Lebanon Goes Pop (Again)

The NY Times offers a half-assed report of today's riots in Beirut, mainly sticking to sources from government supporters. Their inability to get both sides of the story is understandable, given that the other belligerents in the battle are Hizballah supporters, many of whom are not big fans of America and its press corps. Today, like a lot of times when scary people begin to do scary things in the Middle East, the Arab press ran circles around the English press.



Shit's on fire. Back to you, Bob.





Since the fighting is so new, allegedly only erupting today, al-Jazeera has only a (mercifully) short article describing it (It's mercifully short given the horrendous state of disrepair my Arabic is in). Unlike the NY Times article, which is heavy on background, the al-Jazeera article is heavy on events and details. Al-Jazeera names the neighborhoods in which the fighting started (in the Corniche along the Mediterranean, which, having never been to Beirut, I assume to be high-end property), as well as the weapons employed (rifles and RPG's). Both of these details are telling for different reasons.

First of all, the location. Hizballah's supporters, like the partisans of the similar-but-unaffiliated Mahdi Army in Iraq, are poor and live in the city's slums. In Beirut's case, that is far from the Francophile downtown and waterfront. Since the current "demonstrations," as al-Jazeera refers to them, took place downtown, it stands to reason that this isn't your run of the mill clash between Hizballah and the government. For Hizballah to get that many people into an area of the city that is accustomed to peace and quiet implies that this was a well-coordinated, well-planned uprising. It may not go gracefully into that good night.




Beirut's corniche. Full of Lebanese girls.





Secondly, the weapons. In the past occasional skirmish between Hizballah partisans and the government, the demonstrators rarely deployed the heavy artillery for fear of over-playing their hand. As the Israelis found out in the summer of 2006, RPGs are heavy artillery. Hizballah has partly maintained its relevance over the years by knowing that discretion is the better part of valor; they rarely confront better armed and better trained opponents (like government forces or Israeli soldiers) in pitched battles. Like their choice of location, their choice of armament leads one to believe they mean business this time.

In this environment, where the battle has not coalesced into nicely drawn lines, the American press' incompetence is something of a foregone conclusion. The real problem is in how the English-speaking press will continue to portray the conflict going forward. The word "government" will always be preceded by the compound adjective "Western sponsored" or "American backed." Most readers are sophisticated enough to understand the subtext here, but some journalists will continue to push the myth that the Lebanese government is the sole, legitimate representative of the Lebanese people. I won't apologize for Hizballah, which employs terror to its ends, but, since its inception, the central government in Beirut has not exactly a bastion of benevolent democracy, either. Lebanon, and other countries with arbitrarily drawn borders is locked in a state of civil war, where peace is the exception and violence the norm. To portray one side as "good," or even "less-bad" is misleading to the point of lying.



Marines on the ass-end of Hizballah's tactics, 1983.













Finally, a visual reminder of why Lebanon is important: Lebanese girls.