Click here to offer a word of encouragement to our Catholic brothers and sisters in Lebanon.
(c) 2002 by National Review, Inc., 215 Lexington Avenue, New York, NY 10016. Reprinted by permission.
Inside the church, worshipers have just completed the Sunday liturgy, and are filing into the back hall for a special dinner honoring Lebanon's national holiday. The congregation is composed of the descendants of Lebanese immigrants, and a healthy number of new arrivals from the old country — whose presence is a sign of decline in the homeland of the Middle East's most vibrant Christian community.
“The Maronites want to get out of Lebanon,” says Bernadette Karam. “A lot of people are waiting or hope, in any way, to leave the country. They're willing to buy visas, to do anything to escape.”
“It's very dangerous there. Everybody is against us. We're scared. This is why we left,” says Abdo Houayek, standing with his family. “I was born in 1960, but when I grew up in the 1970s, that's when the war started against the Christians. This is why we're scared. It's just best to take your kids and leave. If we have a democracy, we'll go back. But for now, it's too dangerous. This is not the first war against the Christians, or the last…. Those who can leave, are leaving.”
There have been Maronites — Catholics who adhere to one of the Catholic Church's Eastern rites — in Lebanon for 1,700 years. Maronite Christianity arrived with a 4th-century monk named Maron, who — along with his followers — left the church in Antioch (in what is now Syria) after a theological dispute. Looking for a safe and defensible refuge, the Maronites settled around Mount Lebanon, near the Mediterranean coast.
For the many centuries since, Maronites have been practicing their faith and defending themselves against rival Christian sects as well as against Muslims. When the Crusaders arrived, the Maronites welcomed them, and subsequently entered into full communion with Rome. By far the largest Christian denomination in Lebanon, Maronites have since the Middle Ages considered themselves an outpost of the West in a hostile Muslim land. When the end of World War I brought with it the end of four centuries of Ottoman oppression, and delivered Lebanon into the hands of the French, Maronites realized a long-held dream: an independent, Christian-dominated Lebanon.
France designed Lebanon's government to favor the Maronites — which naturally upset the country's Muslims, who began decades of agitation for their fair share of power. The PLO's attempted takeover of the country in the early 1970s exacerbated Muslim-Christian tension, and sparked the catastrophic civil war that began in 1975. Syria invaded in 1976, and remained throughout the conflict, which ended in 1990 with the signing of a peace treaty and the subsequent defeat of the last Maronite holdout, Gen. Michel Aoun.
The peace agreement called for the disarming of all militias, which, with the very important exception of Hezbollah, was accomplished. The Syrian army, too, was supposed to withdraw, but refused, citing the Israeli military presence in the southern Lebanon buffer zone. Israel withdrew entirely from Lebanon two years ago, but Syria remains, running the country as a vassal state. Damascus continues to wage a proxy war on Israel through Hezbollah, which it allows to operate in southern Lebanon.
The Vichy of the Middle East
Though reliable statistics are impossible to come by, the U.S. government estimates that Christians account for 30 percent of Lebanon's population of 3.5 million. The wartime exodus of Christians has continued in peacetime under the present Syrian-dominated government, which Diaspora Lebanese liken to a Vichy regime. Though Lebanon is not an Islamic theocracy, Christians there have been effectively reduced to dhimmitude — second-class status — because of their opposition to the Syrian occupation. The puppet government in Beirut is adamant in oppressing the Christians: In recent weeks, they've shut down a Maronite television station and announced plans to prosecute Christian political leaders on dubious national-security charges.
Chillingly, the regime is even trying to extend its reach to the Diaspora. In October, Beirut issued instructions to its intelligence agents, telling them to keep track of Lebanese in America — “collaborators with the Israeli enemy” — who participated in a Maronite gathering in Los Angeles this year, or who support the Syria Accountability Act now before the U.S. Congress. On November 4, a group of Lebanese-American leaders wrote to attorney general John Ashcroft requesting an investigation into Beirut's spying on American citizens.
Even in the face of Beirut's aggressive tactics, Lebanese-American Christian activists sense that now may be the first chance in a decade — and maybe their last chance ever — to free their people from the Syrian yoke and turn Lebanon into a peaceful and prosperous pluralist democracy. If the U.S. is as serious as it claims to be about eliminating Islamic terror, Hezbollah must be crushed — and that would mean the eviction from Lebanon of its Syrian protectors.
That's why the Diaspora leadership is so excited — and the Beirut government is so worried — about the Syria Accountability Act. The bill, which was introduced in both houses last April, would impose severe economic and diplomatic sanctions on Damascus until, among other things, it withdraws troops from Lebanon and ceases to support and harbor terrorists. Despite heavy bipartisan support for the legislation in both houses of Congress, however, the Bush administration opposes it, as does the State Department; aside from the merits of the legislation, any administration will oppose in principle an attempt by Congress to manage foreign policy. But there is also a feeling, particularly at State, that Syria is owed consideration for being helpful to America's war against al-Qaeda and Iraq. Since the September 11 attacks, the rattled regime of Bashar Assad has been trying to improve relations with the U.S., sharing intelligence and using its vote on the U.N. Security Council to back America's coming war against Saddam. State argues that Congress shouldn't jeopardize much-needed help from Syria. “What help?” snorts Johns Hopkins University Syria expert Marius Deeb. “Catching a few guys Syria doesn't want?”
