THE ANGRY ARAB: The Blast (and the Failed System) That Shook Lebanon
August 15, 2020
The key question after the Aug. 4 explosion in Beirut revolves around the
role of the Lebanese Army command, which is the sole authority with direct
control over the security and safety of the port, and its surroundings.
By As`ad AbuKhalil
Special to Consortium News
Those who are superstitious may think that Lebanon has been recently cursed:
successive disasters, catastrophes and crises have afflicted the small
country uninterruptedly for several consecutive years.
Lebanon has been suffering from one of the worst economic crisises in its
history and young people in Lebanon have launched protest movements twice:
once in 2015, with the limited goal of solving the trash crisis, and then in
October 2019 with the more ambitious goal of changing the political system
altogether.
But the protest movement has stalled, largely due to its infiltration by
right-wing movements of various corrupt politicians (like Saad Hariri, Walid
Jumblat, and Samir Ja`ja`), and also by various NGOs, which have been
effective in spoiling and undermining progressive movements in the Arab
protest movement.
At the time of the blast, Lebanon was suffering from the collapse of its
currency and the the loss of peoples savings (and even checking accounts)
in Lebanese banks. And then the coronavirus hit, followed by the massive
explosion that killed at least 200 and 6000 injured.
The shape of the city has been altered. Whole neighborhoods were destroyed
and poor workers at the port, mostly Syrians, were killed.
Devastation in Beirut. (http://mehrnews.com/xSMehdi Shojaeian/Wikimedia
Commons)
It was a blast like no other in the history of the Lebanese civil war; my
sisterwho lived through the various stages of the wardescribed it best:
every Lebanese felt it and it felt as if it were right next door. The
suffering is indescribable and the damage is estimated by the government at
$15 billion (international donors could only collect pledges of a few
hundred million dollars).
The explosion was the last straw for most people in Lebanon. The protest
movement has not been fully revived, but there are expressions of public
anger in all mainstream and social media.
The story of the explosive chemicals has been told in U.S. media but the
Lebanese people still pose many questions that remain unanswered. The key
question revolves around the role of the Lebanese Army command, which is the
sole authority with direct control over the security and safety of the port,
and its surroundings.
The Lebanese Navy has a base at the port, and Lebanese Army intelligence
directly oversees the security of the port. Yet, no Western media, nor much
Lebanese media for that matter, have pointed fingers at the Lebanese Army
and its commander.
The reason is the U.S. has never had as much direct control over the
Lebanese Army as it does now. The commander, Gen. Joseph Aoun, enjoys great
support from the U.S. government, which (comically) promotes the man as the
most able to defend Lebanon against all dangers. Meanwhile, the Army has
never defended Lebanon from Israel, and it has failed against militant
Islamists.
Furthermore, with all the attention put on Hizbullah and its militia in
Lebanon, rarely is the U.S. military presence in Lebanon discussed. In the
name of training purposes, the U.S. military is all over the country.
The U.S. is said to be training the Lebanese Army on counter-terrorism, yet
when ISIS and Nusrah Front kidnapped and killed soldiers of the Lebanese
Army in `Irsal in 2014, it was Hizbullah volunteers who launched a war
against them, while the Army stood by. This is similar to what happened in
Iraq. When the U.S.-trained Iraqi army collapsed in the face of the ISIS
offensive, it was the hashd militias (known as Popular Mobilization Forces,
unleashed by a religious edict from Grand Ayatullah Sistani) that undertook
the offensive against the ISIS attack.
A Confessional Failure
A map of religious and ethnic communities of Syria and Lebanon, 1935. (Map
prepared by the Bureau of Topographic French troops in the Lebanon. (La
cartothèque de lIfpo (Institut français du Proche-Orient)
The Lebanese political system, which was set up by the French colonial power
after World War I, when Britain and France divided the spoils of war in the
Arab East between them, was designed by Paris to maintain Maronite political
supremacy.
