Losing Lebanon

By Tim McGirk / Beirut

It's never a good sign for a country when the Prime Minister and most of his Cabinet members spend their days barricaded in an Ottoman-era compound. That's what Fouad Siniora and Lebanon's other top officials have done since Nov. 21, when gunmen assassinated Industry Minister Pierre Gemayel in broad daylight. Siniora's worries go beyond his personal safety. With Lebanon still trying to recover from last summer's 34-day war between Israel and the Shi'ite militant group Hizballah, the government has seen its authority undermined, renewed meddling from the country's neighbors and the growing assertiveness of Hizballah. Organized by Hizballah and its allies, about 800,000 protesters--a rather grand figure in a country of just 3.8 million--gathered in the center of Beirut last Friday to demand the resignation of Siniora. At the time, Lebanon's leader was in his barracks, surrounded by machine guns and barbed wire.

Lebanon wasn't supposed to turn out this way. In March of last year, President George W. Bush was hailing Lebanon as a shining beacon of his Administration's "democracy agenda" for the Middle East. Close to 1 million Lebanese had flooded into Beirut to demand that Syria pull its troops out of Lebanon and end its 29-year domination of the country. The U.S. State Department coined the protests the Cedar Revolution, a more folksy title than the Lebanese term, Independence Intifadeh, which smacked of radicalism. But with six ministers having resigned since Nov. 11, sectarian tensions rising and government officials fearing for their lives, the vision of a new Lebanon is dimming fast--and with it, the Administration's bid to build a positive legacy in the Middle East beyond the wreckage of Iraq.

There are worrying signs, in fact, that Lebanon may be closer to a total meltdown than at any time since the 1975-90 civil war. An Arab diplomat told TIME that General Michael Suleiman, the commander in chief of the Lebanese Army, recently admitted that his troops would be able to contain a series of demonstrations "for only a few weeks." If Hizballah organizes protests around the country similar to those in Beirut last week, "We will not be able to cope," Suleiman reportedly said. His concern was that because many of his troops are Shi'ite, they would refuse to act against their brethren within Hizballah.

The nightmare scenario is that Hizballah's show of strength could provoke a backlash against its mostly Shi'ite supporters by Lebanon's Sunni Muslim, Christian and Druze communities. If that happens, most Lebanese believe the situation could quickly escalate into all-out civil war. As a river of pro-Hizballah demonstrators flowed toward Siniora's besieged compound last week, poultry seller Ahmad Sahd, 65, wept. "These youngsters didn't live through the civil war. I did. And it looks like it's starting again."

So why is the Cedar Revolution crashing down? Part of the answer rests outside Lebanon's borders. During the summer's war with Israel, Hizballah relied heavily on the Syrians for logistic, military and financial support. According to Israeli officials, Western diplomats in Beirut and Arab sources, Damascus acted as a conduit for Iranian weapons to reach Hizballah, allowing the group to fight the Israelis to a standstill.

Now it is payback time. Lebanese officials, along with Israeli military sources and Western diplomats, say that while Syrian President Bashar Assad may be willing to help pull the Bush Administration out of the Iraqi quicksand, he hopes to exact concessions that would allow him to treat Lebanon, where the Syrian regime has vast financial interests, as his private turf. And according to these same sources, he is unnerved by a U.N.-sponsored inquiry that implicates top Syrian officials in the February 2005 car bombing that killed former Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri and 22 others. Assad is hoping that the international probe will peter out. Indictments issued by a U.N.-sponsored court against members of the Syrian leadership could critically weaken the Damascus regime and lead to U.N. sanctions against Assad's clique. Hizballah pulled its six ministers out of the 24-seat Cabinet rather than vote to support an international court to prosecute the Hariri case, and the assassination of Gemayel, the scion of a powerful Christian family and a fervent anti-Syrian, was seen as further warning to Siniora. His Cabinet voted anyway to recommend an international tribunal into the Hariri killing, pushing Hizballah into the streets last week.

Hizballah also accuses Siniora's ministers of secretly siding with Israel and the U.S. by failing to provide backup during the July-August war with Israel. With its massive street demonstrations, Hizballah hopes to intimidate the country's other parties into giving it more than the six Cabinet seats it had held, enabling it to block any legislation seen as contrary to the interests of Hizballah and its backers in Damascus and Tehran.

