Lebanon

In January, Douglas Murray explained in The Spectator how relations in the Middle East were becoming increasingly tense. With northern Iraq now in turmoil, following the advance of Islamist militant group Isis, Douglas's insight seems prescient. Syria has fallen apart. Major cities in Iraq have fallen to al-Qa’eda. Egypt may have stabilised slightly after a counter-coup. But Lebanon is starting once again to fragment. Beneath all these facts — beneath all the explosions, exhortations and blood — certain themes are emerging. Some years ago, before the Arab ‘Spring’ ever sprung, I remember asking one top security official about the region. What, I wondered, was their single biggest fear?

It's Lebanon's birthday this month -- 70 years since independence -- but no one's really in the mood to party. Our first birthday present last week came in the form of two suicide bombers belonging to the Al Qaeda-affiliated Abdullah Azzam Brigades who detonated their payloads at the Iranian embassy in Beirut killing 26 people.

  Beirut On New Year’s Eve 2011, I asked a senior Swedish diplomat, who had just crossed over from Damascus and was ready to see in the New Year Beirut-style, how long he gave Bashar al-Assad as Syrian president. ‘Longer than we think, but not as long as he thinks,’ he said with a wink. That was still in the days of what we naively called the Arab Awakening; we Lebanese assumed we could sit back and wait for Syria’s hated system to fall. But the weeks have turned to years, and not only is Assad still in place, he might just be prevailing. Lebanon, meanwhile, is falling apart.

It is more than ten years since I first sat down with members of the Syrian opposition. Back then they included real moderates, but even these didn’t predict a bloodless transition. ‘We will have to unite the country against the Alawites,’ I remember one saying, referring to the minority from which the Assad dynasty comes. ‘Kill them?’ I asked nervously. ‘Or chase them into the mountains,’ he replied. Now, more than two years into the Syrian civil war, there may still be some Alawites but, as Paul Wood points out opposite, there are hardly any moderates. What good opposition elements there were have been killed, have fallen away or otherwise become insignificant since calls for outside help began.

Earlier this month, while he was in Lebanon to highlight the plight of Christians in the Middle East, in particular those fleeing the fighting in neighboring Syria, Terry Waite, the former special envoy to the Archbishop of Canterbury, kissed and made up with Hezbollah, the militant Shia group that held him captive in Lebanon between 1987 and 1991. One probably shouldn’t blame Waite, now 73, for wanting to exorcise any residual demons of his 1,763-day nightmare, but in doing so he unwittingly gave Hezbollah dangerous and unwarranted legitimacy.

The same problem keeps occurring for the megaphones of Iranian propaganda in the West: they keep being let down by their own side.  Every time another op-ed appears in the Guardian or Nation arguing that Iran isn’t seeking a nuclear device (and even if was it would never use it, and even though it doesn’t want a nuke and wouldn’t use it if it did, it does still at least have the ‘right’ to one) another Iranian official or one of their proxies lets slip the truth. The latest person to let the side down is the Hezbollah MP Walid Sakariya.  The MP for the Iranian Revolutionary government’s party in Lebanon told the Hezbollah TV station al-Manar last week that the purpose of Iran’s nuclear project is to annihilate Israel.