A complicated system of sectarian distribution of posts and power according
to an arithmetic formula was intended to keep the system squarely in the
hands of the Maronite elite, while giving token representation to Muslims
behind a democratic façade.
But demographic changes, to the advantage of Muslims, clashed early on with
the French arithmetic formula and that contributed to internal turmoil and
civil strife, first in 1958 and then in a full-blown, protracted war in
1975. (In Lebanon, internal sectarian conflicts always have external
dimensions, because since the 19th century, European powers forced on the
Ottoman Empire a system of foreign sponsorships of Christian and Druze sects
in the Arab East.)
Now what is the relationship of this archaic system to the blast in Beirut?
The answer is simply this: it is at the root of the corruption that explains
the incompetence and mismanagement of the Lebanese state. There are external
elements of Lebanese political corruption (which I will treat in a future
article), but there are also indigenous factors.
Sectarianism basically produced leaders and constituents who are set apart
from other sects in the same country. Politically speaking, sects live
together, but separate from one another, and that impedes national unity.
Just like Iraq today (where the U.S. copied the system of ethnic and
sectarian division of spoils from Lebanonof all places), Lebanon has been
unable, since independence from France in 1943, to forge a national identity
or a concept of citizenry. For instance, there has been no agreement since
the civil war on writing a unified history textbook.
The state only recognizes the individual insofar as he or she is a member of
a sect: you are forced to be born, married, and buried according to the
rites of the sect you are born into, even if you are an avowed atheist.
Political bosses of Lebanon (known as zu`ama) are sectarian leaders and are
rarely national leaders. Thus, their primary responsibility is to their
sectarian audience, which increases their motivation to engage in sectarian
agitation and mobilization because a national citizenry would leave them
jobless.
The fact that those leaders receive money from various countries of the
world make them independent of the state (and many of those bosses are
outright billionaires). But once they are in the state, they help themselves
to the treasury according to a system of division of spoils.
The system is not based on merit, nay it clashes with merit, because the
goal is to appoint individuals, not for their talents and skills, but for
their fealty (that was exactly how Yasser Arafat operated in Lebanon and
explains the demise of the PLO and its inability to create an effective
fighting force against Israel in the country.)
Even if a political boss appoints a qualified engineer or professional
manager, the person is dependent for his or her job on keeping the boss
happy, i.e. helping in looting the treasury. The appointees at the Port were
of that caliber, and the same applies to the Lebanese armed forces and
intelligence services.
It Got Even Worse
From left to right, Gen. Joseph K. Aoun, commander, Lebanese Armed Forces;
and U.S Army Maj. Gen. John P. Sullivan, assistant deputy chief of staff,
G-4; walk through the Memorial Amphitheater at Arlington National Cemetery,
Arlington, Virginia, June 26, 2018. (Wikimedia Commons)
This system, however, took a sharp turn for the worse in 1992, when
billionaire Rafiq Hariri was installed by the Syrian-Saudi alliance, and
with the approval of the U.S. This prime minister used the treasury and his
own money (sometimes) to place many elements of the bureaucracy on his
personal payroll or on the payroll of the state budget he controlled.
The multiplicity of sects means there is redundancy in the bureaucracy: the
Sunnis control one intelligence branch, the Christian another, and the
Shiites a third, without any need for this variety. Similarly, the Port was
under various directors: one for customs, and another for the port itself
(the former is loyal to the Hariri family while the latter is loyal to the
countrys president.) But overall security of the entire port was in the
hands of Army intelligence (which has becomeunder the current directormore
independent from the political bosses and closer to the U.S. government).
When it comes time for accountability, each leader or each sect points
fingers at the other. If one person is found guilty, the religious head of
the sect raises the alarm and prevents court proceedings from taking place
as the judiciary is as corrupt as the political system because the political
bosses appoint the judges, who in turn are loyal to a sectarian patron.
