18 January 2007
Mallat on consequences of Hizbullah-Israel war: Lebanon in the throes of a coup d'Etat

Lebanon in the throes of a coup d’Etat

A reading of the 2006 Hizbullah-Israel War

Chibli Mallat

Talk at the MELSS Yale Law School conference, Athens, 18 January 2007

Narratives over wars are fluid, either in their causes or their outcomes. Few doubt that the First World War dominated the 20^th century, in the Middle East and elsewhere, but causes and consequences long remained a fascination for the generations that suffered from the war, not to mention the special concern of historians. Two polarized readings of WWI emerged early on: the Leninist ‘imperialist’ description, and a less convincing Britain-France victors’ reading of an expansionist and militaristic Germany that ‘democracies’ were there to check. One common narrative eventually jelled: WWI’s unique absurdity, best illustrated in Thomas Mann’s Zauberberg. While this is true of all wars, World War I is the paragon of unwarranted wanton deaths. Another jelled narrative of WWI, this time specific to the Middle East, is that the war was followed by a peace that ended all peace in the region.

While apposite and opposite positions are inevitable, a consensual opinion does also jell.

Opposed readings, and a consensual core, offer a parameter of sorts for all wars, large and small.

There are two additional important factors, however, that bear on the legacy of war and its representation: time, and consequences. Time tends to underline all wars’ vacuity, but shifts in time constantly occur, giving renewed or altered meanings to the core perception of what a given war jells into. Immediately after hostilities cease, some sense of victory could emerge, for instance that of France and Britain against Germany in 1918, or as a long-lasting feature, say US world preeminence after World War II, or Muslim victory against Christendom as the Crusades unfolded, or the 1967 expansion of Israel. As time passes, however, shifts occur, and the core meaning, sometimes, not always, does change. The Franco-British victory in WWI increasingly became meaningless, operating as a shadow game for Hitler, and causing WW2 etc, indeed giving way to the characteristic vacuity and wantonness of four years of senseless human slaughter.

Consequences are different from time shifts, as they tend to operate on a separate register, and do not causally flow from the war military outcome. The emergence of Bolshevism in the shape of the October Revolution, or the Palestinian problem in the wake of WWI’s Balfour commitment, are two such illustrations for WWI. Consequences tend to be particularly difficult to perceive during the hostilities. They also tend to overwhelm the original event, and outweigh and outlast the protagonists’ foreseeable consequences, indeed their lifetimes.

The summer war between Hizbullah and Israel had nothing of the magnitude of great wars, but the parameters just identified apply: Contrastive narratives, common core, shift over time, breach in causality for major consequences. Let’s see how the suggested grid applies on the Hizbullah-Israel war of 2006.

Contrastive narratives. The war immediately created its own narrative, which was inevitably dual, and shifting. It shifted over the 34 days of the conflict as an inevitable form of propaganda, de bonne guerre as it were in all wars. On the side of Hizbullah, the position changed considerably, from the initial ‘world battle for Islam’ argument on July 12, to a far more Lebanese agenda, with support to the Cabinet seven-points and even a curious apology in the regretful afterthought expressed by Nasrallah just after the Ceasefire. On the Israeli side, declared objectives to teach Hizbullah a lesson, overconfidence, and hesitation over the territorial objectives also expressed a moving narrative. So the contrasting parameters were there, with interesting nuances under the general banner of a battle for civilization defined by each side on its own, absolutist, terms.

Common core. One consensual line may have already jelled: Hizbullah was wrong to start the war, and Israel’s reaction was excessive. Considering the absence of judicial accountability over ‘war crimes’ committed on both sides, [John Borneman, Jarae’am al-harb ba‘d harb isra’il-hizbullah (war crimes after the Israel-Hizbullah war), Nahar, 14-15 January 2007] this seems inconsequential, but it provides for a moral and political deadlock: no hero is expected to emerge from the war, whatever claims to the contrary. As in WWI, that common core will play an important role over time, the question is whether it will morph further from faulting Hizbullah for its reckless act on July 12, and Israel’s disproportionate reaction and unnecessary prolongation of the hostilities.

Time will polish the narratives and the common core. The battle over names is already on. ‘July war’, says Hizbullah neutrally enough to take the sting out of its initiation of the conflict on July 12, or ‘divine victory’, to hammer in its legitimacy. It could also be called Lebanon-Israel III or whatever number the war could carry, the sixth Arab-Israeli war, and so forth. The Israeli government is still looking for an official appellation, according to recent news reports. I have offered mine early on, by choosing to call it the Hizbullah-Israel war since the first week of the hostilities [Mallat, ‘Who is really at war? The patterns so far’, (New York) Times Select, 4 August 2006], as I did not think Lebanon as state, government, or society at large, could identify with it as an active protagonist. It was not quite an Israel-Lebanon war. Ninety per cent or more of the physical destruction was Hizbullah territory. There are other possibilities, but it sounds politically incorrect to speak of the war as a Shi‘i-Jewish war, which it also was. There is no doubt however that the war was also a Lebanon-Israel war, an Arab-Israeli war, a continuation of the Palestine strife, indeed a mini-world war of sorts between allies clearly identifiable on the large divide between Islam and the West, and between the Syria-Iran-Hizbullah v. Israel-US-‘moderate’Arab axes. Lots of controversies in perspective over the appellation.

