Every Man in This Village Is a Liar: An Education in War (25 page)

“Any who doubt the appeal of freedom in the Middle East can look to Lebanon, where the Lebanese people are demanding a free and independent nation,” Bush said. “Democracy is knocking at the door of this country and, if it’s successful in Lebanon, it is going to ring the doors of every Arab regime.”

Lebanese basked eagerly in the attention. “All the world is now worried about Lebanon,” marveled a middle-aged Christian lawyer. “President Bush, every day he talks about us.”

One night in early March, the other shoe came clattering to earth, dropped from on high by the Party of God. Hezbollah chief Sayed Hassan Nasrallah stared from television screens and ordered his followers into the streets. These anti-Syria demonstrators were the handiwork of Israel and America, he said. All the talk of international law was a thin disguise; they’d come to meddle in Lebanese affairs, to disarm Hezbollah on behalf of the Zionists. When Nasrallah talks on television, bustling Beirut streets freeze—hotel lobbies, cafés, and electronics shops fall silent as people clump together and watch. When Nasrallah issued his order, the Shiites obeyed.

The day of Hezbollah’s rally dawned gritty and gray. The Mediterranean stretched like steel, breathing a stinging wind over town. Hiking down the hill from the Hamra district, I turned a corner and stood staring at a livid, teeming human blanket. I thought the other crowds had been tremendously big. I thought I’d never see so many people packed into the streets and plazas of Beirut. But Hezbollah’s crowd dwarfed all that had come before, smothering gardens, overpasses, and tunnels. The other Lebanon had arrived, ready to declare itself to the world in a show of loyalty to Syria. The original demonstrators, the ones who hollered for Syria to get out, stood just down the hill, holding their ground at Martyrs’ Square. Lines of Lebanese soldiers kept the groups separated. Once again, the city was split in two.

The Hezbollah demonstrators were mostly farmers and workers from the south and the Bekaa Valley, people who’d suffered the Israeli occupation. They came in rattletrap buses, with dirt under their fingernails, and walked the streets with the weary patience of people accustomed to waiting at the back of the line: men in work clothes and sensible boots; women swathed in head scarves, moving silently along behind their husbands. They didn’t have Hummers and Pierre Cardin and Sri Lankan housemaids. They didn’t jump around or snap photos of themselves or sway to patriotic music. They stood grimly, carrying posters that said, “Bush, we hate you,” “All our disasters come from America,” and “America is the source of all our terrorism.”

A passing woman grabbed my arm. “Are you a journalist?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Well.” She squared her thin shoulders and poked her chin forward. “I am a Shiite.”

“Okay.”

“All the Shiites are not poor,” she pressed on indignantly. “All the Shiites are not from the south. Look at me. I am a Shiite, too.”

She was a small, lithe woman in her thirties. She looked quintessentially Lebanese, meaning she looked beautiful in a contrived and doll-like way—a beauty concocted from hair dyes and foundation creams and expensive clothes. She wore spike heels, tight jeans, and a sequined Daisy Duck T-shirt under a stylishly distressed leather jacket. A diamond pendant dangled from her neck; her fingers tapered into manicure; glossy hair swished to her shoulders. She was roaming with three
shiny-haired, perfumed girlfriends carting signs that said “No to foreign intervention.”

“So what are you saying?” I asked her.

“I’m a Shia. I go to the beaches in my swimsuit. I studied with the nuns. I went to the American University of Beirut. My kids don’t know whether they are Christian or Muslim. Last time somebody asked my son, ‘Are you Christian or Muslim?’ he didn’t know.”

“So,” I said, “do you feel like these demonstrations are creating sectarian trouble?”

“We are with the people over there,” she replied, pointing down the hill to the anti-Syria camp. “But some of them are racist, they’ve been dealing with Israel. They want to divide the country. I have four kids, and sometimes at night I can’t sleep because I’m so worried that my kids will live what I lived during the war.”

“You really think it will come to that?”

“I don’t know. I am very, very worried.”

She was gone, swallowed by the crowd.

The announcer bellowed surprise news:
Sayed Hassan Nasrallah is here
.

