THE ANGRY ARAB: U.S. Role in Lebanon's Crisis Goes Unrecognized
December 4, 2019
The bulk of Lebanon's corrupt ruling class are clients of the U.S. and Saudi
Arabia, not Iran. But this fact is too inconvenient for Western media to
point out, writes As'ad AbuKhalil.
By As`ad AbuKhalil
Special to Consortium News
Of all the underlying causes of Lebanon's current crisis, the role of the
U.S. remains the least recognized, not only by Western media but also that
of Lebanon.
Search "Lebanon crisis" under "news" on Google and you are unlikely to find
any headlines mentioning the U.S. A more targeted search of "U.S.
interference in Lebanon crisis" brings up a Reuters story that presents the
idea, not as a natural premise, but instead as an isolated accusation.
"Hezbollah accuses U.S. of meddling in Lebanon's crisis."
To the extent that any recent history is raised at all by the news media, it
will be said that Lebanon has always been an arena for foreign intervention
and that the sectarian system invited, since the 19thcentury, various
external patrons. But the U.S. role dwarfs all others - by a long shot.
The release of WikiLeaks diplomatic cables from the Middle East revealed the
extent to which former U.S. Ambassador Jeffrey Feltman was the real leader
of the March 14 Movement, which is the pro-Saudi coalition which formed
(overnight) after the assassination of Rafiq Hariri in 2005.
Former U.S. Ambassador Jeffrey Feltman giving congressional testimony, Nov.
19, 2019. (YouTube still)
The U.S. role in Lebanon has been supreme since WWII. The Suez crisis of
1956 - when the U.K., France and Israel attacked Egypt and then President
Dwight Eisenhower forced them to withdraw from Egypt - marked European
recognition that the U.S. had inherited the roles of both France and U.K. in
the Levant.
The U.S. was instrumental in Lebanon's 1958 crisis (a mini-civil war,
really), and championed its right-wing client, President Kamil Sham`un. This
same president would later - as a militia leader - receive support from the
U.S. during the civil war years of 1975-82, as James Stocker covers in his
recent book, "Spheres of Intervention." After Sham`un's term ended in 1958,
the U.S. reached an agreement with Egypt's President Gamal Abdel Nasser over
the ascension of Lebanese Army General Fu'ad Shihabi to the presidency.
Instruments of U.S. Cold War Policy
The Lebanese government and its intelligence agencies also served as
instruments of U.S. foreign policy during the Cold War. The archives of
Farid Shihab, who headed Lebanon's public security apparatus for many years
in Lebanon, show the extent to which Lebanese intelligence services were
spying on local communists, clearly at the behest of an outside power.
The U.S. was keen on preserving Lebanon's capitalist system. It supported
the passage of the Lebanese banking secrecy act in the 1950s, which allowed
for the use of Lebanese banks by Western intelligence agencies, and the
import of capital from socialist Arab countries. This banking secrecy law
also allowed corrupt politicians to store the stolen fortunes from state
coffers without accountability.
With its support of right-wing militias, the U.S. was also involved in the
war on leftism in Lebanon and, after 1967, in the joint war with Israel
against the Palestinian resistance movement in Lebanon.
During the civil war, we now know a lot about the major role the U.S. played
on the side of right-wing sectarian militias of the Phalanges and Tigers,
thanks again to James Stocker's "Spheres of Intervention."
Washington's interest in Lebanon waned after 1984, when U.S. forces were
forced to withdraw after failing to prop up the Phalanges regime of Amin
Gemayyel, who was installed in the presidency by the Israeli invasion of
1982. The U.S. did not withdraw from Lebanon completely but its covert
network in the country was hit hard with the 1984 kidnapping of William
Buckley, a CIA station chief.
In 1990, the U.S. and the Syrian regime reached an understanding by which
Syrian President Hafiz Al-Asad was given a free hand in Lebanon. In return,
Al-Asad pushed Lebanon to participate in the Madrid Conference and in later
bilateral Lebanese-Israeli talks in Washington, while Israel maintained its
occupation of Lebanon.
Through this period the U.S. maintained a strong presence in Lebanon through
a network of local corrupt politicians. (None other than former Ambassador
Feltman alluded to this in his testimony to Congress two weeks ago, when he
said that the war on corruption in Lebanon would lead to the loss of people
with whom the U.S. had worked for years). Some of these corrupt
politicians, such as the notoriously unprincipled Walid Jumblat, served
multiple foreign powers: Qadhdahfi's Libya, the Syrian regime, Gulf
countries and Western powers. But the bulk of the corrupt ruling class of
Lebanon are clients of the U.S. and Saudi Arabia, and not Iran - but this
fact is too inconvenient to point out in Western media.
Pressure On Lahhud Presidency
The U.S. kept its distance from Emile Lahhud after he became president in
1998. Unlike his predecessor, Ilyas Hrawi, Lahhud was not corrupt and he
vocally championed the Lebanese resistance against the Israeli occupation of
Lebanon.
