THERE IS NO LEBANON:

Hezbollah gains as Lebanon's leaders struggle: As nation readies for truce, militia's influence grows (Thanassis Cambanis, August 13, 2006, Boston Globe)

``Hezbollah is stronger than the Lebanese state ," said Wael Abou Faour, a member of parliament from the Druze bloc who is close to the most powerful leaders of the government. The Druze, another religious sect, represent about 10 percent of Lebanon's population and are a unified and influential political force.

The government, Abou Faour said, has found itself on the sidelines at key points in the crisis, unable to exert any control over Hezbollah, a movement whose ``goals don't coincide with the interests of Lebanon." [...]

Lebanon's government is built on a delicate ethnic and sectarian blueprint drawn up under French colonial rule in 1943, which reserves key positions in the government and military for leaders of each group. It's called the ``confessional system," because it apportions powers to each major confession, or religious sect -- Maronite Christians, Sunni Muslims, Shi'ite Muslims, and Druze. All major decisions are supposed to be made by consensus.

That system broke down on July 12, however, when Hezbollah crossed into Israeli territory and kidnapped two soldiers, touching off the current war -- a conflict that government leaders said they never would have approved.

It's not the first time the confessional system has failed; civil war raged in Lebanon from 1975 to 1990, and mistrust still lingers among the country's groups.

That sense of division has only been heightened during the current crisis, with some Christians and Sunni Muslims cheering military strikes against Hezbollah, while Shi'ites have darkly warned that after the war internal critics of Hezbollah will ``face an accounting." Such friction has set the stage for a government weaker than ever to preside over a peace with Israel.

Nasrallah, the unelected head of a single movement representing Shi'ites, has been Lebanon's de facto commander in chief. His fighters move freely throughout southern Lebanon and much of Beirut, while Nasrallah has made several speeches a week outlining his military strategy and his terms for a cease-fire with Israel.

``As long as there is Israeli military movement, Israeli field aggression, and Israeli soldiers occupying our land . . . it is our natural right to confront them, fight them, and defend our land, our homes, and ourselves," Nasrallah said yesterday in an hourlong speech watched closely on televisions across Lebanon. [...]

The ruling coalition, dominated by an alliance of Sunni Muslims, Christians, and Druze, deadlocked earlier this spring in talks with Hezbollah about disarming the group, whose militia has proven far more potent than the official Lebanese military .

The notion that
the 45% plurality of the Lebanese population should be denied self-government by an ethnic-religious coalition specifically arrayed against them, must be repellant to Americans.

MORE:
IN THE PARTY OF GOD: Are terrorists in Lebanon preparing for a larger war? (JEFFREY GOLDBERG, 2002-10-14 and 21, The New Yorker)
IN THE PARTY OF GOD: Hezbollah sets up operations in South America and the United States. (JEFFREY GOLDBERG, 2002-10-28, The New Yorker)

Posted by Orrin Judd at August 13, 2006 12:40 PM