U.S. Committee for a Free Lebanon
Anti-Syrian Lebanese worry that the administration could in effect trade Lebanon to its occupier in exchange for help in the war with Iraq. There is precedent for this. “In the Gulf War, the Syrians offered to help against Saddam. America averted its gaze from the Syrian attack on Gen. Aoun,” explains leading Middle East scholar Fouad Ajami, a native-born Lebanese Muslim. “[The late Hafez] Assad used the cover of the Gulf War to basically complete the takeover of Lebanon by eliminating the last pocket of resistance.”
Mindful of this, a delegation of Lebanese-American Christian leaders paid a call on the State Department in mid November, to urge U.S. diplomats not to cut deals with Syria at Lebanon's expense. Mr. Ziad Abdelnour, president of the U.S. Committee for a Free Lebanon, Inc. accuses the “hardcore Arabists” of the State Department of running interference for Damascus. “I've been working with State for a number of years now, and I'm telling you, nobody gives a damn about the Syrians, but they don't want to anger the Saudis, who protect Syria's interests,” says Abdelnour.
Leaders of the Lebanese opposition criticized President Bush for meeting with Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri, who was in Washington last month to request support for international financial assistance to bail out his country's ailing economy. “The administration is playing into the hands of Syria,” warns Abdelnour, a New York investment banker, venture capitalist and a political activist. “Where is the money going? The country is totally controlled by Syria. Capital will not go there until the situation is fixed. Otherwise, you're throwing your money away.”
True, Washington has more pressing concerns than removing Syria from Lebanon, but it's hard to see how the administration's long-term goals can be achieved without it. Apologists for the status quo argue that Syria has a history of responding to U.S. pressure by turning to America's enemies — but without the Soviet card to play against the U.S., and with the Iraqi regime about to be destroyed, that is now largely an empty threat.
If Syria and its terrorist clients can be coerced to withdraw, conditions are favorable for Lebanon to become a model of democracy and prosperity for a region that has known little of either. The entrepreneurial Lebanese have a reputation as a trading people, going back to the days of the Phoenicians. Indeed, before the country committed sectarian suicide in the 1970s, it was known as the Switzerland of the Middle East. Lebanon is also the only Arab nation that has had anything like free speech and democracy.
“Lebanese Christians have been carrying Western values since before the United States was founded,” says Walid Phares, a political-science professor at Florida Atlantic University. “We could play a tremendous role in defending the interests of the international community. We should start talking to Americans and explain to them and to the world that we're not siding with the Arabists and Islamists against the West and Israel.”
The longstanding Maronite alliance with Israel is a source of tension with Lebanese Muslims. In the 1940s, the Maronite patriarch extended a welcome to the Jewish immigrants to Palestine, correctly seeing the potential for an alliance with a Western-oriented people trying to survive amid hostile Muslims. During the civil war, Maronite militia forces had the backing of the Israelis, who crossed into Lebanon to pursue the PLO in 1982. The infamous massacre of unarmed Palestinians at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps was carried out by Maronite militiamen, and the Israelis stood accused of allowing the murders to take place. Even today, many Maronites freely admit that their side did not have clean hands during the war, and committed atrocities just as their Muslim counterparts did. This ability to confess error is another reason some knowledgeable observers believe that a Syrian withdrawal would not carry with it a large risk of renewed civil war. “I think the Lebanese have learned the lessons of playing with fire,” says Ajami. “They themselves set their country on fire, with a lot of help from the neighborhood. They've endured 25 years of hell, and they've learned that the country has to be shared.”
Hope for Lebanon's Future
Ajami points out that, thanks largely to the Christian population, Lebanon's people are much better educated than others in the region, and thus would be “a damn good place to start” experimenting with the kind of democracy Washington would like to see take hold in the Middle East. A free and secular Lebanon would also benefit from the knowledge and expertise its expatriates acquired in the U.S. Abdelnour, 41, fled the war, earned a business degree at the Wharton School, and prospered in America; he says he and his Lebanese Muslim friends who have had a similar experience have learned from their adopted land the virtues of secular democracy, free markets, and the rule of law.
“These guys [Muslims] are the best of the best,” Abdelnour says. “They went to Harvard Business School, they're great guys. They're not sectarian. They want to build the country too.”
As it turns to debate on the Syria Accountability Act, Congress will want to ask: Why is it in America's interest to ignore these pro-Western Middle Easterners, and instead do the bidding of Syria's water-carriers in Saudi-funded think tanks and at Foggy Bottom? On the answer to that question hinges the fate of Lebanese Christians, and of Lebanon itself. If Syria is permitted to continue its stranglehold on Lebanon, by the time Washington gets around to paying attention — and attention must be paid, at some point — there may not be enough of these natural allies left with whom to build a democracy.
“The island that the Christians are living on within Lebanon is getting smaller and smaller,” says Tony Feisal, who edits an Arabic community newspaper in New York. “If they can find a way to emigrate, they are doing it. At some stage, when you have at stake the welfare of your family, everything else is compromisable. The longer the situation persists, the longer the desperation grows. Once the Christians leave, they will probably only go back on a tourist visa.”
