Many Arabs think Lebanon war was international conspiracy

Press, 8 December 1976, Page 36

Many Arabs think Lebanon war was international conspiracy

By

IAN MacDOWELL,

NZPA-Reuter correspondent Baghdad Many Arabs, notably the Lebanese and Palestinians, are convinced that the disastrous civil war in Lebanon was the outcome of an international conspiracy. In a tour this month of seven Arab capitals this correspondent found a widespread conviction that sinister foreign hands — Arab and non-Arab — lay behind the bloody events in Lebanon. There are innumerable variations of the plot theory, some bizarre, some with a degree of credibility.

They all accept as a basic proposition that Israel, the only State drawing benefit from the fratricide on its northern border, had a major hand in igniting the conflict and fanning the flames of war. It is widely assumed by Arabs that the United States was working closely with Israel. But this is the only 4serhmon ground on which Arabs theorising about Lebanese plots agree. How you elaborate on this basic theme and which Arab governments you believe to have plotted to destroy the old Lebanon depends on your nationality, your religion, and your political beliefs. Evidence to support the plot allegations that would stand up in a court of law is notablv lacking. Israeli support for Right-wing •Christians in southern Lebanon and the major Syrian role in the country are matters of record. But they do not necessarily prove that either of these countries was a party to a pre-arranged plot. Their actions could also be consistent with simple political expediency and exploitation of a developing situation.

Even for a non-Arab, the plot theories have some attractions. How else, strangers to the area ask, could the people of a country which, for all its faults, has been the most dynamic and free in the Arab world, massacre each other with such ferocity, and wreck their economy and their cities alike with such zeal?

Long-time foreign residents of Lebanon, who know the feudal basis of its society and the conflict of clan loyalties, religious beliefs, and greed for political and economic power

which underlie its sophisticated veneer as a haven for the international banker and the jet set, were less surprised, if no less saddened, by what has happened in the last 19 months.

But the number of Arabs prepared to believe that a sufficient explanation of the Lebanese tragedy can be found in the country’s internal problems, compounded by the presence of the Palestinian guerrilla forces there, is few indeed. This readiness to believe that sinister conspiratorial forces are at work behind any and every historical event is strongly characteristic of the Arabs. In part it stems from a natural human tendency to blame someone else for one’s own misfortunes. But there is a particular Arab predisposition to believe in plots.

This is partly because until very recent times their traditional social structure was one in which leadership was maintained by feudal intrigue. Only four years ago the ruler of the Gulf emirate of Sharjah was murdered by his cousin. A whole series of the rulers of the former trucial States have been deposed by their families in palace plots since the end of World War Two.

Again, the modern power structure of independent Arab States is one in which there is no democracy as known in the West. Decisions are reached by a handful of men in deep secrecy, alliances are made and unmade overnight, policies formulated and reversed, politicians promoted and overthrown — all without public, press, or Parliamentary debate of the issues.

Those quasi-Parlia-mentary structures created in the Arab States which emerged to nationhood after the Second World War were successively overthrown by military coups or rendered impotent by rulers who found that autocracy worked better for them than democracy.

Although effective executive power in many Western democracies also rests with a small handful of powerful men, such events as Watergate show thepporerw r er of press and politicians to expose and redress executive wrongdoing.

The Arabs have no such balancing mechanism. Fed information only by a press which is in most cases either official or shackled by censorship and with little opportunity for public debate, the Arab man in the street lives on rumour and speculation in the absence of facts.

In such an atmosphere it is not surprising that theories about plots are elaborated to try to rationalise the sometimes boggling changes in interArab policy and in Arab relations with the rest of the world. Perhaps the biggest single factor in clinching Arab adherence to the conspiratorial view of history was the Palestine issue. A modern British historian might conclude that Britain blundered into Palestine at the end of the First World War in pursuit of a complex of political, military, and economic interest, and blundered out again in 1948 because of changed circumstances — notably the collapse of its imperial .power. He would be unlikely to detect any consistency in the British attitude towards the Arabs and Jews who were to fight over Palestine. The average Arab, however, is deeply convinced that Palestine was lost to the Israelis as part of a malign British plot evolved in the First World War and elaborated into an imperialist-zionist plot with United States backing in the 30 years that followed.