Now as consequences go, which are by nature difficult to anticipate, and which generally turn out, as suggested earlier, to dwarf the immediate hostilities. Michael Young, I believe, was the first to underline the more significant consequences: the war was a ‘coup’.  It was a Hizbullah coup, not so much against Israel, since the word makes no sense in that context, but against Lebanon. As events unfolded, especially since the physical siege of the Lebanese government by Hizbullah and its allies materialized in December 1 in the heart of Beirut, these consequences were becoming tangible.

The whole three paragraphs of ‘Hizbullah’s Coup d’Etat’[1] deserve to be saluted as a unique intellectual compact, but the two opening lines are particularly insightful: ‘There is real danger today that Hizbollah will inherit Lebanon after the war. If it does, an uncontainable civil war will probably ensue.’

I concur: we have been witnessing Hizbullah turning their ‘victory’ and weapons to Beirut, pushing back the Cedar Revolution, and bringing the country, alternatively, to civil war. This is the most important consequence of the war as it appears in the fall of 2006, unfolding as we assess it. Even graver is the civil war which I mention as an ‘alternative’. Here another dynamic is at play, and a deeper one, as it connects with the region, and the sectarian world war developing from within the Middle East.

We are still in the midst of the evolving coup, which constitutes the most disturbing consequence of the war, a springboard for Hizbullah to take over Lebanon, while the civil war is looming. How to deal with the coup will define the legacy of the Hizbullah-Israel war. So how do you prevent Hizbullah from taking over Lebanon ? and how do you prevent the civil war ?

The premise, naturally, is that civil war is a bad thing, and more controversially that Hizbullah as it stands is a bad thing for Lebanon. Everyone will agree on the former, excuses can be found to reject, or at least temper the latter. I find it difficult to introduce nuances at that stage – and my audience is also Hizbullahi: My position is that this war was absurd, unnecessary and cruel, like all wars tend to be, and that it is therefore important to continue insisting on Hizbullah’s responsibility in triggering it. That’s for a start. It’s true that Israel, and American diplomacy, prosecuted the war in a bungled way, but considering that the coup is directed against Lebanon, this is irrelevant at present. From there flows that surrendering to the thesis of Hizbullah’s ‘victory’ constitutes the most dramatic mistake in the political conduct of the war. ‘Victory’ may have come in part from tangible facts, such as a brave and sustained resistance of Hizbullah fighters in the South, making any Israeli advance extremely costly, and belying triumphalist expectations of the Israeli Prime Minister who did not understand that war against a seasoned guerilla movement could not square with classical wars 1967-style. This is immaterial to Hizbullah’s coup against Lebanon.

Hizbullah’s self-congratulatory ‘victory’ is expected from the leadership, c’est de bonne après-guerre. A share in that mistake must be blamed on those within Lebanon who opposed the war, a position shared at the outset by the massive non-Hizbullah partisan section of the population, including its Berri and Aoun allies. One would not have expected more than unease on their part, being Hizbullah’s declared allies. The graver share of the mistake came from those who are the object of the current coup, namely the Lebanese Prime Minister and the Cedar Revolution leader Walid Jumblatt. The first never openly denounced Hizbullah’s coup, even if everybody knew in the country of his frustration for being sidestepped, and of his sincere tears of frustration at the Arab meeting in Beirut. Jumblatt probably bears the heavier political responsibility. For he constructed the worst possible springboard for the ‘divine victory’ when he repeatedly asked, a week into the war, ‘to whom will Hizbullah offer its victory’ ? [see e.g. statement reported in Washington Post, 29 July 2006.]

Now what kind of victory was that for Lebanon, which Jumblatt stands for as the central political leader of the Cedar Revolution, let alone for the million displaced Lebanese Shi‘is, a number of whom should naturally ask, if their misery were to be described as victory, how defeat would look like. Since then, Jumblatt has derided the ‘divine’ dimension of the victory, openly identified and resisted Hizbullah’s coup, but there is much to blame in his initial position, which allowed the Hizbullah leadership to turn a costly adventure into bombastic, indeed divinely ordained, victory.

The upshot, then, was that Hizbullah’s position jelled into a ‘victory’ which its own Lebanese rivals/foes, and now victims, were openly admitting, leading to Hizbullah’s consequent bid for dominance in Lebanon. The call was loud and clear: since we were victorious, and stood up for the country on our own, then we should indeed lead it. One can see how the mistake provided that logic: the proper anticipation of that consequence was one which I tried to formulate differently from the first day: considering the quasi-deafening silence resulting from a stunned country and a real fear from many of Hizbullah’s vindictiveness, Nasrallah’s initial speech expressed a clear warning of the type ‘those who are against us in Lebanon, beware…’, the only way was to candidly ask how Hizbullah could take the whole country to war, whatever its outcome, by openly breaching international and Lebanese law that would put the whole country in jeopardy. [Mallat, ‘Nasrallah has dismissed international law’, Daily Star, 14 July 2006]

Israel’s brutal behaviour and unnecessary prolongation of the hostilities did not help. A Security Council Resolution denouncing the kidnapping of the two Israeli soldiers, and potentially coercive mechanisms to get lasting results on the border, should have been passed on July 13. It didn’t. A replay of the 1996 Israeli war crime at Qana made things worse, although I think one could see how difficult it was for Jumblatt and others, including American diplomacy waiting for Israeli’s ‘lessons’ to teach Hizbullah lessons on the back of wide-scale destruction and physical elimination of the leadership.

So how do you prevent Hizbullah from taking over Lebanon ? and how do you prevent the civil war ? I see no other tools but law, domestic and international, determining responsibility under a framework of law, and not of raw power. It may not be adequate response, but it is the only response I know how to formulate.