On what do you base your hope for Lebanon?
At Elon University a student from Lebanon asked me this excellent question. I did not do a great job of answering, though I did say that the Lebanese people are amazingly resilient. They are survivors. They have an uncanny ability to get around a problem without even solving it. Truly, though I did not say it, the Lebanese sometimes seem to avoid disaster by ignoring it. Maybe this is just a clever trick; they have merely “disappeared” the issue and will pull it out of another pocket when they are ready.
I also should have said and didn’t that my hope has something to do with the evidence that Lebanon is crucial, to the Middle East, to the world.
Other powers care about Lebanon—Saudi, Syria, Iran, Israel, the emirates, France, Russia, the U.S. They meddle, criticize, encourage, suggest, demand, manipulate, bribe, bomb, invade, occupy. The pressure is daily. Consequently, the Lebanese never feel alone or independent. They know that everybody’s opinion matters when a country is so small and diverse and influential. Some would like to devour her; some want to mock her. Many love and support her. All see her as important in some way.
This both paralyzes and protects. It is a problem, and it is a strength.
Even while I write this Lebanon is in big trouble. To mention only one dysfunction, Lebanon has no president, has not had a president for nearly a year now. Authority to elect a president, who must be a Christian, is vested in the parliament, and there is a stalemate in the parliament. Two men are competing for the presidency. Of course, the two candidates have differing views and supporters. One has major support from Shiite Muslims. Neither is willing to back down, though the lack of a president weakens Christian power and influence in the country. Parliamentarians on both sides have prolonged the agony by absenting themselves from any meeting in which a vote can be taken.
Each candidate also has backers in other countries and these backers have ways of exercising pressure: threats, promises, money, etc. They are a big part of the problem. A recent news release was amusing to someone who ever thinks about the big country-small country syndrome that I have described in my book. David Hale, the American ambassador to Lebanon, said to a group of Lebanese leaders, essentially this (though I am not quoting precisely): “Ignore Saudi Arabia, ignore Iran and France and the United States, and just elect a president!” And the leaders’ response was something like, “We can’t do that,” implying, I suspect, that Hale just did not understand.
I laughed, though I felt like crying. Clearly something is wrong. How long can Lebanon survive without fixing whatever it is that is broken?
But Lebanon will survive. For long stretches of the civil war, Lebanon had no central government at all, but life rocked along pretty much as usual. In some communities militias took up the slack, taking care of security, sometimes even cleaning up the streets. And ordinary citizens managed the rest—strung lines to swipe electricity from any visible line, drove with an expired license (or none), showed up at work, stayed civil, obeyed their consciences and the social customs, endured. If the past is a prediction, Lebanon will eventually get a president, without actually fixing the system that let this year-long failure happen.
I have to admit that there was a time during the war when I nearly despaired and it occurred to me seriously that Lebanon might not survive. Bombs were falling everywhere. The Army had fallen apart. Ferries were carrying away desperate people who were just trying to stay alive or save their children. I described it then as a sinking ship, the engine dead, the doomed crew bailing water.
In fact, Lebanon is now a ship that has survived capture, piracy, mutiny, desertion, torpedo strikes, and holes in the hull with the ocean streaming in. Yet it floats and often becomes the lifeboat picking up survivors of other sunken ships.
I wish I had mentioned to the young woman at Elon that back in the 1970s we Americans living in Lebanon used to say, “If this country did not exist, it would need to be invented.” Though I realized something of Lebanon’s uniqueness at the time and joined in repeating this statement, I understood it only superficially. Now I see that Lebanon is a microcosm of the Middle East. Everything—people groups, religious sects, ideologies, movements, music, clothing styles, dangers, problems—whatever exists anywhere in the M.E., as well as a few things unheard of elsewhere, can be found in Lebanon. Its natural diversity causes sparks from far corners to ignite in Beirut, and some of them are very dangerous. Likewise, ideas simmering in Lebanon fly across borders like airborne seeds to fall throughout the Middle East, producing desire or resentment, ridicule or jealousy, even invitations to join the party.
Maybe we Americans were right for once. It is probably true that if Lebanon were destroyed, the world would miss it badly and invent it again.