Moukhtara, Lebanon
WALID JUMBLATT is trying to say something. Shortly before a meeting of Lebanese opposition figures, several hundred people are gathered in front of the Jumblatt family ancestral seat, a 19th-century palace and gardens in Moukhtara, a small village in Lebanon’s Chouf Mountains, when the crowd breaks into the Lebanese national anthem. Jumblatt looks exasperated. A thin, stylishly dressed man in his mid-50s, Jumblatt has large, sad eyes and hunched shoulders that are expressive vehicles for articulating both his frequent wit and displeasure, and now it seems as though his body is letting out a small sigh of frustration. He is trying to say something, but with the singing, it now looks hopeless. So, after a few bars, Walid Bey, as he’s frequently called in Lebanon, joins in.
While former prime minister Rafik Hariri was the highest profile figure to oppose Lebanon’s Syrian-backed government, Jumblatt, leader of the country’s Druze community, representing about 10 percent of the population, was the first prominent non-Christian official to stand against Syria’s Assad regime, which has occupied Lebanon for the last 29 years. And since the February 14 explosion that killed Hariri, Lebanon’s most powerful Sunni politician, Jumblatt has become the international symbol of Lebanon’s Cedar Revolution, with his widely quoted statement to the Washington Post‘s David Ignatius comparing the regional effects of Iraq’s elections to the fall of the Berlin Wall. It is an interesting turn of events for a man once allied closely with the Syrians, at least when the regime was headed by Bashar al-Assad’s father, Hafez, the man who had Jumblatt’s father, Kemal, assassinated in 1977.
“The Syrians thought that some of their past allies, like me, would defend them,” Jumblatt told me a few weeks ago at his second home in Beirut’s Clemenceau district. “In the past, I accepted their line as a fait accompli. Now I’m fed up, and for the first time in my life I feel free. I have a free conscience, because my father opposed Syria and now I can sleep at night.”
This compelling personal drama is unfolding on a very large stage. All of a sudden the Bush administration’s grand vision for a post-9/11, post-Iraq-war, free Middle East seems to hinge on a democratic Lebanon independent of Syrian tutelage. Meanwhile, the Assad regime’s regional prestige, and maybe its survival, depends on its ability to control its neighbor. During the course of a career that was thrust upon him with the murder of his father, Jumblatt has shown himself to be a loyal leader deeply involved with the concerns of his Druze constituency, a ruthless enemy to his foe of the day, and a flexible, sometimes quixotic tactician who knows better than anyone else which way the wind is blowing in Lebanon. Jumblatt is not just an important player, but also a kind of guide to the action.
Jumblatt and his Progressive Socialist party first broke with Syria over the decision by Damascus last September to extend by three years the term of Lebanese president Emile Lahoud. Syria’s heavy-handed extension of Lahoud’s mandate provided a rallying point for the Lebanese opposition, but what indicated that it had gained substantial ground inside the country was Jumblatt’s January meeting with the wife of one of his Christian foes in the Lebanese civil war, Samir Geagea, the imprisoned leader of the Lebanese Forces, the Christian militia. With that meeting, the Syrians felt the ground shifting under their feet.
“Prohibiting intercommunal alliances was one of the main taboos imposed by Syria,” says Farid al-Khazen, head of the political science department at the American University of Beirut. “But now we’re coming back to the normal aspect of Lebanese politics, how it was before 1990, when the government and opposition both had leaders from different communities.”
While Jumblatt’s meeting with Mrs. Geagea was a sign that Syria was vulnerable–the Druze leader wouldn’t have dared it otherwise–Jumblatt explains that it was also a step in postwar reconciliation. “We fought each other. There was a civil war. Spain had one and so did the United States. It’s time to heal now and think about the future.”
Whatever that future holds for Lebanon and the rest of the Arab world, the new alliances created and the old ones dashed by the forces now at work in the Middle East suggest that the region can no longer be understood in terms of the bipolar dynamic that has long dominated Middle East political discourse. There is not one Arab nation standing together against the imperialist designs of Washington and its Zionist stooges, as the struggle used to be construed here. Solving the Palestinian question is no longer the be-all and end-all of Middle East diplomacy. Rather, within the Arab world itself, there are countless challenges, conflicts, and political disputes between countries, tribes, religious, and ethnic groups that are rising to the surface. Neither the force of Arab nationalist rhetoric nor the violence of Arab nationalist regimes is capable of suppressing this any longer. Case in point: Syria’s decades-long “relationship” with Lebanon has at last been named for what it is–an occupation.
Jumblatt himself has had recourse to plenty of anti-American, anti-Israel verbiage in the past. One of his most famous outbursts cost him an American visa after he said he wished Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz had been killed in a missile attack on the hotel he was staying in during a fall 2003 visit to Baghdad. Jumblatt called Wolfowitz a “virus” spreading “corruption in the Arab land of Iraq and in Palestine.”
Now Jumblatt has reassessed the effects of that virus. “It’s strange for me to say it,” he told Ignatius last week, “but this process of change has started because of the American invasion of Iraq.” WhenI phoned him last week, Jumblatt deadpanned: “Maybe I should just go to Washington now and become a neocon.”
Of course, if the neoconservative creed consists of believing that there’s a causal relationship between authoritarian Arab regimes and the social, political, and economic distress of the Middle East, then Jumblatt is already in the fold.
“These regimes cannot stay this way in the long term,” he told me in Beirut. “The Arab world cannot stay like that. Arabs are leaving. Have you seen our elite? The Lebanese have an excellent elite, you find them wherever you go–they’re in the States, and Europe. But the opposition movement is having an effect on the Lebanese diaspora. We need freedom so these people can come back. If we succeed, and set up a democracy like it used to be, we’ll be an example in the region. Let Syria have the system they want, but let them leave us free. We want our system. We’re the only country in the Arab world that has freedom of press and speech. The liberals throughout the region are waiting for us. If we fail, it will return to the status quo.”
Has Jumblatt changed his mind about Wolfowitz? “Did you see the nice comments he had about me?” Jumblatt asks, referring to an interview Wolfowitz gave to Lebanese Broadcasting Corporation TV. (“Even a man like Walid Jumblatt who has said some not-so-nice things in the past has had a lot of courage in standing up to the Syrians. We admire that,” Wolfowitz said.) Jumblatt goes on: “It shows that when you’re dealing with civilized people, even if you attack them, you can engage in rational discourse. I know. You’re called a traitor in the morning, and a patriot in the evening.”
Whatever Jumblatt’s feelings are about Bush administration officials, the one political figure he seems especially interested in right now is the controversial Iraqi Shiite leader Ahmad Chalabi–“an intriguing person,” Jumblatt calls him. He jokes about Chalabi’s many loyalties and the inability of his American patrons to figure him out. It seems Jumblatt appreciates the gamesmanship and survival instincts of a kindred spirit. In the two of them–with their fractious hot-and-cold attitudes toward U.S. power–one senses the emergence of a new type of Arab political leader (or perhaps the reemergence of an old type).
If the Arabs’ Berlin Wall is crumbling, as a number of observers besides Jumblatt believe, the obvious casualties are Arab dictators. Who will replace them? The dictators themselves–whose explanation is echoed by any number of U.S. experts and academics–say après nous, a deluge of Islamist extremists. That certainly can’t be ruled out. But it may also be the case that fewer Arab strongmen means more Jumblatts–opportunists, horse-traders, and politicians who are going to cut lots of deals, including with parties that are not friendly to U.S. interests. As some of our enemies pass from the scene, it’s useful to recognize that many of our allies are also going to look different.
Lee Smith is writing a book on Arab culture.
