Authors: Kim Ghattas
Suddenly I felt strangely vulnerable, abandoned by the side of the road with my luggage.
I wanted to wave good-bye like a child, but everybody was off, going back home. And
I was home.
Was I?
I was standing on a patch of gravel, a shrine to a dead politician to my right, a
statue to Lebanon’s many martyrs since the Ottoman Empire to my left, and a six- or
eight-story-high banner hanging from a building behind me, stamped with the face of
Gebran Tueni, a prominent journalist watching me from beyond the grave. Like Hariri,
he had been killed by a targeted car bomb in 2005. He was the husband of a close friend.
His death was also blamed on Syria. Nine political and public figures had been killed
in explosions between 2005 and 2008, and an international investigation was under
way to look into the connection between the murders and find the culprits. Syria’s
friends, like Hezbollah, saw the investigation as an international machination to
destroy Damascus. But the West had also long wanted Syria to make peace with Israel.
In Lebanon, Syria’s opponents worried that justice would fall victim to wider geopolitical
considerations.
During the press conference, Clinton had been asked whether the United States was
going to strike a deal with Syria at the expense of Lebanon. She said justice was
overdue in Lebanon—the age of impunity had to end.
“So, I want to assure any Lebanese citizens that the United States will never make
any deal with Syria that sells out Lebanon and the Lebanese people,” she said, becoming
animated, softly banging her hand on the lectern, emphasizing every other word.
“You have been through too much, and it is only right that you are given a chance
to make your own decisions, however they turn out, amongst the people who call Lebanon
home, who love this country, who are committed to it, who have stayed here and done
what you can to navigate through these difficult years. It’s a complicated neighborhood
you live in, and you have a right to have your own future. And we believe that very
strongly.”
* * *
I had heard that before. Or at least I had wanted to believe it was what I had heard,
back in September 1990. I was becoming politically aware and sitting in the back of
my parents’ olive-green Peugeot one sunny September Sunday morning, listening to President
George H. W. Bush on the radio. We were driving to a restaurant in the hills east
of Beirut for Sunday lunch on a rare quiet day during one of the darkest periods of
the war. My sisters, Ingrid and Audrey, both older than me, had been sent to universities
abroad, away from the madness. Michel Aoun, an army general who had recently been
appointed interim prime minister, had declared a war of liberation against Syria,
which occupied most of Lebanon with forty thousand troops. The rebel general ruled
only over the Christian enclave where I lived and the army he commanded was just a
small remnant of the country’s divided national army. But his soldiers were conducting
a ferocious assault against Syria’s occupation, making some gains or at least fighting
the Syrians to a stalemate. Aoun was greatly helped by the supplies of weapons he
was receiving from Saddam Hussein in Iraq. The world had grown tired of watching the
televised gory images of our internecine clashes, except when, like now, moving battle
lines in Beirut reflected the shifting balance of world power.
Iraq had just invaded Kuwait. Oil fields were burning. The Berlin Wall had fallen
a year earlier. The Soviet Union was trying to keep itself together while the U.S.
eagle puffed its chest and spread its wings. On the radio, the voice of President
Bush was telling us he stood with the Lebanese.
“America is finally listening,” I thought with relief. “They’re going to help; all
will be well.”
I thought it meant he stood by me and what I thought was best for Lebanon. Just a
few weeks later, on October 13, 1990, Syrian troops invaded the Christian enclave
of Lebanon, looting and raping on their way in and arresting scores of soldiers and
Aoun sympathizers or shooting them at close range execution style. We were convinced
a deal had been struck: the United States had given Syria the green light to take
over the rebellious but prized part of Lebanon that had so far remained outside its
control. In exchange, Hafez al-Assad, the dictator in Damascus, a bastion of anti-Americanism,
agreed to participate in the American-led coalition against Iraq to liberate Kuwait.
America wanted the broadest possible coalition and Arab participation was key.
I felt betrayed, devastated, and furious at the United States for selling us out,
for lying to me about their support for my country. I couldn’t fathom that elsewhere
in Lebanon, in a different community, another neighborhood, someone listening to a
different radio station but hearing the same words of the American president had understood
them very differently. For them, the Syrian invasion was a sign that America had supported
their version of what was best for Lebanon. Either way, it seemed clear that there
was a plan, that America did pull the strings and could end wars if it wanted to.
