Beirut Notebook

Lebanese politics have entered a period of deep and complex deal-making of a sort that I am barely equipped to read about, let alone blog about, and it’s probably a good thing that I’ll be heading out of Lebanon and traveling around the region a bit next week.

One new analysis that I think is worth reading is this one, by Christopher Dickey, in Newsweek (I know, me too).

What was missing, particularly in Washington, was an understanding that politics in the Middle East could be a game of nuance, where complex constituencies with complicated and often conflicting agendas have to be taken into account. And while that is most obvious during free election campaigns, it’s true even in monarchies and under authoritarian regimes. What I think and hope we are seeing now is a much more subtle appreciation of the role that politics short of war–indeed, instead of war–can play in reshaping the region.

President Barack Obama’s speech in Cairo last week was an evocation of that fresh approach.  Lebanon’s elections over the weekend were a window into it. And what may be most surprising is the role that Saudi Arabia, which is utterly undemocratic but highly political, is playing at many different levels. Its long-term goal is to preserve its regime by stabilizing the region through any political and diplomatic means available. And its current challenge–much like that of the United States–is to stop the Iranian political momentum that has been building for the last several years.

In Lebanon, the Saudis gave massive financial support to the victorious coalition of Saad Hariri. As long ago as March, one well-connected operative from Riyadh was telling me privately but with evident pride that his country had spent more in Lebanon, than the record-breaking $715 million Barack Obama’s campaign spent in the United States. And even if my source was indulging in wild hyperbole, the extent to which Beirut had become a kind of electoral e-Bay for vote buyers from Riyadh and Tehran made international headlines.

But the defeat that the Lebanese handed Hizbullah at the polls on Sunday will only be a minor political setback for the mullahs in Tehran if the United States and its key Arab allies–Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Jordan–do not develop a coherent political strategy throughout the region. And my sense from talking to leaders in all these countries is that they think we’re not there yet, even if Obama is trying to move American policy in the right direction.
[via FLC]

The illegal spending by all parties in Lebanon is the great lingering question about the legitimacy of last week’s election, at least in my mind, which is probably why local politicians will be happy to see the issue go away. One big problem is that the man who most people in the country trust to be independent enough to dig into it was the man who ran the elections, and has a major stake in their success — Ziyad Baroud, the Minister of the Interior. If the figure cited by Dickey’s unnamed Saudi source are inflated even threefold, it still throws into stark relief the strange indifference to corruption in this column, by Elliott Abrams, a hawkish former national security official in the Bush Administration, from yesterday’s New York Times:

There are rumors about large amounts of Saudi money floating in to support the victorious March 14 coalition, but so what? Hezbollah gets at least $200 million a year from Iran.

Meanwhile, I think the enduring image of this election is actually (sadly) one from a chart:

Ignore all the numbers and pretty colors, and just look, on the left column, at all those zeros. Out of 26 districts in Lebanon, there were only three in which the less popular party won even a single seat. That’s a sign of trouble if you ask me.

Tags: Lebanon, Lebanon Elections

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 13th, 2009 at 8:03 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.