Posted on 08/24/2006 1:24:48 PM PDT by tessalu
During the war, most of Lebanon's days and nights were dominated by Israeli bombs, Hezbollah missiles, or both. But Monday, August 7, belonged to Lebanese Prime Minister Fouad Siniora. A grim-looking career banker, Siniora has been in office for just over a year, and this war came at him the same way it hit everyone else: like a sucker punch. For three and a half weeks, he shuttled from meeting to meeting, trying to enlist allies for his war-torn country. That Monday, he finally managed to gather in Beirut the foreign ministers of the 22-member Arab League, some of whose key members had pointedly snubbed his earlier appeals for help.
His voice shaking, Siniora delivered a passionate speech to the ministers, who sat around a table looking uncomfortable. He called on them to keep Lebanon from being Israel's "punching bag" and alluded to his country's longsuffering status as the battleground for regional wars. He spoke of massacres, martyrs, and the destruction of the country's infrastructure; at that point, some 500 Lebanese civilians and 35 soldiers had been killed. And then he broke down. Weeping, he said he had just heard of another Israeli bombing, in a village called Houla, in which 40 people were believed killed (it turned out to be only one). The Arab foreign ministers bowed their heads, either from courtesy or shame.
If Lebanon's strength is its weakness, as the old saying goes, then Siniora's moment of weakness was his strength. His tear-filled plea was all anybody could talk about that day. "When I saw him crying, I could tell he had a big heart, that he felt the same pain we all do," exclaimed my newspaper vendor, Khalil Youssef, placing his hand on his heart. Until the war, middle-class Lebanese like Youssef loathed Siniora. As a former finance minister and technocrat, he was a national Scrooge--the man who inaugurated the country's value-added tax (VAT) and tried to raise it again this May.
As the war ground on, however, that changed. Siniora turned out to be an unexpected statesman for Lebanon, producing a masterful seven-point plan for ending the war. With his fervent speeches, he began to emerge as a counterweight to Sayyid Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah's charismatic leader. Nasrallah rejoiced in the battlefield sacrifice of his own son; Siniora wept over the deaths of children who weren't even his own. "Gradually in the crisis, up to this speech with the Arab leaders, he has certainly become a very viable prime minister," says Jamil Mroue, the publisher and editor-in-chief of Beirut's English-language Daily Star newspaper.
But now that the war is over--or at least in remission--Siniora's real work begins. Lebanon's safety, as well as Israel's, depends on him. The question is whether he can manage the peace as well as he handled the war. Can he control Hezbollah and hold his broken country together? Or will it keep exploding into armed conflict? To find the answer, which is not encouraging, you have to understand how the weakness of the Lebanese state has only strengthened Hezbollah.
Born in 1943, Siniora came of age during the 1950s, the golden age of Arab nationalism. He remains an ardent Arab nationalist to this day, say friends and family--a lover of his mother tongue who memorizes verses by the 10th-century poet Al Mutanabbi. He attended the American University of Beirut (AUB), then a hotbed of progressive pan-Arab ideals. "Those were times of big dreams and great hopes of things changing--mass movements, demonstrations. People could change regimes at those times," says Fawwaz Traboulsi, a professor of history and political science at the Lebanese American University, who attended AUB with Siniora. "And he's very much related to that tradition."
But post-civil war Lebanon was a far cry from the pan-Arab dreams of Siniora's youth. Syria had assumed control of a political system that is inherently weak: Instead of a simple majority, it requires a government of squabbling factions to reach a consensus before making any decision. In 1992, then-Prime Minister Rafik Hariri tapped Siniora, a close friend from the same hometown, as minister of state for finance, and then finance minister. In both positions, Siniora's job was to tighten his boss's purse strings.
An expansive, free-spending tycoon who often greased his negotiations with cash, Hariri was adept at navigating the fissures between rival sects. As the leader of the Sunnis, he could negotiate with Nasrallah--the leader of the Shia--as an equal. But Siniora's attempts to modernize the Lebanese economy pitted him against Hariri's political foes, and the only significant economic reforms he managed to impose were ones that squeezed the country's disappearing middle class. By the time Hariri left office in 2004, Lebanon had a $36 billion public debt--at 170 percent of GDP, one of the highest, proportionally, in the world.