That name! It stirred the bodies and lit the faces. Nasrallah, hunted by Israel, a famous ghost who flitted through underground chambers and hidden offices in the warrens of the southern suburbs, would show his face in the heart of Beirut for the first time in years. “Thank you to Syria,” the announcer cried, heating up the crowd. “Thank you to President Assad.” The men leapt up and down, fists pumping. The women’s faces tipped skyward, saintly and pale, eyes swelling to take him in.

And there he stood, impossible as a hallucination, on a balcony over the Buddha Bar and the Casa del Habano cigar shop. Silence grabbed the crowd by the tongue. But Nasrallah wasn’t talking to them; they were merely his context. Nasrallah was talking to the world.

“If you really want to defend freedom in Lebanon and democracy in Lebanon, then you must look with your two eyes,” he said. “Are we not the people of the Lebanon you love? We tell you we want to maintain and protect our historic ties with Syria and we believe in the resistance.

“Now let me turn to America,” he said.

Fists drove to heaven. “Death to America!”

“You’ve made a mistake with your calculations. Lebanon will not change its name or its history or its politics,” Nasrallah informed America. “Do you think the Lebanese are afraid of American fools? Don’t interfere with our internal affairs. Get your fingers off our country.”

As darkness settled over the streets, there was grogginess in the air; the alarm had shrilled and the dream was gone. This was real. This was the danger that nobody wanted to write or talk about: The “popular revolution” existed only in one half of the country. The dancing in the streets, the fast push for toppled governments and new days, was tearing the country in two. In the tent city on Martyrs’ Square, the activists shivered and stood their ground.

“Those weren’t Lebanese,” they said irritably. “They bused in Syrians. They bused in Palestinians.”

“Maybe,” I said. “But there were Lebanese, too. A lot of Lebanese.”

“Those people are not Lebanese.”

That’s the essence of it, I thought. They see only their sectarian mythology, the stories they tell themselves. They are wrapped in dreams, believing only the narratives of their own creation.

“If they represent half, then we’re the other half,” a student spat out. His tone was almost desperate.

“We can’t get rid of them,” said another student, “and they can’t get rid of us.”

The clash wasn’t country against city; poor versus rich; Shiites squaring off against the rest. It was all of that, a little bit, and none of that. It was deeper and darker, harder to say, and impossible to fix. Lebanon was pushing blindly toward change, and it had to decide what kind of country it was going to be: a protectorate of Syria, tied to Iran through Hezbollah, verging on pariah status, battling endlessly with Israel, or this new country that Hariri and the others were trying to forge—free from Syrian influence, oriented toward France and America, liberal and warless, luring tourists and making nice with the neighbors. Each side saw its own extinction in the alternate vision. They weren’t living in the same country anymore; they had become divided until they couldn’t even recognize one another. I was haunted most of all by the Christians who looked at the Shiites and said simply, “Those people are not Lebanese.” Because they believed it.

In the end, the Americans managed to pry Lebanon out of Syria’s hands. They sent the Russians, the Saudis, and everybody else to lean on Damascus until they didn’t have a friend left in the world, aside from Iran. The demonstrations helped, of course. The protests, tent city, and anthems gave America an irrefutable screen to lean over the Atlantic and smack Syria across the jowls.

I watched the last Syrian soldiers pull out of Lebanon on an April day when the sun dripped like hot honey through the straight, fresh pines of the Bekaa Valley. The crust of words had flaked away. The politicians had raged; the kings and presidents had slathered on their threats. The Lebanese had called the Syrians dogs and bastards and sons of whores, hollered their heads off, beaten luckless Syrian construction workers. Now it was time to swallow the acid long enough to say good-bye.

A lot of questions massed under the surface that day: Can you undo long years of domination by emptying out a few army bases? What about proxies and undercover intelligence? What about Hezbollah? How will this country, which is really two countries, find its way forward? The day Syria left, nobody asked.

At a military base near the border, the Syrian and Lebanese army commanders strolled side by side through beds of roses and daisies, saluting the troops. The two national anthems wheezed from brass horns. Mountains loomed splendidly against the sky.

“Lebanon will endure. Its rocks, its mountains, its waters will stay. And that’s thanks to the Syrian military presence, which ensured the unity of Lebanon,” Syrian commander Ali Habib told the soldiers. “The civil war is over and Lebanon, once weak, is strong through its people, its army, and its resistance. Our relationship is bound by the pure blood spilled by our forces.”

