On October 31, the Lebanese parliament elected Michel Aoun president, ending a two-and-a-half-year stalemate during which the country had no head of state. The presidency is reserved for the country’s Maronite Christian sect, so Christians there are celebrating the election of the controversial 81-year-old former general as a gesture of reconciliation for an often divided community. The excitement is unlikely to last. The presidency is one of the last remaining tokens of the Maronites' fading power in Lebanon, and there is trouble ahead, not just for the Christian community but for Lebanon and the Middle East at large.
The election is unlikely to alleviate the country's most serious problems. There is a refugee crisis, which, according to some estimates, has left some 2 million Syrian, mostly Sunni, refugees in a country of 3.8 million with limited resources. And the red-hot war in neighboring Syria will continue to exacerbate sectarian tensions in Lebanon, a country still reeling from its own civil war, which saw 150,000 killed between 1975 and 1990.
Aoun is a stubborn man given to fits of incoherent rage that may owe to a medical condition. He was a fierce opponent of the Syrian regime in the years of the Lebanese civil war. During his 15-year exile in Paris, from 1990 to 2005, his young followers in the Free Patriotic Movement risked jail, torture, and death by opposing the Syrian occupation of Lebanon.
Shortly after his return home, though, the volatile Aoun changed sides. He became an ally of Hezbollah, Lebanon's Shiite militia, which is allied with the Assad regime in Syria and backed by Iran. Over the last half-decade, he rallied supporters around open contempt for the country's Sunni community and its erstwhile patron, Saudi Arabia. Many commentators believe Aoun's presidency is clear evidence that Hezbollah, and therefore Iran, has defeated Saudi Arabia and the Sunnis for full control of Lebanon. There's some truth to that, but it's beside the point.
Contrary to the belief of many, including many Lebanese, Lebanon is not, or is no longer, a prime battleground for regional and international actors. The election of Aoun is mainly significant as a symptom of a larger dynamic playing out across the Middle East. And that dynamic is a grim one that our next president will find very difficult to change, thanks to the misfeasance of the Obama administration.
Aoun has wanted the presidency for most of his adult life. He believed a memorandum of understanding he signed with Hezbollah in 2006 would guarantee him the job and assumed he was next in line after the term of Michel Suleiman ended in 2014. However, a large part of the Christian community didn't want Aoun, especially the Lebanese Forces led by Samir Geagea, against whom Aoun had waged a fratricidal war in the late 1980s that permanently weakened the Christian community. The main Sunni bloc, the Future movement led by former prime minister Saad Hariri, was also opposed to Aoun's nomination. More to the point, because Hezbollah had all that it wanted from Lebanon anyway, it saw no need to deliver the presidency to its new Christian ally.
Last winter, the electoral calculation changed when Geagea came out in support of Aoun. But Geagea's onetime ally Hariri backed a different candidate for the presidency, Suleiman Frangieh, a childhood friend of Bashar al-Assad. Hariri's choice revealed a divided Sunni community, much of which was astonished that Lebanon's most important Sunni leader would back the bagman of a regime slaughtering Sunnis in Syria.
So Aoun kept his portion of the Christian bloc from providing a quorum in parliament, which therefore could not elect a president. When Hariri finally changed his tune and decided to back Aoun—in exchange for Aoun's vow to return him to the premiership after several years of exile in Riyadh and Paris—a deal fell into place. It only needed the approval of Hezbollah's Hassan Nasrallah.
Here is the source of a significant misunderstanding. Many observers believe this election signifies that Lebanon has now come fully under Hezbollah management. But this has been the case already for years. Hezbollah has controlled key Lebanese institutions, especially the security and military portfolios, since the Syrian withdrawal from Lebanon in 2005. Hezbollah's instigation of war against Israel in 2006 was further proof that it had final say over the country's foreign policy. That Iran's praetorian guard on the eastern Mediterranean has now placed some 150,000 rockets and missiles aimed at Israel throughout Lebanon reinforces the fact that Hezbollah alone has the power to make life-and-death decisions of state, affecting the fate of millions of Lebanese, whether they back the group or oppose it. What the election shows is that Hezbollah has finally replicated the system of its patron, the Islamic Republic of Iran.
"Analysts have long misunderstood what it means for Iran to export the Islamic revolution," says Tony Badran, research fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. "It's not about forcing veils on women, or forbidding alcohol, or anything like that. Rather, it's about replicating the Islamic Republican system. Sure, there's a political system with ostensibly independent actors . . . but what matters is the parallel system. In Iran the important parallel institution is the Revolutionary Guard. In Lebanon it's Hezbollah. The real head of state and government isn't the president or prime minister but the supreme leader, who is the arbiter of anything that matters. In Iran that's Ali Khamenei. And this is the stage we've reached with the appointment of the president of Lebanon—it's okay, because Nasrallah says it's okay. He's the supreme leader."