Only recently, there was public anger against Riad Salamè, the Central Bank
governor since 1993, who was the real architect of the financial Ponzi
scheme that triggered the financial collapse of Lebanon. Not only did the
U.S. government protect him by issuing direct threats against the Lebanese
government in case he was fired, but the Maronite patriarch also intervened
to prevent any government prosecution of Salamè, or even his dismissal. (The
banker appointed by Rafiq Hariri is known to facilitate financial
transactions for the church).
Similarly, as the public in Lebanon demands accountability for those
responsible for the blast, the corrupt system is unlikely to settle on one
culprit.
Domestic Responsibility
Michel Aoun, President of the Lebanese Republic, addresses European
Parliament, Sept. 11, 2018. (© European Union 2018 European Parliament)
There are various levels of corruption, incompetence, mismanagement and
recklessness in the performance of the Lebanese government which resulted in
the blasteven if there was a so-far unproven external handsuch as Israel,
which has a history of sending booby-trapped cars, trucks, and donkeys and
detonating them in crowded Lebanese neighborhoods. Israel did this while
claiming responsibility in the name of a fictitious organization it invented
to make its crimes seem indigenous (the name of the organization was The
Front for the Liberation of Lebanon from Strangers, see).
Who stored the explosive chemical ammonium nitrate in the port, and who put
the explosive material next to a warehouse of firecrackers? Who left it
unattended for six long years? When did government officials know about the
dangerous chemicals (or even U.S. government officials, as we now know there
was a Pentagon contractor who had access to the port and inspected it and
found the dangerous material)?
There is evidence that only weeks before the explosion President Michel Awn
and Prime Minister Hassan Diab both received a report about the material.
And it was only one intelligence agency (the Security of the State Agency)
which had warned about the danger, but even this organization did not raise
a public alarm about it.
Most importantly, when did the Lebanese Army command know about this stored
materialit is certain that they have known all alongand why did they not
act? There is also another question to be posed to Lebanese Army command:
the fire took place for many minutes before the big blast: why did the Army
fail to evacuate the area and warn the citizens before the explosion?
A Long Crisis
Protests in Beirut last year. ( Shahen Araboghlian/Wikimedia Commons)
People in Lebanon did not need this latest scandal to rise up against the
government of Lebanon. But the task of overthrowing the Lebanese government
much more difficult than overthrowing governments in other Arab countriesas
difficult as that task is, given Western sponsorship of most Arab
governments. (In Syria, the regime sought Russian and Iranian intervention
to stay in power.)
In Lebanon, the regime is democratic in name (which gives it a veneer of
political legitimacy) and too resilient because the security of the regime
is tied to the security of the sect. When political bosses are really
threatened, they quickly resort to sectarian agitation and mobilization to
divert attention and anger away from the ruling class and toward members and
leaders of other sects. This has been the case since at least the 1840s.
Lebanon will never be the same after this incident. While actual reform of
the regime is unlikely, the ability of the government and the ruling classes
to go back to the normal ways of Lebanese politics has at the same time
been severely hampered. This is a long crisis with no end in sight.
There is a great opportunity for radical change in Lebanon, but there are no
potent, political movements at the moment. The protests so far have been
either too timid or too cartoonish to cause real harm to the ruling classes.
Too much of the energy of the protestors (somenot allof whom were
infiltrated by right wing movements and organizations who work closely with
the Saudi and UAE regimes) was focused on the person of Jubran Basil
(son-in-law of the president and leader of the largest parliamentary bloc).
The protest movement has failed to shake the foundations of the system and
force the ouster or resignation of the political bosses. The ruling class
will come back in full force with the support of the Western governments
that sponsor most of them.
There is little ground for optimism in Lebanon.
Asad AbuKhalil is a Lebanese-American professor of political science at
California State University, Stanislaus. He is the author of the Historical
Dictionary of Lebanon (1998), Bin Laden, Islam and Americas New War on
Terrorism (2002), and The Battle for Saudi Arabia (2004). He tweets as
@asadabukhalil