05 March 2005

BEIRUT: Who "won" when Prime Minister Omar Karami resigned on Feb. 28? Was it the multi-partisan masses assembled between the Mohammed al-Amin Mosque and Martyrs' Square, abjuring party banners in favor of the Lebanese flag and red-and-white "revolutionary cockade?"

Was Karami's resolve destroyed by the two weeks of performance activism - grieving, outraged demonstrators writing demands for resignation and withdrawal on banners, the carnival-like atmosphere at Martyrs' Square, the 18,000-plus-signature petition demanding to know who killed former Premier Rafik Hariri, the "human chain" stretching from Hariri's tomb to the bomb site? Was it all too reminiscent of the 1992 protests that brought him down, and ushered Hariri into office?

Or was all this orchestrated, an international conspiracy led by the U.S. State Department - which, hours after Karami's resignation obligingly dubbed the event the "Cedar Revolution," evoking images of a "Regime Change" file cabinet housing thick folders labeled "Velvet Revolution" (Czechoslovakia), "Rose Revolution" (Georgia), "Orange Revolution" (Ukraine) ...

This isn't the first time competing narratives have arisen to explain Lebanon's sometimes-paranormal political life. Hariri's vicious assassination two weeks before also inspired a flurry of conflicting explanations.

For most Lebanese politics is theater. It has been less a thing of mass participation than a spectacle to be watched, discussed and, less frequently - as during pro or anti-regime rallies or funerals - to be acted in. In this, Lebanon's politics is not unlike the declining democracies of the West.

In lieu of political participation, Lebanese have busied themselves making a living, consuming, cheering on sporting teams, working for non-governmental organizations, and (since it's assumed that the real stuff of politics is hidden) discussing what's really behind the current public outrage. These discussions, and the narratives that spin out of them, represent the grand tradition of the mouamara, "the plot."

"Mouamara culture" is dismissed as rumor mongering, even worse an abnegation of political agency. This assessment overlooks how important it is to apply the reason of narrative to otherwise inexplicable events. Some of the tales that have spun out of the outrage of Hariri's assassination, and their relationship to international pop narratives, are worthy of consideration.

One traditional narrative is the "Zionist Entity" plot: "Hariri's assassination is the latest in a long list of ruthless operations carried out by Israel's security and military apparatus" - a once-reliable and much-related serial, last invoked (plausibly) after the car bombing of erstwhile Christian politician Elie Hobeika.

Previous installments of this narrative point out that Israel has an interest in destabilizing Lebanon's economic or political life because, when regional peace breaks out, Beirut will be its only competitor. The latest plot twist suggests the Zionist entity wants to incriminate Damascus and its Lebanese clients in "acts of terror." Assassinating a friend of the two authors of United Nations Resolution 1559 - calling for Syria's immediate withdrawal from Lebanon and the disarming of Hizbullah - is a terrorist piece de resistance.

The "Zionist Entity" plot has suffered a drastic decline in popularity recently and has been little recounted in connection to Hariri's murder. Possibly it has fallen victim to its own popularity. It has been so common to blame virtually every security breach on Israel that the public has no doubt grown tired of it.

Perhaps this is one reason the "state" narrative has gone with a more recently devised "Al-Qaeda" plot: "Hariri's convoy was attacked by an Islamist suicide bomber." The plot elements are a trifle derivative, borrowing from the well-known serial that has kept international audiences transfixed to their television screens since the fall of 2001.

It may be the chance of sympathetic audience reception in the U.S. that encouraged the producers of this tale to make the bold move away from the "Zionist Entity" and toward the "Al-Qaeda" plot. It may explain, too, why it hasn't picked up the "Bushdunit" scenario (for details, see http://www.larouchepub.com/other/2005/3208hariri_killed.html).

Like the best imported franchises, Lebanon's Al-Qaeda plot combines local and global elements. Global elements include a videotaped confession from a bearded member of a hitherto unknown Islamist organization, dropped off at the Beirut offices of Al-Jazeera. Also drawn from the parent franchise was the bombing's low-tech modus operandi (whether a suicide car bomb, or a bomb-under-street scenario), which is in line with Al-Qaeda's previous MO.

The Al-Qaeda plot also finds verisimilitude in local ambient realities: back-stories involving the murder of four Sidon jurists in 1999 (still unsolved but blamed on Palestinian Islamists), the December 1999-January 2000 mayhem in Diniyyeh (ascribed to Al-Qaeda-associated Afghanistan veterans), and a number of Wahhabi militants holed up in Lebanon's various Palestinian refugee camps.

