Lebanon's Rule of Radicalization

By Charles Waterman

An underlying cause of U.S. failure to deal effectively with the Israeli-Palestinian dispute has been our unwillingness to distinguish between the moderates and the radicals in each camp. Instead of reducing U.S. economic and military assistance to Israel when it was run by Likud block extremists, we increased that assistance. Instead of responding to repeated overtures from moderates within the Palestinian camp, we impose "conditions" that can only weaken them vis a vis their radical competitors. To avoid making the same mistake should the U.S. again seek to grasp the Lebanese nettle, we should look realistically at the contending elements within each of the religious communities there.

Nothing characterizes Lebanon's prolonged travail as much as the inordinate degree of political power wielded by radical elements. Time after time, compromise solutions reached between reasonable internal or external parties fall prey to the devious veto of this or that extremist organization. And with each failure, the credibility of moderate compromisers falls lower. Nothing contributes to the perpetuation of the Lebanon crisis more than this phenomenon which has rendered pragmatism a rarity, and extremism the norm of political behavior. Besides the obvious brutalization of war itself, a number of dynamics have favored the strengthening of radical extremes.

In the non-compromising Lebanese milieu of sectarian conflict and international meddling, popular demands have simply not been attained by the more pragmatic, moderate parties. This factor opens the field to demagogic blackmail as regularly practiced by extremist politicians.

Most obviously, Shiite traditional politicians failed to match evolving expectancies of their constituencies for a fairer slice of the Lebanese economic and political pie. Their successor, Nabi Berri's pragmatic Amal movement, is itself under persistent pressure from the more radical Hezbollah and Islamic Amal. While Berri need not deliver an Islamic Republic to satisfy the popular emotions behind these factions, he must at least show a potential for increasing Shiite political clout within a unified Lebanese state. He has thus far failed to do so tangibly a failure which has strengthened extremists supported by Iran. While the latter do not yet predominate, they are sufficiently powerful to require Amal to adopt uncompromising positions.

In the Maronite camp radicalization is fueled by popular expectations that Christian leaders would be able to preserve Christian dominance and a Western mode of life. Leaders with the political will, strength, and desire to compromise these maximalist goals are rare indeed. Far easier is the route of rigidity desired by Christian extremists a course chosen early on by the present regime, to its ultimate detriment.

The mainline parties are rarely strong enough to withstand the debilitation which would follow a crackdown on their own extremist fringes. In the mid 1970s, for example, Fatah was frequently confronted with rejectionist Palestinian actions which ran counter to the policies of Yassir Arafat. Kidnappings of American diplomats in 1975 and 1976 by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), at a time when Fatah was seeking to broaden its international acceptability, are cases in point. Yet despite massive military dominance over the extremists, Fatah was in no position to bear the impossibly high political costs that suppression of the PFLP would have entailed during a time of continuous conflict with non Palestinian enemies.

Ironically, these same mainline parties have found it convenient to have an extremist fringe voicing extreme demands which they can then apply as bargaining pressure for negotiations with other elements in the war. Nabi Berri's ability to point at radical Shiite demands on Amal no doubt serves a useful purpose for him a situation mirrored in the political dynamics of many other communities. But it is clearly too double edged a sword for any moderate to wield long with impunity.

The ease of provocation in Lebanon's anarchic environment has made compromise solutions impossible to sustain. Countless truces along Beirut's Greenline, made by mainline forces, have been broken by a rocket, mortar, or kidnapping designed to provoke renewed hostilities. The lack of an effective command authority to suppress such provocations and the inevitable responses to them magnifies the power of small radical elements with their own axes to grind.

Internal Migration of Populations A Key Factor

Massive migration of populations particularly among Shiites and Maronites has created rootless populations susceptible to extremist formulations. An estimated 100,000 Shiites were expelled by Maronite militias from eastern areas of Beirut to the city's western side during 1975 and 1976. Another 140,000 fled South Lebanon during the 1978 Israeli incursion and remained in the Beirut area as of 1983. These and other migrations have spawned radicalized converts, not only to the mainline Shiite movement Al Amal, but also to its more extreme derivatives, the Hezbollah and Islamic Amal. Similarly, Maronite youths from outlying areas who moved into Beirut provide many of the recruits for the Lebanese Forces, a potent source of radical challenges to the traditional Maronite leadership. Demographic data also indicates a significant Maronite emigration from the country since the mid 1970s an unanalysed phenomenon which may, however, have left the political field more open to the spread of political extremism.

Other migrations have reinforced an increasing separation of populations, further eroding the necessity for compromise found among different communities living cheek by jowl. For instance, a movement of Christians from the Baalbeck and Hermel areas estimated at some 18,000 between 1977 and 1983 left a population in the area comprised of 90 percent Shiites far more susceptible to radical religious, Iranian, and Syrian influences.

The incapacity of the U.S. and her European allies to reciprocate overtures from pragmatic elements within non status quo organizations, including Amal and the moderate Palestine Liberation Organization elements when based in Lebanon, has reinforced radical formulations holding that compromise with the West is impractical.

The ease with which internal extremist groups accept support and subsequent manipulation by external states also strengthens radical forces. Syria has continually exercised pressures through its direction of a number of fringe players in Lebanon: the Lebanese Ba'ath, Al Sa'iqa, the Alawite factions in Tripoli, Sulayman Franjiyyah's Marada forces, and elements of the Popular Syrian Party. Israel, of course, has almost totally controlled Christian militias in South Lebanon and strongly influenced some of those in the north. Iran and Libya both have found it convenient to utilize Lebanese or Palestinian surrogates to upstage moderate solutions when they have threatened to become a reality.

In short, the "state of nature" which Lebanon became after 1975 has rendered the country seemingly incapable of sustaining moderate solutions to its basic problems. American policy makers must accept the reality that a "radical imperative" is at play a force powerful enough consistently to undermine leaders or groups moving in the direction of compromise.

Charles Waterman served for many years in US Government positions in the Middle East. He now is a consultant and writer on foreign affairs.