“Lebanon never fails to surprise”

If Marc Lynch doesn’t have anything to add to the commentary on the Lebanese elections, then I obviously don’t either, though I feel as though I should take a serious interest since I’m going to Beirut in a couple months.

Elias Muhanna aka Qifa Nabki has great analysis. If you’d been reading his blog (as I told you to a few weeks ago) you would know that he was predicting a defeat for the ruling coalition, but, as he says, “Lebanon never fails to surprise.”

Abu Muqawama also has a great wrap up of the election’s winners and losers.  You can read it here.  In case you’re not going to read the whole thing, I’ll summarize.

Winners: Saudi Money, Hizballah, US Central Command/Department of Defense, nepotism, and the Maronite patriarch.

Losers: Hizballah, Israeli hard-liners, and Hassan Nasrallah.

Exum explains how that works out.

American media is mostly focused on Hizballah, of course.

Don’t know what else I’ve got to say, especially since it seems like it will be a while until the real implications of the election are sorted out.  What kind of government will March 14 form?  They are probably pretty hyped-up on their unexpected win and not too excited to take in the “resistance.”

At the same time, I suspect that Hizballah, like so many other parties, are relieved that they didn’t win.  Paul Salem wrote about this the other day in Foreign Policy.

Hezbollah is a surprisingly efficient organization, despite the fact that it is many things at once. It is the dominant Shiite political party and a strong opposition voice inside and outside parliament. It also acts as an army: resisting Israeli occupation from 1982 to 2000 and fighting Israel to a draw in 2006; receiving arms, training, and financing from Iran; and serving as a military proxy for Iran and Syria. Additionally, it is an Islamist movement that adheres to the principles of the Iranian Revolution (though it has accepted that those principles cannot be implemented in Lebanon). It provides hospitals, schools, and social services in Shiite areas of the country. In many ways, Hezbollah acts as a state-within-a-state — sharing power with other groups in the government, but maintaining its own army, finances, and foreign policy.

This is Hezbollah’s preferred mode of operation: benefiting from the cover of the legitimate multicommunal Lebanese republic, while maintaining enough military and political influence to be left alone. The problem for Hezbollah is that this model does not translate easily into national office and plays badly on an international stage.

Based on what I know the organization, I’m inclined to agree.  If Hizballah ends up taking a “veto” role in the new government, that will might work out optimally for them.  They can participate but continue to be an oppositional force.

Anyway, stay tuned.

Talking about drugs in Beirut

Andrew Lee Butters, the Beirut correspondent for Time magazine, wrote an intriguing post about drugs in Lebanon on the Middle East Blog yesterday.  Mr. Butters has done some good stuff at Time.  Some of my recent favorites were this piece about Palestinian refugees in Lebanon and this one about Fatah and Hamas in Lebanon.  But this blog post feels a little out of whack.  It starts of with the kind of lede that is sure to attract clicks:

When my editors asked me to write a story about drug use in the Middle East, I told them that doing one from Lebanon would be easy. The country’s open borders, dysfunctional government, and modern society, means that is a regional center both for the use and production of drugs. Beirut — the party capital of the Arab world — is awash in all the usual party drugs, while there are there are hashish fields dotting the remote corners of the Bekaa Valley and meth labs in Palestinian refugee camps.

And then goes on to remind you that being a foreign correspondent is actually the dream job you think it is:

When my assistant Rami set up a preliminary interview with some small time dealers, they slipped halucinogens in his drink and then they vomited in his car. Rami had to be hospitalized.

Nor are drug users themselves terribly easy to interview. Drugs still carry enough of a social stigma, and drug penalties are harsh enough that usage is as covert as it is pervasive. On Saturday night, I went on a reporting trip to a rave hosted by the international DJ, Tiesto in a huge convention center full of teenagers clearly on extasy or worse, but didn’t see a single pill being pooped or line being snorted.

