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Pushed to the brink, Lebanon pulls back

As international rivalries play out in the tiny nation, it finds ways to endure.

By ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published June 24, 2007

BEIRUT, Lebanon - Lebanon is enduring, despite snowballing violence and a persistent political crisis.

The army is locked in battle with Islamic militants in the north, rockets were fired into Israel from the south, a car bomb in Beirut has killed a prominent politician, and a political impasse threatens to produce two rival governments.

And it is still fixing the damage inflicted by Israel in last year's war between the Jewish state and Hezbollah guerrillas.

Lebanon would seem to be teetering. But somehow it always manages to pull back from the brink.

The events have shaken the country, keeping away tourists, driving out business and raising worries of a renewed civil war - similar to the 1975-90 conflict that killed 150, 000 people.

"Everything that is happening in Lebanon is grave, " Arab League Secretary-General Amr Moussa said when he arrived Tuesday in Beirut as head of an Arab delegation trying to mediate an end to the worst political crisis since the civil war.

Lebanon has always been a battleground for competing regional and international powers.

Lebanon's troubles also are intertwined with the wider confrontation between America and Iran, although some analysts believe that also makes a renewal of civil war unlikely.

"If left to their own means, the Lebanese would destroy Lebanon, " said Hilal Khashan, a political science professor at the American University of Beirut. But "there is an international decision that Lebanon be maintained."

Political analyst Sahar Baasiri said a functioning Lebanon serves the interests of both the foreign powers and the Lebanese factions.

For the Americans, she said, Lebanon "will be their only victory. The Palestinian situation has collapsed. They cannot convince us that Iraq is improving. This is the only place where they may be able to keep it on its feet. ... And none of the Lebanese factions wants the country to go down, no matter how much they disagree."

Also, Baasiri said, the nation of 4-million has held together because it still has the machinery of state and army to cope with each new crisis.

And crises have come in a rush:

- Clashes in December and January between pro- and antigovernment forces killed 11 people and took on a Sunni-Shiite overtone.

- When the U.N. Security Council three weeks ago ordered a tribunal to probe the assassination of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, it polarized the country.

- A June 13 car bomb assassinated lawmaker Walid Eido, the seventh foe of Syria to be killed in the last two years.

- The army, which fell apart during the civil war, fought Palestinian militants in the Nahr el-Bared refugee camp for more than a month, even though 79 soldiers have been killed, including three on Saturday. On Friday, the military said it had largely destroyed the group's base.

The group, Fatah Islam, had been largely isolated by other Palestinians and by the mainstream Sunni community.

Khashan, the American University professor, said that the Lebanese know the dangers of civil war but that the political system, which shares power on a religious basis, does not allow real change, and the solution may have to await shifts in the wider Middle East.

"We have to see the end of the standoff between America and Iran, " he said.

[Last modified June 24, 2007, 01:21:10]