--a warlord with mystical leanings--passed himself off as a leftist seeking social justice. He sided generally with the PLO, Sunni Muslim Arab nationalists, and Syrians and against the Christians. But his career ended when he ran astray of the Syrians and was assassinated by them in the mid-1970s. Like Bashar, Walid was not the man his father was but he did hold together the Druze community and maintained his own leadership in the thirty years since then.
When necessary, Walid has played his own demagogic pan-Arab card as a faithful disciple of the ideology of what might be called Nasserism-Baathism-Hafiz al-Assad thought. In January 2004, after a Palestinian woman suicide bomber murdered a number of Israeli civilians, Jumblatt praised the action as a good example of hope in contrast to the weakness and defeat found elsewhere in Arab society. It was ridiculous that the Arab armies had full arsenals and did not use them to equip such fighters.
But when the opportunity offered a year later, as popular pressure was building to kick the Syrians out of Lebanon, suddenly Jumblatt posed to credulous Western journalists as mister liberal democracy. The overthrow of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein was like the fall of the Berlin Wall, he explained, and freedom was on the march. During that period, he hinted that Hizballah's excuse of continuing to fight Israel because it was supposedly occupying a tiny piece of Lebanese territory--which everyone knew was untrue--was ridiculous.
Soon, however, the Syrian army left and it was back to politics as usual. Jumblatt quickly turned around to support Hizballah's continuing war on Israel and to oppose the demand of moderate Lebanese that the radical Islamist group should disarm as all other militias had done.
Despite some progress and the emergence of a rational political leader like Aoun, the Jumblatts are still running the show. After a half-century of disastrous Arab radical ideology and practice they can only ask, like a Dickens' hero once did, "Please, can I have some more?"
Barry Rubin is director of the Global Research in International Affairs (GLORIA) Center and editor of the Middle East Review of International Affairs Journal. His latest books are The Israel-Arab Reader (seventh edition), with Walter Laqueur (Viking-Penguin); the paperback edition of The Truth About Syria (Palgrave-Macmillan); A Chronological History of Terrorism, with Judy Colp Rubin, (Sharpe); and The Long War for Freedom: The Arab Struggle for Democracy in the Middle East (Wiley).
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