Deja Vu in Lebanon

Lebanon is passing through several grim anniversaries. Friday was the 25th anniversary of the assassination of Christian militia leader Bashir Gemayel, who was killed in a car bomb by a Syrian agent just a week after Israel -- which then occupied much of Lebanon -- engineered his election to the presidency with a green light from the United States. Within a week after his death, Christian militiamen -- with support from the Israeli army -- massacred the Palestinian inhabitants of Sabra and Chatila refugee camps. The tragedy was a serious blow for the American government, which had promised to protect the Palestinians in Lebanon as part of a US brokered truce between Israel and the Palestinian Liberation Organization, under which PLO militants agreed to leave the country. War and anarchy followed, including suicide bombings attacks against the US embassy and Marine Corps barracks.

All of this would just be a history lesson if it weren't for some ominous parallels with the current state of play in Lebanon. The Gemayel family has been back in the news this past year, after Bashir's nephew, MP and industry minister Pierre Gemayel, was himself assassinated in November. Pierre's father, former president Amin Gemayel, blamed Syria for his son's death, and became a leading member of the American-supported coalition that backs the current Lebanese government against the Iranian and Syrian supported opposiition. Amin Gemayel even visited the Oval Office earlier this year.

The Lebanese political crisis is coming to a head in a presidential election season that will begin next week, and which has become a focus of regional rivalries as it was 25 years ago. The anti-Syrian camp would like to replace outgoing president Emile Lahoud -- widely seen as a Syrian stooge -- with one of their own. This would help the government maintain it's fragile authority, and help it clamp down on what remains of Syrian influence in Lebanon -- inclulding weapons smuggling to Hizballah, the political party and militia that finally drove Israel out of Lebanon in 2000. Conversely, the Hizballah-led, pro-Syrian opposition is trying to delay the parliamentary vote for president and settle on a toothless consensus candidate, so that they can re-arm themselves for another round against Israel without interference. Foreign ambassadors say they aren't meddling in Lebanon's internal affairs, but no one believes them.

And Lebanon's 200,000 or so Palestinian refugees are in the news again as well. Though the mainstream Palestinian political parties -- Fatah and Hamas -- no longer use Lebanon as a base for attacks against Israel as they did in the 70's and 80's, Palestinian camps are becoming havens for foreign militants and home grown Islamic radicals. The Lebanese government may have put down the Fatah al Islam uprising in Nahr al Bared camp, but there are others that are seething. Sixty years of exile and repression tends to do that.

So what are the lessons of the Bashir Gemayel era for today? The rise and fall of Bashir was part of the failed American and Israeli attempt to re-draw the map of the Middle East in the 1980's, by kicking out the PLO and installing a government that would make peace with Israel. A similar project is afoot now. After Israel's failure to destroy Hizballah by force during last summer's war, the U.S. and it's western allies are trying to isolate Hizballah and Syria politically, by supporting the anti-Syrian coalition in Lebanon and using their control of the UN Security Council to turn up the heat.

But as long as the Arab-Israeli conflict is unresolved, Lebanon will always be an arena for that conflict. Lebanon is an unstable country filled with tribal leaders who look to foreign powers for help settling their domestic scores and who then gang up on each other if anyone of them gets too powerful. By not pursuing regional peace as eagerly as it is pursuing Syria, Iran and Hizballah, and by affiliating itself with the same old cast of sectarian characters like the Gemayels, America is bound to find itself humiliated here just as it was in the 1980's. And although the US is lucky not to have troops here this time, the stakes could be higher if Lebanon starts falling apart again. If more people like the militants of Fatah al Islam start showing up, Lebanon could find itself an arena not just for the Middle East conflict, but global jihad.

--Andrew Lee Butters/Beirut