11 may 2006
Lebanon must plan beyond
Bush and Chirac
Last
year, Paris Match magazine had
a cover story on French Prime Minister
Dominique de Villepin. It featured, among other mementos, a photograph of him putting pen to paper while
sitting in a military helicopter. The caption was pure celebrity mag fluff,
absurd for probably being true: Though
he was on an official function, de Villepin, the magazine informed us, was writing a poem.
There is not much poetry in de Villepin's life these
days. His well-cultivated conceit - that of being a politician and something of an intellectual - bought him little
reprieve last November when the prime minister had to deal with weeks of rioting
by immigrant youths; nor earlier this year,
when he was
forced to back down (by his
main sponsor, President Jacques Chirac) on implementing what the "contract of first-hiring," allowing companies to employ job-searchers for limited periods of time. And now, de Villepin,
hitherto regarded as a potential presidential front-runner, faces his toughest trial: the so-called Clearstream scandal, which threatens his political
survival, but more importantly
Chirac's.
Clearstream is a Luxemburg bank through which
French politicians and others were alleged
to have laundered kickbacks
from an arms transaction with Taiwan. The accusation appeared on a CD-ROM sent to a judge,
its provenance murky. Among those accused
of receiving payoffs was Interior Minister
Nicolas Sarkozy, Chirac's and de Villepin's leading rival on the right. Sensing an opportunity, Chirac asked de Villepin to get the dirt
on Sarkozy. The interior minister was subsequently
cleared of any wrongdoing by a Defense Ministry inquiry, but claimed that de Villepin kept the
latter going anyway, for political motives. Now de Villepin is fighting off demands that he
resign. His priority is to protect Chirac from the Clearstream backwash, or risk seeing the president
abandon him.
The shockwaves of Clearstream
have yet to be felt in Beirut. However, both the
scandal and the many impediments
the Bush administration is struggling with across the Atlantic
will soon impose themselves on Lebanese political life, because it is above all the
personal attention of Chirac and
of President George W. Bush that
has kept Lebanon high on the French and American agendas in the past two
years. This shared interest was fostered
despite the awkward presence of de Villepin, who alienated
the Bush administration in the
run-up to the Iraq war. He was
foreign minister at the time and
went too far in a vainglorious effort to deny the United States a favorable
vote for war at the United Nations Security Council. U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell felt
betrayed, and for months the tension between Washington and Paris could be cut
with a knife. However, Chirac kept his lines open to Washington, particularly to National Security
Advisor Condoleezza Rice, through his
own advisor, Maurice Gourdeau-Montagne. This relationship
allowed both Bush and Chirac to move beyond Iraq and toward agreement over Syria and Lebanon,
beginning in June 2004, when they met in Paris to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Normandy landings.
There is some question as
to whether that partnership inexorably led to passage of UN Security Council Resolution 1559 (after all the Syrians
could have done the prudent thing and accepted President
Emile Lahoud's departure). However,
it certainly made it possible. Chirac felt Syrian President Bashar Assad had
deceived France once too often, but he was
also echoing the fears of his
friend Rafik Hariri. And since it
was Chirac rather than Bush who first
saw Lebanese matters as essential to developments
in the post-Iraq Middle East,
it's fair to say that the French president, through his close ties with a former Lebanese prime minister, was the
one who initially brought the U.S. into Lebanon. Until
Hariri's murder, the Americans had no independent Lebanon policy.
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Envoys from Washington now
insist all that has changed. Lebanon is loved for its
own sake. That's good news, but one should be realistic. As in France, it is a personal
priority for the president, not a long-term institutional one. Bush's concern
for Lebanese affairs is an adjunct to his enthusiasm for Middle Eastern democracy. Rice at the
State Department concurs,
but mainly because of the president, even if, perchance, she has come around to his way of thinking
on the region. The same thing
holds for Chirac: He wants a Lebanon free of Syria, he seeks
retribution for Hariri's assassination,
but his crusade is more personal than strategic, with the Foreign
Ministry hacks said to be skeptical. When
Bush, Chirac and Rice leave, their desultory
bureaucracies may well return to the realism of the past, where Lebanon
was afforded only secondary status.
A
reversal of concern is trickier to effect than it sounds.
Lebanon, as a model of Middle Eastern
democracy, as a place where
political crimes can be permanently terminated, may indeed soon bore the functionaries at the State Department
or Quai d'Orsay. However, as a security
interest, due mainly to the relationships between Hizbullah, Iran and Syria, the
country will retain much importance. But that's the kind of attention Lebanon has to be careful with. It's the same attention that might conceivably
encourage the Americans and French to yield to whoever controls Hizbullah - Iran and Syria being the
most likely candidates. Or,
it may encourage them to endorse military action against the party.
In
the current context, neither option is probable. But unless Lebanese officials begin shaping how policy-makers in Washington and
Paris address their country
in the future, once Bush and
Chirac are gone, they may find themselves sitting across from insensitive administrations having no desire to imitate their predecessors.
This means ensuring that both the
Americans and the French retain an independent Lebanon policy, one based on ideas as much as on security, where defense of Lebanese pluralism and sovereignty
is a cornerstone. It means using
those Oval Office or Elysˇe Palace meetings to also build bridges to Bush's or Chirac's likely
adversaries or successors,
no matter how thorny this may be.
The Syrian stratagem today is simply
to wait until Bush and Chirac disappear from office. The Lebanese response cannot be as passive. It must aim to make both men
gradually less relevant amid a consensus that Lebanon should never again be
sacrificed to the whims of its neighbors.
Michael Young is opinion editor of THE DAILY
STAR.
Copyright (c) 2006 The Daily Star