Juan Cole: Obama wins an election in the Middle East

http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2009/06/10/lebanon/


Obama wins an election in the Middle East

Lebanon's voters gave the White House the victory it wanted -- with a lot of help from Hezbollah.

By Juan Cole


June 10, 2009 | President Barack Obama's speech in Cairo last Thursday may already have borne fruit. His call for political moderates in the Muslim world to fight extremism may have helped tip the weekend's parliamentary elections in Lebanon to the anti-Syrian March 14 Alliance. Obama did not explicitly call for the defeat of Hezbollah in the elections, but the Lebanese already knew where the administration's sympathies lay. His speech came three weeks after a Beirut visit by Vice President Joe Biden in which Biden warned at a news conference, "We will evaluate the shape of our assistance programs based on the composition of the new government and the policies it advocates."

Whatever the size of Obama's influence, the election has already had a direct impact of the future of Arab-Israeli negotiations and on the realization of U.S. aims in the region. A Hezbollah win would have strengthened the case made by the right-wing Israeli Likud Party that Iran and its proxies are a higher priority for Israel's foreign policy than trying to restart the peace process with the Palestinians. For Americans and the rest of the world, the Lebanese elections were about whether Iran would be strengthened or weakened in the Levant, and whether Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu would have a new pretext for intransigence. The answer to both questions was a resounding no.

But while the consequences may have been global, the politics, as always, were local. Even before Biden's visit and Obama's speech, most of the Lebanese public had probably already made up its mind about the arrogant and presumptuous Hezbollah-dominated opposition. The March 14 Alliance won because of the strength of the local economy, the desire for tourism, and anger at Hezbollah for streetfighting in 2008 that left 11 dead, more than a year of protests and sit-ins, and the Hezbollah bloc's ultimately successful attempt to strong-arm its way to effective veto power in the government.

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In some ways, the victory of the ruling March 14 Alliance is a public vote of confidence in the Lebanese economy, which has largely avoided the fallout of the global downturn and is on track to grow 6 percent this year. Lebanese banks adopted conservative lending and investment policies as a result of the economic meltdown during the 1975-1989 civil war, and legions of Lebanese expatriates and Gulf investors assure bank liquidity and a hot real estate market. The Lebanese tourist market is potentially huge, but it has been devastated in recent years by Israel's attack and then by faction fighting between Hariri's supporters and Hezbollah militiamen.

With the victory of March 14 Alliance, many Lebanese are hoping for a bumper crop of tourists and music festivals. Despite Europe's economic doldrums, nearly half a million tourists went to Lebanon in the first quarter of 2009, up over 50 percent from the previous year, and tourism revenues this year could come to $2.5 billion, some 10 percent of the gross national product.

Hezbollah prospered for years by offering the Lebanese an effective means of resistance to Israeli encroachments and by allowing them to hold their heads up high. Even Christians and Sunnis supported Nasrallah during the Israeli attack in 2006. But once he turned his guns on his own countrymen, he transformed himself from a symbol of Lebanese pride into a source of oppression and humiliation. Above all, this election was a referendum on which policies would lead to peace and prosperity. Whether they had their eye on Biden's stick or on Obama's carrot, the Lebanese voters made it clear that they did not believe Nasrallah could deliver. It's Obama's time in Beirut, not Khamenei's, and the president now has one less obstacle to face in his pursuit of peace in the region.

If Ahmadinejad is defeated, he's definitely right.

disappears into obscurity.

And welcome to DU, timeforpeace.