For the second time in three decades, a substantial American investment of time, money, and effort to strengthen the Lebanese government and support its fledgling democracy has come to very little. Hezbollah, Tehran, and Damascus now dominate the country’s intractable domestic politics. US diplomacy is left powerless, wondering how to make the best of an increasingly untenable situation in the Levant.
Reflecting on American involvement in Lebanon in the 1980s often inspires neuralgia among former and current policymakers. Then, as now, a destructive mix of actors were wreaking havoc on the Lebanese state, beginning with the PLO’s relocation to Beirut after the Jordanians expelled it for “Black September.” The June 1982 Israeli invasion to root out the PLO triggered the United States’ dramatically deepened involvement in Lebanon. The US government sought to defuse tensions between Lebanon and Israel, and then deployed the Marines as part of the Multinational Force to facilitate the PLO’s evacuation, an opportunity that offered a moment of optimism for the Lebanese government to expand its writ. But a rapid tumble of events, including the assassination of incoming Lebanese President Bachir Gemayel, the massacre of Palestinians at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps, the failure of regional states to support the May 17 agreement for Israeli withdrawal negotiated by Secretary of State George Shultz, and the systematic effort of Syria and its allies to destroy an independent Lebanon created a difficult and dangerous environment for the American peacekeepers, culminating in the bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut—Iran’s first, but not last, use of proxies to carry out a lethal assault on US military forces.
In spite of some progress in training and equipping the Lebanese military, American efforts to strengthen Lebanese institutions were stymied. Domestic political concerns about the possible negative impact of America’s Lebanon policy on the 1984 re-election campaign encouraged some of President Reagan’s advisers to argue for a swift withdrawal. It is no wonder that a combination of frustration, guilt, and dismay often plague American reflections on this period in foreign policy. By 1984, when the United States turned away from Lebanon, it was clear that the country had been “lost” to Syrian domination.
Although the civil war ended with the 1989 Taif Agreement (inspired, more than anything else, by the exhaustion that fifteen years of violence had wrought), the Lebanese state continued to stagnate under Syria’s heavy hand. American involvement and interest in Lebanon, limited at best for the next decade and a half, was punctuated by rare outbreaks of concern about calming the Levant, including negotiating the 1996 Israel-Lebanon Ceasefire Agreement that established a multinational monitoring mechanism to minimize civilian deaths. The US granted some economic assistance and small amounts of military aid, but overall Lebanon was low on the list of Washington’s priorities.
Events in 2004 and early 2005 began to restore Lebanon-related issues to the forefront of American interests. In September 2004, the UN Security Council passed resolution 1559, which pledged international support for Lebanese sovereignty, calling for “foreign forces to withdraw; [and] disbanding and dis[arming] all Lebanese and non-Lebanese militias.” Despite the Israeli withdrawal four years earlier, the Syrian military occupation remained and Hezbollah invented new reasons for maintaining its arms despite the end of the Israeli occupation—the ostensible pretext for maintaining an armed militia. Further, resolution 1559 inaugurated a push against Syria and a renewal of Franco-American collaboration in the Middle East after the froideur arising from the Iraq War. Assistant Secretary of State Bill Burns and Deputy Secretary Richard Armitage traveled to Damascus to encourage Syria to reconsider its occupation of Lebanon, among other things. Such public support for Lebanon may have encouraged Prime Minister Rafik Hariri’s boldness when Syrian President Bashar al-Assad pushed to illegally extend Lebanese President Emile Lahoud’s term. The January 2005 vote in Iraq also appeared to play a role since it supported the notion that Arabs craved democracy. (Lebanese Druze chieftain Walid Jumblatt gave credence to the importance of these developments when he said, “It’s strange for me to say it, but this process of change has started because of the American invasion of Iraq. . . . When I saw the Iraqi people voting three weeks ago, eight million of them, it was the start of a new Arab world.”)
Hariri’s murder on February 14, 2005, catalyzed a majority of the Lebanese populace. They bravely asserted that they would no longer quietly ignore the stream of assassinations that had punctuated their country for decades. Many Lebanese rose up and proclaimed a revolution to bring freedom to their country. Backed by a strong and broad international consensus, they managed to push Syria’s military out of Lebanon in just over two months, ending its overt occupation of their country.
Washington quickly recognized the significance of the so-called Cedar Revolution and was enthusiastic about supporting Lebanon as it wrestled with the aftermath of this event. In a message to the Lebanese people, President Bush pledged, “The American people are on your side.” The nascent relationship rested on three pillars: strengthening Lebanese government institutions, particularly the military; establishing a transparent international investigation of the Hariri assassination; and isolating the Syrian regime to prevent it from destabilizing Lebanon. Implementing all of these elements turned out to be a much more complex, lengthy, and frustrating effort than American policymakers had imagined