Aoun's inaugural speech on October 31 made clear that his plans for the presidency conform with official, i.e., Hezbollah, policy. "As for the struggle with Israel," he said, "we will not spare any effort or resistance in order to liberate Lebanese land still under occupation and to protect our country against an enemy that still covets our land, our waters, and our natural resources." Aoun promotes the idea that Lebanon should continue its state of war against Israel because Hezbollah, which has placed rockets and missiles pointed at Israel throughout the entire country, wants him to.
And then there was Aoun's claim that his "priority and obsession will be the project of strengthening the Lebanese Armed Forces and upgrading its capabilities so that our army can become capable of deterring all kinds of aggressions against our country." In a phone call with John Kerry, when the secretary of state called to congratulate him, Aoun stressed how important it is for the United States to continue funding the LAF. Kerry assured him that the United States stands with Lebanon and is committed to supporting "the LAF in confronting terrorism and to strengthen stability."
Since Hezbollah entered the war to prop up Assad in Syria, the Lebanese Armed Forces have served as the party's strategic depth—covering Hezbollah's rear flank against domestic adversaries while patrolling certain Sunni regions on the Lebanese side of the border that Hezbollah needs pacified but to which it cannot commit resources. As Saudi Arabia came to understand that the LAF was nothing but a Hezbollah auxiliary force, Riyadh withdrew its pledge of $3 billion in military aid and equipment in February 2016. That was one of the first signs that the Saudis, under the new management of King Salman, had decided Lebanon was a bad investment.
The Saudis had already stopped seeing Lebanon as a venue for challenging Tehran. Partly that's because Riyadh lost faith in Hariri. The breaking point, one senior Saudi official told me recently, was when Lebanon went against Saudi Arabia at the Arab League and voted not to condemn Iran for destroying the Saudi embassy in Tehran (retaliation for the Saudi execution of dissident Shiite cleric Nimr al-Nimr in January). "Even Iraq abstained," the official told me. "But here are our own people in Lebanon"—meaning Hariri's movement—"voting against us."
The Saudis gave up on Lebanon because they believed Syria was a more important place than Lebanon to challenge the Iranian order. To their dismay, they found that in Syria, as in Lebanon, the Obama administration had effectively taken Iran's side.
In 2014 Obama wrote a letter to Ali Khamenei promising Iran's supreme leader that he wouldn't touch Assad. As he explained in a December 2015 press conference, the United States would respect Iran's "equities" in Syria. John Kerry recently reconfirmed the White House's position when he explained the United States wasn't going to target the Lebanese terror outfit in Syria because "Hezbollah is not plotting against us." In Lebanon, that meant the United States would protect Hezbollah by sharing intelligence with the Lebanese Armed Forces.
As Kerry's remarks to Aoun illustrate, the White House's Lebanon policy is centered on the LAF. American funding of Lebanon's army may have made some bureaucratic sense a decade ago when it was possible, if unrealistic, to argue that a strengthened LAF might offer a counterweight to Hezbollah. But the conflict in Syria has underscored that the LAF these days is, as the Saudis understand, an auxiliary of Hezbollah. The administration believes the same thing—which is why it fed intelligence to the LAF, knowing that Iran would be pleased. The White House not only promised Hezbollah freedom of movement in Syria, it also shored up the organization's defenses in Lebanon.
Obama's anodyne language describing how the Saudis need to "share" the Middle East with Iran obscured the fact that he was actively backing Iranian interests against the wishes of American allies. Continued American support of the LAF, and therefore Hezbollah, was just one facet of a larger regional strategy that saw the White House repeatedly coordinating with Iran and Iranian assets to the detriment of Sunnis—in Syria and Iraq as well as in Lebanon. The whirlwind reaped from Obama's realignment with Iran has dragged in others as well, like Lebanon's Christian community, which, thanks to the election of Hezbollah ally Michel Aoun, is now on a collision course with the region's Sunni Arab majority.
Can Lebanon's Christians survive their choice? Who knows? Sure, it puts them in the middle of a perpetual war against the Sunnis, but the Iranian axis they're now aligned with is doing pretty well. Tehran likes to boast that it's now in control of four Arab capitals—Beirut, Baghdad, Damascus, and Sanaa (Yemen); it's got Russian support and a nuclear arms program on the way. More to the point, it has the backing of the Obama administration.
And what of the next administration? Year upon year, Obama has dismantled a security order laboriously constructed in the Middle East over decades. Old friends no longer trust Washington, and old enemies are on the march. Destruction, alas, is more efficient than creation. Even a president determined to restore American credibility and order—and who knows when we will have such a leader—is unlikely to undo all the damage.