I didn’t understand the intricacies of the geopolitical ballet the United States had
had to perform, the work it had required to make everybody’s positions align from
Russia to Israel to Syria. But the guns fell silent, and we found ourselves under
Syrian occupation.
If America was the source of all our trouble, we also believed it had the answer to
our problems, and this elicited hope and disappointment in people like a roller coaster.
And if we believed America pulled all the strings or could save us, it was probably
because the United States had once intervened in Lebanon with great success.
* * *
In 1958, Operation Blue Bat brought fourteen thousand U.S. troops to the shores of
Beirut. President Dwight Eisenhower had sent them to help prevent the overthrow of
the Christian president by a rebellious, dominantly Muslim opposition backed by the
nationalist Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser. It was a time when “international
communism” preoccupied Washington, and Nasser’s links with the Soviet Union were a
good enough reason to back the pro-Western president of Lebanon.
The opposition was intimidated, another more widely accepted president was elected,
and the Americans left three months later with barely a shot fired. It was a successful
projection of American power etched in the memories of the Lebanese and many others
who had watched around the world. America was a reliable, powerful friend that got
things done or, for its enemies, a power to be feared. The Soviet Union and Communism
appealed to many as well, but America had better, bigger, shinier toys.
The next time a Lebanese president asked for help, in 1982, after the Israeli invasion
and our escape from Galerie Semaan, we were a different country, seven years into
a savage civil war. Everybody still thought it was 1958. When we heard the marines
were coming, my sister Audrey was ecstatic. She was thirteen years old at the time,
I was five, and our exposure to the war’s raw images was limited by power cuts and
curfews. The only way my sister could picture what an American marine landing could
look like was to imagine an endless supply of bubble gum.
The marines arrived with French, Italian, and British troops ostensibly as a neutral
force to help bring peace back to Lebanon, separate warring Christian and Muslim militias,
and keep the Israelis in check, away from the Syrians, who had also invaded. These
forces were going to make sure that the Palestinian guerrilla fighters left the country
as had been agreed. In the process, America would strengthen the central authority—the
president and the Lebanese army, the good guys. But the lines had become murky—the
good guys were bastards too, though they spoke English and wore ties. The president,
a Christian, roped the smiling, optimistic marines into his feud against his Muslim
opponents. America believed in good and evil, black and white, but Lebanon was now
full of gray. By the summer of 1983, the marines were increasingly drawn into the
fighting as they tried to shore up the president and his army against the Muslim militias—they
had picked sides, de facto. The leftist, pro-Syrian newspaper
As-Safir
started referring to the Western troops as the international militia. It ended in
blood and tears on October 23, 1983, with the smoldering marine barracks, hit by a
suicide truck packed with twelve thousand pounds of TNT at 6:20 a.m.
After the attack, the single deadliest day for the U.S. Marine Corps since the Battle
of Iwo Jima in World War II, President Reagan swore his commitment to Lebanon. There
would be no run for the exits, he said, because America would not be cowed by terrorists.
Four months later, the marines left. Those who had carried out the attacks and saw
America as the enemy cried victory. But thousands of others felt utterly abandoned.
And Audrey still wanted her bubble gum.
The sacrifice for America had been great, but we couldn’t grasp the enormity of it.
We were still living in hell and we still wanted the world to help. To us, it looked
like America had made promises, raised our hopes, and then cut its losses, leaving
us in the downpour—a deluge that would eventually catch up with the United States
too.
The marine barracks bombing was the first salvo in the war between radical Islamic
militants and the West, America in particular. Warning shots had been fired a few
years earlier, in 1979, in revolutionary Shiite Iran when Islamists had overthrown
the country’s secular monarch, Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, a friend of the United
States and an enlightened despot. Later that year, still seething with anger at American
interference in their country, students and militants took over the U.S. embassy in
Tehran and kept fifty-two Americans hostage for 444 days. Iran’s new ruler, Ayatollah
Ruhollah Khomeini, wanted to push America even farther out of the region, and with
his allies in Beirut, he delivered a deadly message to Washington on that October
morning. Combined with the Vietnam War debacle, still fresh in the collective memory,
the events in Iran, and the Beirut bombing, the headlines were all about American
decline. Politicians, pundits, and grocers emphatically declared that America was
over.
