| Other Photos |
 |
|
 |
The Fall of the Near-Eastern Switzerland
// Is Lebanon Lost the the West Forever?
In his inclusion of the Lebanese "cedar revolution" in the list of examples of the victorious march of democracy and Western values in their liberation of every new country from the grip of authoritarianism, US President George Bush clearly overplayed his hand. However the crisis in Lebanon is resolved, it is clear that the tone of the country's politics will be set by the controlling strategic initiatives of Hezbollah and Amal – in other words, by radical Shiites who are distinguished by their anti-Western attitudes and entirely unique take on democracy. In this they are awfully similar to the zealous adherents of the "Islamic democracy" espoused by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
For George Bush, the news cannot possibly be worse. In some ways, it is even worse than the news coming out of Iraq, where American soldiers continue to die and the national government continues to endure the fiasco, or out of Palestine, where the government is in the hands of Hezbollah's spiritual twin, Hamas. The fact that reforms according to the American conception of democracy are going awry all over the Near East is not as much of a painful blow for Washington as the events in Lebanon. In the end, both post-Saddam Iraq and the deceased Yasser Arafat's authoritarian and clannish Palestine were and will remain light-years away from Western liberal values. Thus, there will really be no one to blame when the seeds of democracy fail to take root in that soil no matter how much they are tended. But Lebanon is an entirely different matter. In its time, cosmopolitan Lebanon was the "Near-Eastern Switzerland," an island of relative liberalism and freedom of thought that remained an exception to many of the rules governing the Arab world. Lebanon survived a bloody civil war, after which it has spent the last twenty years attempting to balance on a power keg of often competing national and religious factions. Right up until last year, the "guarantee of order" was provided by Syrian troops. However, many features of Arab political culture, such as presidents-for-life, an unchanging ruling party, and the inheritance of political posts by one generation from another, simply made no sense in Lebanon. The Lebanese way means normal elections. It is no wonder that tiny Lebanon played a huge role in America's geopolitical plans for the Near East, both as a check on the expansionist designs of Syria and Iran and as a launching ground for the spread of those same values whose triumph George Bush undertook to ensure in the Near East. It was in order to make that process go faster that the "cedar revolution" was dreamed up.
And now the bankrupt nature of the Lebanese "cedar revolution" as a political project is the cross on the grave of the Greater Near East concept. However, that's not all. For the United States, the loss of Lebanon will be similar to the loss of Iran 30 years ago when Ayatollah Khomeini's Islamic Revolution overthrew the pro-Western regime of the Shah, in the process stripping Tehran of its reputation as the "Paris of the East." The international repercussions of that Islamist victory turned out to be the strenuous dissemination of the idea of radical Islam throughout the region and the world. Meanwhile, Sheikh Nasrallah is maneuvering adeptly for the role of the Lebanese Khomeini – a process that appears to be unstoppable.
Sergey Strokan
All the Article in Russian as of Dec. 04, 2006
|
|
|
