Losing Lebanon

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Now it is payback time. Lebanese officials, along with Israeli military sources and Western diplomats, say that while Syrian President Bashar Assad may be willing to help pull the Bush Administration out of the Iraqi quicksand, he hopes to exact concessions that would allow him to treat Lebanon, where the Syrian regime has vast financial interests, as his private turf. And according to these same sources, he is unnerved by a U.N.-sponsored inquiry that implicates top Syrian officials in the February 2005 car bombing that killed former Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri and 22 others. Assad is hoping that the international probe will peter out. Indictments issued by a U.N.-sponsored court against members of the Syrian leadership could critically weaken the Damascus regime and lead to U.N. sanctions against Assad's clique. Hizballah pulled its six ministers out of the 24-seat Cabinet rather than vote to support an international court to prosecute the Hariri case, and the assassination of Gemayel, the scion of a powerful Christian family and a fervent anti-Syrian, was seen as further warning to Siniora. His Cabinet voted anyway to recommend an international tribunal into the Hariri killing, pushing Hizballah into the streets last week.

Hizballah also accuses Siniora's ministers of secretly siding with Israel and the U.S. by failing to provide backup during the July-August war with Israel. With its massive street demonstrations, Hizballah hopes to intimidate the country's other parties into giving it more than the six Cabinet seats it had held, enabling it to block any legislation seen as contrary to the interests of Hizballah and its backers in Damascus and Tehran.

Whether Hizballah succeeds depends on how long it can capitalize on the p.r. boost it gained from waging war with Israel. Among Lebanon's downtrodden Shi'ites, Hizballah leader Sheik Hassan Nasrallah now enjoys mythical status. The many faces of Nasrallah appear everywhere. At times he is portrayed as a jolly preacher, a wise scholar or a glowering warrior with his turban like a black storm cloud overhead. When a starstruck woman requested the abaya, or robe, that he wore during the war, Nasrallah obliged, and since then TV crews have been following the woman across Lebanon as she displays this now holy garment for other faithful fans.

And yet even in Lebanon, Nasrallah isn't universally adored. Many Lebanese consider it a heroic but colossal blunder on Nasrallah's part to have provoked the Israelis by having his fighters stage a cross-border raid in July and kidnap two Israeli soldiers. War damage in Lebanon is assessed at $3.6 billion. More than 1,200 Lebanese died, and 3,700 were wounded. Another 974,184 were left homeless. Says parliamentarian Saad Hariri, son of the slain former Prime Minister: "When it starts raining and getting cold, people will realize what a huge mistake it was for Hizballah to start this war." What's more, the olive groves and hills of southern Lebanon are sown with more than 1 million bomblets from Israeli cluster bombs, say U.N. experts, making it hazardous if not lethal to wander into these areas.