The relative merit of the two views is immaterial. What is important is the Arab tendency to take their belief in plots to obsessive lengths. Some Palestinians believe that their compatriots’ eagerness to find a foreign scapegoat for the successive defeats of the Arabs by Israel has blinded them to the need to overcome their own weakness. The same pattern seems to be developing over Lebanon. Few foreigners in Beirut would deny that the flames of war have been fanned by various powers, Arab and nonArab, for a wide variety of reasons. But you cannot start a fire unless the wood is dry. In Lebanon the divisions among the Arabs themselves had created an arsonist’s dream.

A synthesis of some of the main Lebanese plot theories would produce something along these lines:

Israel wanted to sow disunity among its Arab foes and break the military threat posed by the Palestine guerrilla forces in Lebanon. It helped fin* ance and arm the Lebanese Maronite Christian militias and instigated them to attack the Palestinians in April, 1975 — the spark that ignited the civil war. It blockaded the approaches to Leftist-held ports in Lebanon and worked hand in glove with the Rightist militias to create an anti-Palestinian buffer zone in southern Lebanon.

The United States, sup* ported by various West European countries, wanted to break the growing influence of the Palestinians in the United Nations and other international bodies, to discredit the Palestine Liber* ation Organisation as a political force, and to end the Palestinian power to block progress at Geneva towards a permanent Middle East settlement. It backed Israeli interference in Lebanon and itself financed and encouraged the Lebanese Rightists. Syria wanted to reduce Lebanon to puppet status, to bring it into a SyrianJordanian - Lebanese confederation that would make Damascus the paramount Arab capital, and to break the independent power of the guerrillas which it saw as a threat to the stability of its right flank with Israel. It pushed the Lebanese Leftists and Palestinians into the war, then sent its troops in to check Leftist victories and redress the balance of power in alliance with the Rightists, leaving Damascus as the arbiter of Lebanon’s future.

Egypt, at odds with Damascus over the strategy for seeking a settlement with Israel, and jealous of Syrian influence in the area, pushed the Palestinian-Leftist alliance into conflict with the Syrians.

Iraq, bitterly hostile to Damascus, used the Pales* tinians and Leftists as a lever to put pressure on the Syrians from the West while it built up forces on Syria’s eastern border in the hope that a revolt would bring a pro-Iraqi

government to power in Damascus. It sent “volunteer” forces to Lebanon to fight alongside the Leftists, whom it also helped finance and arm.

Libya wanted to eliminate the Christian domi* nance in Lebanon as an affront to the Moslem character of the Arab world and to gain political influences over the country’s Moslems and the Palestinians. It financed and armed the anti-Right-ist alliance. The conservative oil States like Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and the United Arab Emirates saw the military power of the Palestinians, and particularly of the radical rejec* tion front, as a threat to their own security, and covertly financed the Rightists and backed the Syrian intervention. Jordan, another conservative monarchy which had expelled the guerrillas from its own territory in 1970 and 1971, saw them as a continuing threat to the survival of King Hussein and to an accommodation with Israel that would restore the West Bank of Jordan. It also backed the Rightists and Syria.

The Soviet Union wanted to radicalise Lebanon and increase Left* wing influence in the area as a means of bringing mounting pressure on the United States by increasing the threat to Israel and to Arab oil supplies to the West. It backed the Leftist alliance, although it was gravely embarrassed by the splits that developed between its Left-wing Arab allies. Just which of these allegations about motives and actions are justified and can be proved to be cor* rect must be left to the verdict of history, which is likely to be ambiguous. So the question is, whether even if these States acted in the way described, they did so as part of a plot or plots or simply exploited events in Lebanon to further their national interests on an ad hoc basis. But what is not in doubt is that, even if the responsibility for the Lebanese tragedy must rest ultimately on the Lebanese themselves, their country has been the bloody cockpit for a power struggle with Arab and international dimensions.