Heir Pressure

This week, as Beirutis huddled over printouts of the Mehlis report--a U.N. report implicating Syria in the February 14 assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri--the talk was somber and wary. A desultory victory rally Friday night drew only a few hundred people to the same Martyrs' Square where hundreds of thousands had marched after Hariri's assassination. On Saturday, Saad Hariri, son of the slain statesman and now head of his parliamentary bloc, demanded an international tribunal for his father's killers. But Hariri's speech was beamed in from the safety of Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. The younger Hariri seemed afraid to set foot inside his own country-- even though the anti-Syrian opposition now controls the government.In part, this general unease is attributable to the widespread expectation that pro-Syrian elements will retaliate, stepping up a six-month string of bombings and assassinations. But there's another reason for Lebanese apprehension: rumors of a grand bargain between the United States and Syrian President Bashar Al Assad. Such an agreement would supposedly allow Assad to stay in power in exchange for cooperating with the U.N. investigation into Hariri's killing and surrendering the accused to stand trial; ending Syria's meddling in Lebanon; arresting insurgents trying to infiltrate into Iraq through the Syrian border; and cutting off support for Hezbollah, Hamas, and Islamic Jihad. For the United States, such a deal with Assad could kill several birds with one stone. There's just one problem: By giving Assad a pass, the Bush administration would signal to the Arab world that democracy was never the goal of its game. "There are two tendencies in Washington," says Chibli Mallat, a law professor at Beirut's St. Joseph University and currently a senior fellow at Yale Law School. "One tendency is for democracy. ... [The other] is, `Let's be realistic, and [make requests only of] those things that operate outside Syria's borders.'" In this case, the "realistic" option is the worse one. Annia Ciezadlo is a Beirut-based writer. So long as U.S. troops garrison Iraq, civil war remains an unlikely outcome. But that's about as uplifting as things get. In terms of what we fight for, Iraq may be a democracy, but the results of the constitutional referendum show that it is a democracy where the advantages of democracy have gotten lost, a hollowed-out society where tribe and religion remain the basic affiliations and sectarian identities harden by the day. Gone is the hope that Iraq will be a liberal democratic beacon for the rest of the Arab world. Gone, too, is the hope that liberal democrats will triumph even within Iraq. What's left is a negative, albeit vital, aim: what we fight against. There is nothing inherently wrong in waging a war for negative purposes. The United States, after all, was not fighting on behalf of the KLA in Kosovo, or a corrupt government in South Vietnam, or a dictatorship in South Korea. It was fighting against something, and rightly so. And, beginning with the Al Qaeda and Sunni terrorists who would bring down the government and transform the country into their sanctuary, there's plenty left to fight against in Iraq. But defeating an insurgency is a much narrower, much less exalted enterprise than the democratic transformation of an entire region. This is a different war now, a war worth fighting, but a war without ideals.

By Annia Ciezadlo; Lawrence F. Kaplan