Siniora became a national symbol of government heartlessness. After he imposed the country's 10 percent VAT, a popular Lebanese talk show invited him to appear on a Christmas special and then staged a scene straight out of A Christmas Carol: The host took the finance minister to the home of a very poor Christian family (with a disabled son) that was having trouble making ends meet. Confronted with this tableau, Siniora did something that convinced viewers he was either a kindhearted man or a weak one: He cried.
In February 2005, Hariri was assassinated in a massive bombing, a violent coda to a decade-long cold war between him and Lebanon's pro-Syrian president, Emile Lahoud. By then, Siniora had already returned to his first career, that of a private banker. "He decided to get out of politics," his son Wael told me. "He doesn't want it anymore; he never wanted it in the first place." For the next several months, young Lebanese camped out in downtown Beirut, and, through mass demonstrations and international pressure, eventually forced Syria to withdraw its troops. After elections in June, the new anti-Syrian parliamentary majority appointed Siniora.
As prime minister, he got a second chance to pursue economic and political reforms. He pledged to revise Lebanon's electoral law and to finally get the country into the World Trade Organization. But, once again, Lebanon's consensus-based political system--even more fractious without the powerful Syrian tiebreaker--foiled Siniora's attempts to push through changes.
Unlike Hariri, Siniora doesn't have billions of dollars or thousands of votes to dispense. He's not the representative of a religious sect, like Nasrallah, or a zaim, one of the hereditary lordlings who make up most of Lebanon's political class. He's not even the head of his own party: That role goes to Saad Hariri, Rafik's son. "Siniora does not have a power base; he's not a member of parliament, he's not a zaim," says Traboulsi. "So real power is somewhere else. ... That's a very fragile situation for someone like Siniora."
Hezbollah took full advantage of Siniora's weakness. Last December, when the government made a key decision by majority rule, not consensus, five Shia ministers--all members of Hezbollah or its ally, Amal--stalked out of the Cabinet. They refused to return until Siniora declared that Hezbollah was not a militia--thus protecting it from being disarmed under U.N. Resolution 1559. After nearly two months, Siniora made a statement worthy of Gertrude Stein: "We have never called, and will never call, the resistance by any other name but the resistance, and it is a national resistance, and we will not use any other expression to describe it but national resistance," he said. This tortured statement, said Hezbollah parliamentarian Mohammed Raad, was "synonymous with what we demanded."
As the year dragged on, Hezbollah continued to keep the new prime minister in line: At the Arab League summit in Khartoum, in late March, Siniora tried to rewrite a statement supporting "Lebanon's resistance"--a clear reference to Hezbollah--to the more ambiguous "Lebanese people's right to resistance." Lahoud erupted into a tirade, and Siniora lost face yet again. And, in May, when Siniora tried to impose an economic austerity program, which would have raised the VAT and gasoline taxes, Hezbollah and its allies staged a huge rally in downtown Beirut. The protest was mainly a show of strength: The government had already rescinded the most unpopular of Siniora's proposed changes.
As soon as the August 14 cease-fire took effect, Nasrallah, with great fanfare, pledged to help people rent apartments, rebuild their homes, and even furnish them. But, after Israel's relentless bombing of Lebanese infrastructure, Siniora's government is more broke than ever--leaving the Lebanese with no question of whom to thank and whom to blame. "Our government, they take the VAT and they give nothing back," says Qassem Youssef, a stocky 34-year-old shopkeeper from Tyre. "This is not our government. This is the government of a different country. But it is like ice: It will melt soon. It will be water."
n a small hotel room in West Beirut, the Rikans--one extended family among close to a million Lebanese who fled the Israeli bombing--are taking refuge. Two pretty, curly-haired daughters flit around the room, playing with plastic dolls and eating peanuts. Their father, Khalil, perches on the cabinet next to the television, which silently flashes with pictures of Siniora, George W. Bush, Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, and other faces of the war. The Rikans haven't gotten much help from Siniora's government, and they don't expect to. "Our government is bankrupt; they don't have any money," says Muhammad Rikan, Khalil's father, who is propped up in bed in his pajamas.