In Lebanon, the war continued until that day in October 1990 when Syria imposed its
peace on us. The tanks were retired and the snipers went home. But Lebanon was still
a troubled country in a difficult neighborhood where the stakes for America remained
high, and peacetime brought its share of crises. As a journalist, my stories were
about our power plants being bombed by Israel, Hezbollah kidnapping Israeli soldiers,
Syria imposing presidents on us, politicians and journalists getting blown up; and
with each crisis, journalists, friends, and family waited to hear what Washington
had to say or what it was planning to do about the situation. As ever, interpretation
of any statement depended on your political leanings: you were either looking for
a sign that help was on its way or looking for a clue about America’s nefarious designs.
More often than not, the news anchor, speaking in Arabic, would start the evening
news bulletin with “The spokesperson for the American foreign ministry today said
the situation in Lebanon was…”
Now I was living in Washington, and I knew the current spokesperson, P. J. Crowley.
A jovial man with the gift of gab, probably due to his Irish ancestry, P. J. was a
retired air force colonel who had served in the Clinton administration. Sharing a
drink with him and other journalists in Washington, at the beginning of my time in
the United States, I still wondered what he knew that I didn’t. I knew that America
had changed, that the world had changed. China was looking more and more like a rival
to the United States, Turkey was vying for a regional role, Brazil was becoming a
superpower in Latin America, and Moscow was slowly recovering from the breakup of
the Soviet Union. Yet people’s vision of America as omnipotent remained.
Were we stuck in the past, holding on to the image of America as a superpower because
it was simply what we knew? What was twenty-first-century American power made of,
anyway? Was it smart? Or would it end up being more of the same, just better than
the last eight years? Lebanon wasn’t the only country in the Middle East that hung
on Washington’s every word looking for a clue about its intentions and about the future.
4
NO NATURAL GROWTH
A few weeks before the trip to Beirut, Clinton had faced a crowded, chaotic room full
of hostile Arab journalists and a smattering of equally skeptical American and European
reporters. She had just pledged $300 million in aid for the Palestinians during an
international conference in the Egyptian seaside resort of Sharm el-Sheikh. Cast Lead,
the Israel military assault against the Gaza Strip which had ended just as Obama was
inaugurated, had killed up to 1,400 Palestinians, including 300 children, and left
an already bleak economy in ruins. The Israeli army had pounded the territory to stop
rocket fire into Israel and was keeping the strip under blockade. The Arab journalists
didn’t care so much about the aid: America had made many promises before, but life
as a Palestinian under Israeli occupation was still miserable. The money was just
a Band-Aid.
The journalists had a very simple question for Clinton: Would an independent Palestinian
state come into existence within a year?
This was Hillary’s first foray into the decades-old conflict as secretary of state,
but she had a long history with the region, as did her husband, who had tried until
his last minute in office to get the Palestinians and the Israelis to make peace.
Overall, Arabs did not trust America when it came to resolving conflict. They accused
the United States of siding with Israel, always and without reservations. They were
not wrong, but they were not entirely right either. The conflict was about so much
more than land and elicited deep emotions, unrealistic hopes, and bursts of anger
on all sides. American officials expressed empathy with Israel more often, leaving
Palestinians living under the humiliation of occupation feeling like lesser humans,
but Arabs still pleaded with the United States to help broker peace, perhaps precisely
because they knew no one else could deliver Israel to the negotiating table. There
were still fond memories in the region of Bill Clinton, of his rare ability to empathize
with Palestinians and his desperate efforts to broker peace. Discussing the conflict
with Arab leaders, including Egypt’s president Hosni Mubarak, Hillary referenced the
long days and nights her husband had spent working for peace. Then she reached out
to her skeptical audience. A viable Palestinian state was the goal.