The U.S. responded to the administration of Lahhud with a combination of
measures and policies. It refused to allow Lebanese airlines (MEA) to fly
into the U.S., holding the permission as a leverage to force Lebanon to
reach a humiliating peace agreement with Israel. (The U.S forced Lebanon to
sign a peace treaty with Israel in 1983, but it was abrogated the following
years, and U.S. has hoped ever since for another treaty.)
The U.S. also denied the Lebanese Army any military aid (that would only
come - albeit with insignificant and outmoded military technology - after
2005.) It also was not-so-quietly sponsoring the Lebanese opposition to
Syrian domination in Lebanon at the same time as it continued to support
Israeli occupation and aggression in Lebanon. Towards the end of Bill
Clinton's administration, after the U.S. failed to broker a Syrian-Israeli
peace deal, the U.S. also expressed more hostility toward Lebanon and the
Syrian role there.
U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo Visits construction site for the new
U.S. embassy in Lebanon, March 23, 2019. (State Department/Ron Przysucha)
Since, the George W. Bush administration, Lebanon has become a renewed focus
of U.S. policies in the Middle East. A new billion-dollar embassy complex is
under construction in Lebanon and the U.S. maintains a military presence in
the guise of assistance to the Lebanese Army.
U.S. military aid to the Lebanese Army has substantially increased since the
assassination of Hariri because the Lebanese Army has become much less
supportive of Lebanese resistance to Israel.
After the assassination the pro-Saudi, pro-U.S. March 14 coalition became
the dominant political force in Lebanon after the parliamentary election of
2005, which the U.S. insisted on rushing to boost the political fortunes of
March 14, foes of the Hizbullah-dominated opposition. Furthermore, the
assassination caused a rift in Saudi-Syrian relations, because Syria was
initially blamed for it, before the U.S. and its clients settled on
Hizbullah as the culprit. That helped to better synchronize the Saudis,
politically, with the U.S. and Israel. This led to heightened pressure
against Hizbullah and any military resistance to Israel.
The U.S. calculated that its assistance to the Lebanese Army would convince
the Lebanese people that the Army is qualified to serve as the sole defender
of Lebanon. Of course, this U.S. propaganda project was hard to sell. For
one thing, the U.S. never provided the Lebanese Army with meaningful
weapons. Instead of equipping the country's air force, it provided Cessna
planes that are used in California for spraying crops. Meanwhile, the
Lebanese Army kept to the sidelines on Israeli aggression, leaving Hizbullah
forces to defend the country.
U.S. War on Hizbullah
Hezbollah and Amal Movement supporters on motorbikes in Beirut's Martyr's
Square, Nov. 25, 2019. (Nadim Kobeissi, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons)
The U.S. war on Hizbullah - and consequently on the whole of Lebanon -
increased substantially after 2006, when Israel suffered a humiliating
military defeat at the hands of Hizbullah volunteers. The blow to the
Israeli military doctrine (of quick and decisive victory) was so severe that
the U.S. became desperate to weaken Hizbullah and consequently Lebanon's
ability to defend itself against Israeli aggression.
The U.S. steadily raised sanctions on Lebanon and the governor of Lebanon's
central bank, Riad Salameh, (who has become the symbol of Lebanese financial
corruption and mismanagement) served as a tool for the Zionist agenda of the
U.S. Treasury Department. The U.S. forced Salameh to close down two major
banks in Lebanon - in 2011 the Lebanese-Canadian bank and earlier this year,
the Jammal Trust bank, one of the few Shi`ite-owned banks in Lebanon - on
the pretext that the banks served Hizbullah interests.
MPs of Hizbullah were not able to deposit their money at any Lebanese bank,
and Salameh, and the banking elite, bragged of their strict obedience to
U.S. orders.
The U.S. punishes Lebanon in other ways, through its client regimes in the
Gulf. Saudi Arabia had punished Lebanon for Hizbullah by barring Saudi
citizens from visiting Lebanon, and Bahrain and the UAE followed suit.
(Saudi Arabia only recently lifted the ban). Furthermore, Gulf assistance
to Lebanon has all but dried up. In 2016, the Saudis withdrew $3 billion in
aid to the Lebanese Army - announced by King Abdullah - most likely at
Israeli and U.S. insistence.
In the present crisis, Gulf regimes have watched silently because they don't
have orders to act to rescue Lebanon (compare that to how the UAE and Saudi
Arabia rushed to rescue the financial fortunes of Egypt under General Abdel
Fattah el-Sisi and those of General Omar al-Bashir of Sudan in his last
year). The U.S. wants Lebanon to suffer and the recent congressional hearing
about Lebanon made it very clear that Washington wants to turn the protests
against Hizbullah.
But the U.S. is playing a risky game. Hizbullah can adjust to a collapse of
the ruling political and financial order. But for U.S. interests, which have
worked to construct and support that order for decades, it would be a major
blow.
As'ad AbuKhalil is a Lebanese-American professor of political science at
California State University, Stanislaus. He is the author of the "Historical
Dictionary