"If they get money from outside, maybe they'll give us a little of it," says Khalil with wry hopelessness.
"We're not expecting anything from them," says his father. "We'll be very happy if they don't take our house!"
But, for all this, Nisrine Salih, the girls' eager, talkative young mother, was moved when she saw Siniora cry; she identified with him. "We saw that he was in the same situation as the people," she says. Siniora's tears showed the Shia that somebody in the government--a Sunni, no less--gave a damn about them. The Rikans see Siniora as like them: helpless.
Siniora's impotence is a product of the Lebanese political system, not any personal weakness of character. As a technocrat, he's exactly the kind of leader Lebanon needs; unfortunately, the country's political system makes it almost impossible for this kind of man to be effective. His tears won him respect, even affection, from the Lebanese. But getting people to like you isn't power--especially in Lebanon, where votes matter less than behind-the-scenes deals. As the idealistic Arab nationalist who cried for the Shia, Siniora has the personality to transcend the sectarian limits of Lebanese politics. But he doesn't--at least, not yet--have the power.
"He's very good--obviously he has a very lovely personality. The people liked him when he cried," says Khalil Gebara, co-director of the Lebanese Transparency Association, an anti-corruption watchdog group. "But he is very unlucky, because he's to blame for everything that happens, especially for things beyond his control. Who's to blame for the VAT? Who's to blame for all the corruption and all the debt? Siniora. Now who's to blame for everything in the war? Siniora. Everyone blames him for everything. So he cries."
Sounds like Anna just wants to wrap up ol' Siniora in her arms and rock him to sleep, like a good little boy should.
Now we know where the Gothic novelists went.
Our foreign policy is incoherent. We are doing the exact opposite in Lebanon and Iraq for the exact same reasons.
I think this guy is a war criminal.
All of this political correectness sucks! If Israel gets attacked again from Lebanon by Hezbollah, it should go in there and start annexing Lebanon territory, exterminating the Hezbollah fighters, deporting the Lebananese civilians. Eventually, either Lebanon will cease being a country, or it will do what it should have been done, control its own territory.
Siniora's impotence is a product of the Lebanese political system. This war is not over yet, and we might as well know the players.
Both are weak men... who will soon be swept aside.
If sleeper cells in the U.S.A. attacked Canada, the U.S.A. would be responsible for allowing the sleeper cells to exist on U.S.A. soil. Because Hezbollah was allowed to exist in Lebanon, (even as a part of Lebanese government!), Lebanon is responsible for what Hezbollah does to Israel. I have no sympathy for Lebanon, nor do I want to subsidize reconstruction necessary there due to the Israel sorties. Next time I hope Israel takes off the gloves and defends their soil as God means them to do.
High volume. Articles on Israel can also be found by clicking on the Topic or Keyword Israel. also
2006israelwar or WOT
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A touching scene.
His voice shaking, Siniora delivered a passionate speech to the ministers, who sat around a table looking uncomfortable. He called on them to keep Lebanon from being Israel's "punching bag" and alluded to his country's longsuffering status as the battleground for regional wars. He spoke of massacres, martyrs, and the destruction of the country's infrastructure; at that point, some 500 Lebanese civilians and 35 soldiers had been killed. And then he broke down. Weeping, he said he had just heard of another Israeli bombing, in a village called Houla, in which 40 people were believed killed (it turned out to be only one). The Arab foreign ministers bowed their heads, either from courtesy or shame.
At least this article mentions that after the media incitement died down, the obligatory "recount" rendered a revised death toll of one, down from forty.
Excellent point. In Iraq we kill terrorists each day. We should annihilate Hizbollah ourselves. We should have done it back in '83. Instead we confer legitimacy on them by allowing them to exist. Why on earth would we ALLOW such a group to exist? Thats the only reason Hizbollah exists... because other nations such as ours allow them to exist. Thats like allowing a rattlesnake to live in your basement.
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