Whether Hizballah succeeds depends on how long it can capitalize on the p.r. boost it gained from waging war with Israel. Among Lebanon's downtrodden Shi'ites, Hizballah leader Sheik Hassan Nasrallah now enjoys mythical status. The many faces of Nasrallah appear everywhere. At times he is portrayed as a jolly preacher, a wise scholar or a glowering warrior with his turban like a black storm cloud overhead. When a starstruck woman requested the abaya, or robe, that he wore during the war, Nasrallah obliged, and since then TV crews have been following the woman across Lebanon as she displays this now holy garment for other faithful fans.

And yet even in Lebanon, Nasrallah isn't universally adored. Many Lebanese consider it a heroic but colossal blunder on Nasrallah's part to have provoked the Israelis by having his fighters stage a cross-border raid in July and kidnap two Israeli soldiers. War damage in Lebanon is assessed at $3.6 billion. More than 1,200 Lebanese died, and 3,700 were wounded. Another 974,184 were left homeless. Says parliamentarian Saad Hariri, son of the slain former Prime Minister: "When it starts raining and getting cold, people will realize what a huge mistake it was for Hizballah to start this war." What's more, the olive groves and hills of southern Lebanon are sown with more than 1 million bomblets from Israeli cluster bombs, say U.N. experts, making it hazardous if not lethal to wander into these areas.

Hizballah was badly swatted by the Israelis too. The Israeli military says it has the names of over 550 Hizballah fighters who were killed, including 400 belonging to the Iranian-trained elite special forces unit, the Nasr Brigade. In Lebanon, the thinking is that those numbers are probably inflated, that many of the dead were militants unaffiliated with Hizballah who grabbed a gun and joined the fighting. Whatever the body count, Hizballah has lost assets. As part of a cease-fire agreement, 10,000 U.N. peacekeepers and 15,000 Lebanese troops moved into southern Lebanon, long an exclusive preserve of Hizballah. As a result, Nasrallah's men lost possession of a number of strategic underground bunkers, complete with showers and dining halls, honeycombing the limestone hills for miles near the Israeli border. Many of its field commanders were killed in the fighting, and according to Lebanese and Israeli sources, Hizballah inquisitors are now weeding out and shooting suspected collaborators who helped the Israelis by pinpointing militia targets. And every Hizballah office in Beirut was sledge-hammered by Israeli warplanes. The rubble of concrete slabs, steel and scraps of clothing was scooped up by bulldozers into heaps; it has added a dozen large hills to the coastal landscape south of Beirut.

Hizballah's opponents say that as time passes, resentments toward Nasrallah are likely to build. That may be the main reason that Hizballah is again girding for war. The next round could be even uglier. While most of the other communities still have stockpiles of arms stashed away from the days of the civil war, Hizballah's force is stronger and better organized than its rivals, say Beirut-based diplomats. But the various players in Lebanon may find outside backers. The Christians could again find support from the Israelis; and the Saudis, who are alarmed at the growing Shi'ite influence in Lebanon through Hizballah, may find Sunni militias to bankroll. Sunni jihadists may also join the fray, turning Lebanon into a mini-Iraq. Lebanese intelligence recently broke up a ring of 200 Syrian-backed Islamists holed up in a Palestinian refugee camp who had a hit list of 36 Lebanese politicians.

Posters of Nasrallah, usually grinning, may crop up everywhere, but the cleric himself is still deep in hiding. During the summer's fighting, the Israelis made no secret that they were trying to assassinate him. Western diplomats in Beirut say they are trying to persuade the Israelis that killing the Hizballah boss is no longer a good idea. His murder could spark reprisals across the Middle East. Hizballah has ways of taking revenge. After Israelis targeted a previous Hizballah leader in 1992, the militia blew up the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires. Should Nasrallah be killed, Israeli missions today would be similarly at risk--as would U.S. interests around the world. But these sources say that the Israelis may be willing to court that danger if they have a chance to take out Nasrallah, whom they view as a particularly clever and dangerous enemy. The damage that Lebanon and the Middle East will face if another war breaks out could make the destruction caused by Hizballah and Israel last summer look like a brisk whirlwind by comparison.

With reporting by Nicholas Blanford/Beirut, Aaron J. Klein/Biranit, Elaine Shannon/ Washington