Lebanon's voters gave the White House the victory it wanted -- with a lot of help from Hezbollah.By Juan Cole
June 10, 2009 | President Barack Obama's speech in Cairo last Thursday may already have borne fruit. His call for political moderates in the Muslim world to fight extremism may have helped tip the weekend's parliamentary elections in Lebanon to the anti-Syrian March 14 Alliance. Obama did not explicitly call for the defeat of Hezbollah in the elections, but the Lebanese already knew where the administration's sympathies lay. His speech came three weeks after a Beirut visit by Vice President Joe Biden in which Biden
warned at a news conference, "We will evaluate the shape of our assistance programs based on the composition of the new government and the policies it advocates."
Whatever the size of Obama's influence, the election has already had a direct impact of the future of Arab-Israeli negotiations and on the realization of U.S. aims in the region. A Hezbollah win would have strengthened the case made by the right-wing Israeli Likud Party that Iran and its proxies are a higher priority for Israel's foreign policy than trying to restart the peace process with the Palestinians. For Americans and the rest of the world, the Lebanese elections were about whether Iran would be strengthened or weakened in the Levant, and whether Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu would have a new pretext for intransigence. The answer to both questions was a resounding no.
But while the consequences may have been global, the politics, as always, were local. Even before Biden's visit and Obama's speech, most of the Lebanese public had probably already made up its mind about the arrogant and presumptuous Hezbollah-dominated opposition. The March 14 Alliance won because of the strength of the local economy, the desire for tourism, and anger at Hezbollah for streetfighting in 2008 that left 11 dead, more than a year of protests and sit-ins, and the Hezbollah bloc's ultimately successful attempt to strong-arm its way to effective veto power in the government.
Lebanon, where no one religious sect can claim a majority, is a small pond with a handful of big frogs in it. The chief power broker since 2005 has been the dapper, goateed Saad Hariri, son of slain multibillionaire and former Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri, who was assassinated in February 2005. Saad Hariri will now become prime minister. The Hariris, Sunni Muslims, made their pile in Saudi Arabia and are close to the royal family there. This political dynasty stands for Arab cosmopolitanism and represents the urban, upwardly mobile Sunni middle classes (Sunnis are just over a quarter of the Lebanese population, Shiites at least a third).
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