Lebanese producers of the Al-Qaeda plot had the security apparatus quickly identify the (Palestinian) man in the Al-Jazeera video, raid his (empty) flat in Tariq al-Jadideh, and discover he's off killing Americans in Iraq. A plot twist involving several other bearded men had a brief run, thanks to Australian Federal Police investigations.

Another local element in the narrative is Hariri's close relations with the Saudi regime - whom Al-Qaeda says it wants to overthrow. The former premier was murdered in the hotel district, the destination for an increasing number of Gulf tourists in the years since Sept. 11, 2001 - some of whom (it is said) conduct themselves in a manner incongruous with the strict Hanbali school of Islam to which pious Saudis adhere.

Vastly more popular than the "Al-Qaeda" plot has been the opposition's "Regime Change" narrative: "Hariri was killed by elements of the Syrian and/or Lebanese security apparatus." Damascus and its clients in Lebanon, the story goes, blamed Hariri for the Franco-American sponsored Resolution 1559.

Like the state's narrative, "Regime Change" draws upon elements of the local and the global, apparently with the aim of appealing to a national and international audience. This was succinctly expressed by the slogan "It's obvious, no?" - a quotation from an English-language television interview with Saadeddine Hariri, which was flown from a banner at his father's funeral.

In response to those who claim that no government would gouge out the eyes of its own economy (or that of its cash cow) this way, the plot can be modified to invoke "rogue" elements within these security agencies, possibly intent on humiliating Syrian President Bashar Assad.

This plot is derived from a spin-off of the Al-Qaeda narrative, America's conflation of Osama bin Laden with the various Arab despots who aren't "with" - and therefore "against" - Washington's "war on terror." Such despots, this narrative relates, will undergo "regime change" by one means or another, thus ushering a new era of peace and democracy into this benighted region.

After several successful seasons in Afghanistan and Iraq it was assumed that (like the original "Star Trek" series) this plot would breed spin-off series set in Iran, Syria and Lebanon. "Regime Change Syria-Lebanon" is premised on Damascus and its Lebanese clients being sponsors of "terror" - in the guise of Hizbullah and several Palestinian factions hostile to the Palestinian Authority making peace with Israel.

This isn't the only treatment that's been pitched to the producers in Washington, incidentally. One very popular local narrative depicts Hizbullah as a national liberation movement (responsible for liberating Israeli-occupied South Lebanon), social welfare organization and political party. Another depicts Damascus' endeavors to co-operate with Washington's anti-terror campaign - obligingly torturing America's Syrian-born detainees in the years after Sept. 11, like Canadian engineer Maher Arar, for instance.

These treatments proved unpopular with Washington producers, though, and particularly with certain pro-Zionist elements in the George W. Bush Cabinet.

Several local elements have been folded into "Regime Change Syria-Lebanon." On the day of Hariri's assassination, for instance, it was asserted with some confidence that (assuming it was a radio-controlled explosion) it must have been the work of a well-funded intelligence agency with the means to circumvent the Hariri motorcade's elaborate jamming mechanisms.

The confidence of this assertion rests not in conclusive proof but in the old adage that no security breach takes place in Lebanon without the knowledge and/or permission of the Syrian security apparatus.

It's popular hereabouts to recount how Syria controls all aspects of Lebanese political life - the Lebanese Parliament's decision to extend President Emile Lahoud's term by three years, for example, despite his lack of popularity among the people and politicians and the imminent threat of Security Council Resolution 1559.

All three plots could be utter bollocks, with no bearing on what actually happened on Feb. 14. Their potential appeal to the Lebanese market is apparent, though, since they allocate blame to outsiders. While "Al-Qaeda" and "Regime Change" plots should both appeal to Western audiences, the latter more exactly mirrors current tastes in Washington.

Lebanon's judicial and political apparatus are perceived as unable to determine and disclose who is responsible for the brazen acts of murder and corruption that occasionally adorn this country's political landscape. In lieu of this, applying the reason of narrative is virtually as important as determining what really happened.

Storytelling gives the storyteller agency - even if the telling only reiterates state or opposition narratives, even if the teller's only original contribution is the ornamentation of opinion.

In recent weeks many Lebanese have found other venues for expressing their agency, in the 2 kilometers from bomb site to Martyrs' Square. It is difficult to underestimate how important the events of these last weeks have been - not to "the opposition," but to the activist habit of mind (the oft-abused "civil society") that is essential to the workings of participatory democracy. The challenge confronting Lebanese democrats in the weeks ahead, far more difficult than that of the last weeks, will be to maintain a voice in the political process once it ceases being performative, to insist on a consultative voice - inconvenient and dangerous as it can be. Otherwise, there'll always be another plot.