The Levantine Crucible

I’ve read many great reviews of my book, but this one by Sohrab Ahmari is my favorite.

MODERN terrorist attacks, Régis Debray has argued, are “manifestos written in other people’s blood.” In the winter of 2005, one such manifesto was inscribed in the blood of Lebanese Prime Minister Raﬁk Hariri and 20 of his associates. Its drafters were bent on subjugating Lebanon to the will of their Syrian and Iranian paymasters. More mportantly, they sought to prevent Hariri from moving his compatriots beyond the failed ideologies that had deﬁned Lebanon for more than a generation. But rather than cower in fear and submit, a majority of the Lebanese—usually notorious for their sectarian fractiousness—united around the “March 14” movement, calling for political freedom and the withdrawal of Syria’s occupation force from their country.

In The Road to Fatima Gate, Michael Totten offers a masterful account of this Cedar Revolution, as it came to be known, and its tragic aftermath. Totten, a frequent contributor to Commentary’s blog, practices journalism in the tradition of Orwell: morally imaginative, partisan in the best sense of the word, and delivered in crackling, rapid-ﬁre prose beﬁtting the violent realities it depicts. An unabashed classical liberal, Totten brings his political commitments and emotional intelligence to bear on the dramatic events he witnesses. As a result, he ends up far more clearsighted than the many analysts who claim “objectivity” but share neither his love of the region and its inhabitants nor his concern for its future. Totten’s Lebanon is a Mideast crucible, foretelling the promise—and peril—of the democratic uprisings that would rock the region in 2009, and then again last winter.

First, the promise. In Lebanon, it was represented by the more than one million people who—in what was then an unprecedented sight in the Arab world—peacefully took to the streets of Beirut in response to the Hariri assassination. Beyond their speciﬁc demands, the young leaders of the March 14 movement were determined to radically alter the very nature of Lebanese politics. “We want to rebuild our country,” one tells Totten. “And that includes rebuilding our minds. Lebanon has been so divided. We stand not only for freedom and independence, but also national unity and a new, modern, common, tolerant Lebanese identity.” The March 14ers, in other words, rejected the politics of existential negation and permanent enmity that had deformed a once pluralistic Lebanon. On March 14, the rebirth against all odds of that Lebanon seemed both imminent and inevitable.

The promise was also represented by an older generation of sectarian leaders willing to bury the hatchets they had wielded during Lebanon’s civil war. The most striking of these transformations was undoubtedly the one underwent by Samir Geagea, the leader of the once brutal Maronite militia known as the Lebanese Forces. When the Syrians departed, Geagea emerged from solitary conﬁnement, where he had spent more than a decade after being convicted of bogus charges relating to his civil war-era activities. (His hands were not clean by any measure, but unlike other communal leaders, Geagea was refused amnesty for failing to fully cooperate with Syrian overlordship in post-civil war Lebanon.) While in jail, Geagea had spent countless hours discovering religious mysticism. Once free, he embraced the March 14 spirit of coexistence rather than seek revenge. “He sounded like a Taoist,” Totten concludes after meeting Geagea. “The mystic in his bunker might make an excellent companion to be stuck with in a foxhole, but he had no intention of digging one ever again.” Leaders of Lebanon’s Sunni and Druze communities, Totten shows, underwent similar transformations.

The remarkable realignment of political attitudes among Lebanon’s sectarian elites could not be solely credited to March 14’s moral accomplishments. It also reﬂected a long-term shift in the balance of power in Lebanese society—and the growing menace of the Iranian backed Shi’a terrorist organization Hezbollah. Most of Totten’s narrative is devoted to explaining how the Iranian theocrats and their Syrian sidekicks managed in just a few years to recapture Beirut, reverse the gains of the March 14 coalition, and route its leaders.

And herein lies the peril. For amidst all the post-ideological and post-sectarian euphoria, it was easy to forget that the heterodox life-world of the March 14ers exists side-by-side with another, wholly different one: the militarized state-within-a-state ruled by the Party of God, where the regular armed forces—let alone most Western journalists—dare not read. Totten, though, makes his way into Hezbollah’s squalid, backward stronghold in the dahiyeh (suburb) of Haret Hreik, among other Hezbollah-controlled areas. What he ﬁnds “looked, alternately, like a slum of Tehran or Damascus.” The comparison is apt in more ways than one. While technically located within Lebanon’s borders, “Hezbollahland,” as Totten calls it, is really a satellite of the ayatollahs’ Shi’a empire. Here, Lebanese Shi’a are kept dependent on Hezbollah’s welfare system, force-fed a steady diet of anti- American and anti-Semitic propaganda, and taught to seek “martyrdom” rather than help rebuild Lebanon.