Look At Who Holds The South Lebanon Trigger

On the eve of last Friday’s mini-Arab summit in Lebanon, the United States quietly, but noticeably, renewed a 2007 Executive Order designating parties deemed to be undermining Lebanese sovereignty.

The renewal was a welcome reminder of the problems overshadowed by the photo-op in Baabda that included President Michel Sleiman, Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah and Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. However, it did not compensate for the lack of active American involvement in Lebanon’s affairs, nor its substitution with an “over the horizon” policy allowing local and regional actors to take the lead in addressing initiatives potentially damaging to Washington’s interests.

In his message to Congress about the renewal of EO 13441, President Barack Obama identified the major source of Lebanon’s destabilization and the undermining of its sovereignty: continued arms smuggling to Hezbollah, including, of course, that carried out by Syria. This helped refocus the issue amid all the surreal statements about Syria’s role in safeguarding Lebanon’s stability at the Baabda summit.

This clarification also served to refocus, at least conceptually, the priorities of US policy toward Syria and Lebanon. Syria is, understandably, nowhere near the top of the list of the Obama administration’s main concerns. However, this has led to ill-advised steps, one being the introduction of myriad American interlocutors with Damascus, which has led to a muddling of policy priorities.

A perfect recent example was the disastrous  “creative diplomacy” of the State Department Twitterati: the two young officials who infamously Tweeted their adventures in Syria, as they led a delegation of tech executives on a “cyber diplomacy” mission. Their embarrassing conduct was matched by the total loss of perspective and clear policy evident in the initiative itself. Here was a case of “engagement” with Damascus devoid of a single reference to the outstanding issues with Syria, such as the smuggling of Scuds and M-600 rockets to Hezbollah.

Which brings us back to last Friday’s bizarre fest. It’s no secret that the dynamics unfolding in Lebanon since 2009 have been directly linked to the Saudi entente with Syria that began at the Kuwait Economic Summit in February of last year. This has had negative repercussions for US regional interests even beyond Lebanon. Take, for instance, Iraq, where Syria has facilitated a campaign of violence since August 2009 in the run-up to the Iraqi parliamentary elections; or Saudi insistence on “reconciliation” between Syria and an uninterested Egypt, whose positions on “resistance” movements and national security concerns remain in direct conflict with those of Syria.

Some Saudi publicists who have echoed the evolution of thinking on Lebanon in Saudi official circles have gone as far as to advocate a full “handing over” of Lebanon back to Syria, as well as to entertain fantasies about prying Syria away from Iran and returning it to the Arab fold. Their general objective is balancing Iranian influence in Lebanon and using Syria to “contain” Hezbollah.

Unfortunately, all the US could muster in response to these developments was a naïve statement by State Department Spokesman P.J. Crowley, who advised the Syrians to listen to King Abdullah and start moving away from their relationship with Iran.

Whatever the Saudis may be thinking, it’s far from clear that their maneuvers are necessarily going to serve the US well. For instance, despite conflicting leaks and analyses about what the Saudi position on the Special Tribunal for Lebanon is, it’s not unreasonable to argue that, under the guise of safeguarding stability, Prime Minister Saad al-Hariri would come under increasing pressure to denounce the tribunal, and that’s clearly the direction being pushed by the Syrians and their frequent spokesmen. While that may not be enough in itself to end the tribunal, it would be a setback for US objectives and leverage.

Syrian thinking, as expressed in public leaks and statements, does not suggest any sense of harmony with Saudi hopes and desires. The notion being peddled today that Syria has an interest in Lebanon’s stability ignores Damascus’ continuous smuggling of unprecedented types of weaponry to Hezbollah. In the end, the only venue for Syria’s regional relevance is an open south Lebanese front to be used to blackmail its adversaries under the guise that it is a front controlled by Syria.

But that front, and the Hezbollah combatants manning it, are Iranian assets first and foremost. That’s why Syria has begun to transfer specifically Syrian weaponry, in the hope of regaining the seat of primary interlocutor that it had in the 1990s, most clearly enshrined in the (thankfully) obsolete April Understanding of 1996. Syria was officially recognized as a guarantor of the understanding in Lebanon, and primary interlocutor for Lebanese foreign and security policies.

And this is hardly a new refrain. The Israelis were foolish enough in the 1990s to believe that the Syrians would “contain” Hezbollah, and now we are seeing the same argument recycled once more, in Saudi guise.

But we are no longer in the 1990s. The rules of engagement have changed drastically since 2006. In the end, both the Saudis and the Syrians are playing in the margins, as neither controls the trigger of Hezbollah’s weapons; Iran does. The main constituent elements for future conflict remain the same regardless of Saudi-Syrian maneuvers.

Tony Badran is a research fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.