Wordless, blank, the soldiers stood in straight lines under their berets—red for the Syrians, green for the Lebanese. Bugles blared, songbirds trilled, cell phones chirped.

The Lebanese commander embedded in the soil a square of marble
commemorating twelve thousand Syrian soldiers killed in the civil war. Then he stood there, this Christian general, and thanked Syria for arming Hezbollah and protecting the country from Israel. It was a reminder of the truth that lurked under the resentments: at the invitation of the world, Syria had taken on broken, impossible Lebanon, with its dagger-in-teeth warlords and its slick, shiny liars and its endless capacity for blood and more blood. Syria had waded into a mess and pacified Lebanon.

“Dear brothers, in our hearts we feel love and great thanks and we want to tell brotherly Syria, its army, and its people, thank you,” the Lebanese commander said.

The drums cracked, and hundreds of boots hacked crisply at the blacktop. The Syrians turned their backs to Beirut and their faces to the ramshackle buses that would carry them home. I bumped into Adib Farha in a pale, fancy suit, and was immediately hurtled back to the nasty realities of Beirut. He was a Lebanese American, one of the countless well-groomed, white-teethed analysts you could count on to flay Syria in tidy English. Today, he stood sputtering.

“So what do you think?” I said.

“It’s ludicrous, surreal,” he yelped, swallowing a laugh and then leaning in a little. “It’s hard to imagine a country that feels occupied for thirty years is thanking its occupiers as they leave. This really shows the huge schism between the Lebanese president and government and people.

“Here,” he said, interrupting himself, “take my number and call me later. I’m going to be on CNN.” And he was gone, rushing off like the White Rabbit in shiny shoes.

The buses of Syrian soldiers rumbled east, through vineyards reconstructed from the wreckage of battle and fields greening with the first breaths of spring. They rolled past fading roadside pictures of Ayatollah Khomeini; kiosks where fresh fruit dangled on strings; tractors and orchards. The buses wept paint chips as they belched over the hills. Beneath the plastered portraits of Bashar al-Assad, the windows were cracked. The Syrian army is desperately poor; it was hard for anybody to hate the skinny young soldiers too much, simply because they lived so badly, moping around with the faces of kicked dogs.

Housewives and old men and schoolchildren lined the road and
stood there silently, waiting for the Syrians to pass. They crowded the doorways of banks and gritty vegetable shops and clothing stores. I pulled over in the village of Riyaq, and stood with some women who had abandoned their mirrors at a beauty shop to watch history groan past. “The Syrians suffered a lot here,” a Christian woman told me. “At the time they entered, sectarianism was rife. Many people left here, and there was a lot of violence. The Syrian presence helped keep the Christians here. Without a doubt, a lot of mistakes were made, but we will remain friends.”

When the Lebanese saw the Syrians, they smiled and waved their arms and honked horns, as if they were watching relatives pull away. The Lebanese smiled up, and the Syrians smiled down, and they held up two fingers in the sign of peace and victory.

The pinched faces of the young soldiers hung in those busted windows, and their hands waved good-bye, good-bye. “To Damascus,” one of the guards chanted through his open window, his smile spread all over his face. Syria leaving and good-bye. A new day coming, and good-bye.

They disappeared over the borderline, off through the tanks and pine-shaded hills. All along the road back to Beirut, the people were returning to houses that had been seized by the Syrians. They were counting the things that were stolen, the fruit trees crushed, asking each other whether the townspeople who fled for America and Europe and Australia might finally come home.

I kept stopping to ask people how they felt. They all said the same thing.

I feel scared, they said. We don’t know what’s coming next.

These months of revolution would all come back like a bad dream. There was a promise embedded in all those Bush administration speeches: that if the Lebanese fought against Syria and formed a new government, Washington would back it up. Confident and strident, Lebanon pushed Syria away. Washington applauded, and said some nice things. But nobody addressed the tangle of Hezbollah’s power and Shiite fears—not the Lebanese, who could hardly admit the other half of the country existed, and not the Americans, who talked about Hezbollah as if it were an alien force, a fringe enemy, and not a grassroots movement woven into the fabric of Lebanese politics and society.