Lebanon: Still No Prez, Yet No Abyss Either

Today Lebanese politicians failed again to name a new president, postponing a parliamentary vote for the seventh time in three months. Having been on a dangerous knife-edge all year, Lebanon now has lacked a president since Nov. 23, when Emile Lahoud's term of office expired. Last week, there was another punch-up in West Beirut among students aligned to different factions. You might think that Lebanon is about to plunge into the civil war that so many people have been fearing.

But, in fact, things may be looking much better, at least in the short term. The brinksmanship going on right now isn't about confronting existential threats to one Lebanese community or another, but rather about negotiating a temporary win-win political deal that involves dividing up the spoils of government power.

The majority March 14 coalition backed by the U.S. and the minority March 8 coalition supported by Syria and Iran have actually agreed on a compromise candidate for president, Lebanese army commander Michel Suleiman.

March 8, which includes Hizballah, publicly backed Michel Aoun, a former army commander and Hizballah ally, as its choice for president. But many believe that Suleiman is Hizballah's preferred choice, first because he is not March 14's man, and second, because as a top military officer since 1998 he was close to Syria and has consistently supported Hizballah's military wing.

March 14 preferred a candidate more to the liking of Lebanon's pro-democracy forces, but threw in with Suleiman rather than allow a dangerous political vacuum to develop. The real issue now, pending some unexpected reversal, is simply dividing up the main government positions like prime minister and army commander between the political factions.

Either March 14 or March 8 could have pushed the country into a deeper crisis. The former could have insisted on using its slim majority in parliament to elect one of its own as president of the republic, the opposition be damned. The latter might have influenced the departing Lahoud to appoint a new caretaker government and hand it power, the current March 14-led government be damned. The first scenario could have produced a violent backlash, the second a dangerous constitutional deadlock.

Among the decisive new factors, perhaps, is Annapolis, the new U.S.-led effort, begun during the Maryland conference two weeks ago, to achieve a comprehensive peace settlement in the Middle East. It represents the Bush administration's gradual shift from idealism to realism--from pushing a democracy agenda that shows zero-tolerance for countries and groups like Syria and Hizballah to pushing a security agenda that involves bringing the Middle East's warring parties into negotiations. Syria would have made a strategic mistake by ignoring Bush's invitation to engage in talks aimed at a Syrian-Israeli accord over the Golan Heights. Seeing that the White House no longer had the stomach for brinksmanship in Lebanon, the March 14 forces threw in the towel and agreed to compromise with March 8.

That amounts to a hugely demoralizing setback for the millions of Lebanese who took to the streets on March 14, 2005 to protest Syria's military domination of Lebanon after the assassination of March 14's martyr, former Prime Minister Rafic Hariri.

Nick Blanford's time.com story about the Suleiman deal this week captured the political shift and the accompanying disappointment, quoting a senior March 14 figure saying, "The message the Americans are sending to the region is that what succeeds is terror, bombings and a total disregard for democracy. No one is going to remove the feeling from March 14 that we have been dumped by the Americans."

The fear, of course, is that the U.S. will "sell" Lebanon to Syria once again, as it did in 1990, in order to get Damascus to cooperate on broader Middle East issues--such as getting Bashar Assad to join an anti-Iran coalition, just as his father Hafez signed up for the anti-Iraq war 17 years ago.

In the short term, Lebanon can use the peace. Nobody should ever have believed that George Bush was going to bring democracy to the Lebanese. It was unrealistic to think that either March 14 or March 8 could triumph, winner take all. But to prevent a long-term disaster in Lebanon, and so that Hariri did not die in vain, the U.S. has to see through the commitments Bush made in Annapolis "to do all I can" for a just peace in the Middle East.

--By Scott MacLeod/Cairo