The Doha Accords: The Best Melancholly Solution
Writing by abuhatem on Monday, 26 of May , 2008 at 6:05 pm
Since Michel Aoun’s Free Patriotic Movement defeated Phalangist Amin Gemayl for his murdered son’s parliament seat last summer the Lebanese crisis has percipitated. The day after the fact, disputes arised with Gemayl accusing Aoun of electoral fraud and profiting from Armenian and Shiite votes. The March 14th government majority suffered its first blow.
A few months later, the road to the Presidential elections made clear that there would be no elections. A few March 14th MPs assasinated later, and March 8th’s withdrawal from the government, caused a true political crisis in Lebanon in November. Aoun was determined to be president, no matter what the cost. The realpolitik nature of the March 8th’s alliance - Hezbollah, Amal, and the Free Patriotic Movement - was apparent. Many failed attempts at acheiving an agreement and electing a president, with intervention from Maronite Cardinal Nasrallah Boutrous Sfeir, came of no avail.
For all of us that remember what happened next it was a classic game of who blinks first. Aoun pressured the government to accept an agreement in which he was president and Hariri prime minister, and Hariri refused. Many meetings between the opposition and the government ensued with no success. The U.S. and France attempted to place pressure on the opposition in numerous visits to the region, but the opposition would not blink. After Lebanon’s former pro-opposition president Emile Lahoud’s term was up on November 24th 2007, it became a country without a president.
Lahoud attempted to instate a state of emergency in his last hours of office which was immediately revoked by the interim March 14th government. Hezbollah called the interim government’s calls to elect its own president “a coup.” President Bush had encouraged his allies in March 14th to elect a president switfly without Hezbollah. Hezbollah drew their line firmly in the ground and with a millieu of threats stalemate ensued. The brinkmanship of an international struggle lied squarely in Beirut.
The government’s actions in shutting down Hezbollah’s telecommunications network was the final straw for March 8th. Hezbollah showed its power, and in a four day occupation of Beirut and Tyre, proved that it held the balance of power. Seven months after Lahoud’s term completed, the government finally decided that anarchy, civil war, and instability were too much of a price to pay, and gave Hezbollah veto power in the Doha Agreement two days ago.
Homo economicus, self-interested and rational man, does not enter into agreements or accords unless he sees benefit. The Doha Agreement is a positive-sum game. The opposition achieves veto power and keeps their weapons, while March 14th retains stability and a Sanoira led cabinet. The opposition has proved that it knows how to play its cards right in achieving its objectives . Lebanese politics are clearly not serving the Lebanese - they serve as a battlefield for the world powers.
Hezbollah’s alliance with Christian leader Michele Aoun has served its purpose for both parties. And the broad coalition of former adversaries in the March 14th bloc will probably begin to break up. As history shows, politics, especially Lebanese politics, makes strange bedfellows. While the stability brought about by the Doha agreement is perferable to anarchy for both parties, a new era of internal strife appears inevitable after the next parliamentary elections set for 2009. Lebanon is between a rock and a hardplace.
International relations theorist Kenneth Waltz notes that bipolar international systems are more stable than unipolar ones. The Middle East is currently a bipolar balance-of-power system. Although the Doha agreement gives Hezbollah the advantage, the threat of war has been put off for now. While most see it as a victory for Hezbollah, French President Nicholas Sarkozy called the agreement a “great success.” Even the United States government congratulated Lebanon on the agreement. Lofty rhetoric about democracy is being rejected for more sober talk of stability. As Robin Wright, chief Middle East correspondent for the Washington Post said recently despite American rhetoric about Arab democratization, it is clear that its final realization was the need for stability.
Lebanon is not the first country to be an international battlefield and it certaintly will not be the last. In Taiwan, Burma, North Korea, and the Eastern Bloc during the Cold War, the west and its allies found that stability was a higher goal than democracy. When democratization and standing for freedom has burdensome consequences, great powers act in their self-interest and cost-benefit analysis. In the height of the second World War, the Allies united with Stalin’s Russia.
Lebanon cannot solve its problems through the political sphere or with war on the streets. Until the Syria-Iran-Hezbollah-Hamas alliance is broken up, there will be a vital interest in Lebanon for Iranian foreign policy. It is the same with the U.S. and France. These countries care for Lebanon as a means to an end. The recently reported Turkish mediated Israeli-Syrian talks are a good start. If Syria meets its security and political objectives, it will find no need in Hezbollah or Iranian protection. Allies and enemies come and go in the self-help world of international politics. Yet as long as the greater diseases of the problems are not cured, the Doha agreement’s attempts at peace, may be unfortunately the temporary and melancholly solution to Lebanon’s problems.
Category: Lebanese Politics
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