Okay, I guess the part about Rami going to the hospital doesn’t sound that great.  And yes Levi, I know that there’s a funny typo.  Also, as someone who wants to be a foreign correspondent, I should note that doing drugs and dealing with dangerous people is obviously not what it’s all about.  But you have to admit that going to a rave in Beirut is pretty sweet.  As is what comes next:

But I did have one breakthrough this past week, an interview with a major local drug dealer, conducted in Rami’s car — minus the vomit — as we drove through the southern suburbs of Beirut while being followed by two SUV’s carrying his bodyguards and while the man himself fingered a pistol every time we passed a soldier.

But here is where I start to get skeptical.  He reports that the “major local” drug dealer he met with told him this:

Drug trafficking in the Middle East had undergone a transformation since September 11th. Before then, the drug trade had been controlled by feuding war lords with very parochial spheres of influence. But after 9/11, counter-terrorism agencies in the region started paying more attention to drug networks, because drugs and weapons dealing go hand-in-hand, and because drug dealers typically support or at least pay protection to the major militant groups. So traffickers responded by organizing themselves into trans-national, a-political, non-competeive cartels that operate on a scale large enough to be financed and run from the Gulf  while operating money-laundering and political corruption networks  everywhere else.

I guess that’s possible.  Maybe there are transnational, noncompetitive drug cartels working across the entire Middle East.  But that’s also  exactly the kind of bullshit drug dealers like to spit.  I hope that Mr. Butters reports this story fully, because I’d like to learn more.  Until there are a couple sources behind this, I’m just going to assume it’s some punk ass wannabe talking big to the white dude.  Not uncommon.

Fewer blue helmets

I came across this story today via David Axe’s blog War Is Boring:

WARSAW, Poland (AP) — Poland plans to end its military missions in Lebanon, the Golan Heights and Chad as it cuts spending due to the global economic crisis, the defense minister said Wednesday….

Poland is trying to cut its defense spending this year by about 2 billion zlotys ($56 million) as its economy, the largest among the European Union’s new ex-communist members, shows signs of a significant slowdown.

Poland has about 500 troops in a U.N. force in Lebanon, 360 troops on U.N. duty on the Golan Heights — a territory captured by Israel from Syria in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war — and about 400 in Chad on a European Union mission that is to become a U.N. mission in March.

I suspect that we’re going to see a lot of this in the next couples months and/or years.  As governments are forced to pay the exorbitant price of the global financial meltdown, they will become decreasingly interested in foreign military committments.  Why spend money keeping the peace in Bosnia or Lebanon when you desperately need dollars to bail out your banks?  I predict a (limited) return to isolationism among a lot of nations if this trend continues.  Be on the lookout.

We need a bell

Lebanon finally has a president!

I know that Lebanese politics are extremely complicated, but isn’t Michel Suleiman, who was just elected, the same guy who was originally supposed to be president?  Whatever.  Civil war averted.  We need a bell.

Welcome back

College is over for the summer (read my thoughts about that on the Oberlin College admissions blog) and I can finally devote myself full time to screwing around on the Internet, at least until I leave for the Middle East in a few weeks.

A few quick thoughts to share:

• I’m really glad that John McCain finally rejected John Hagee’s endorsement. Hagee is a bigot and his brand of fundamentalist Christian Zionism is not good for America, Israel or anyone in the Middle East. I hope, but don’t expect, that Joe Lieberman will get the picture soon, too.
• I feel (sort of) bad for Ms. Emily Gould, who exposed her entire life to the world in the New York Times Magazine. But didn’t she realize that oversharing about her oversharing might not be the best way to solve her oversharing problems?
• It’s good to see that Lebanon is getting back in order even if the new arrangement is good for Hizballah.
• I think that Syria will recognize Israel by the end of 2008. I base this partially on the negotiations that are going on now, but more just on my own gut feeling.
• I am growing to hate Hillary Clinton more than ever before.

Future posts will be more coherent.