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Religion See other Religion Articles Title: Lebanese Democracy: One Man, One Boom Lebanon is one of the bright spots for us war nerds, and just today as I’m writing this, the ol' Phoenicians gave us one of the funniest bombings since Reagan's F-111s sent a GBU straight at Khadafy's daughter's crib. Once you know the name of the Lebanese politician who got flame-broiled a few days ago, you ought to be able to tell me who did it and why—if you've been keeping up with your homework. Clue: his first name was Antoine—full name Antoine Ghanim. Now: whodunnit? Well, it wasn't the Puerto Ricans. C'mon, it's not that hard. If a Lebanese congress-critter is named Antoine, or some other Frenchy first name, he’s a Maronite Christian. If he's a Christian, he's probably (not always but probably) anti-Syrian. And if he's an anti-Syrian Lebanese congress-critter, he's probably shredded beef by now. For the past few years anti-Syrian Lebanese have been having all sorts of nasty accidents, stepping into bullets like Pierre Gemayel (see? "Pierre"! The name tells you everything!) or having their motorcades turned into confetti by superbomb like Rafik Hariri, the billionaire who was dumb enough to decide the best way to spend his wealth was to get involved in Lebanese politics--and on the anti-Syrian side. See, the Syrians are sly people. Like I've said before, their army isn't much—whenever the Israelis are feeling down they dream about having an excuse to fight the Syrians—but like a lot of cowards, the Syrians specialize in booby traps, backstabbings and proxy killings. What I love is the way the Syrian PR service was online instantly condemning the "criminal act" of blowing up Antoine. It's almost like they had their official denial in hand before the bomb went off: "President Assad is disgusted by this bombing which occurred—what's that, Raheem?—oh, sorry, my aide has just informed me that this regrettable bombing will not happen for another half-hour, so have some tea, my journalist friends, have some of our delicious Syrian coffee and come back after lunch, when I will have something to deny for you!" The Syrians can count, and they believe in democracy—in a way. See, ol' Antoine, before he went to Lebanese-Christian heaven (which would be a place where South and West Beirut are always falling into the sea and the Beka'a Valley has a major earthquake every ten minutes), he was an important vote for the anti-Syrian front that's hanging on to power in Lebanon. It's like the graveyard scenes in old Western cartoons: you hear a shot and the sign on the graveyard goes "ding!" and changes from "Gower Gulch, pop. 276" to "...pop. 275." Now that Antoine's gone, the anti-Syrians have only a two-vote majority. And you have to wonder how long those other two votes are going to last. Antoine was running scared himself; he'd stuffed his license plate in his trunk to fool his killers, whoever they were—coulda been anybody, Lacey Peterson's husband or my own ex-congress-critter Gary Condit (well, I was almost in his district). I'm not saying the Syrians did it! I don't want to have to run a mirror under the Subaru every day before leaving the duplex—but it sure does look that way. I've talked about Lebanon before, but just to go over the basics, it used to be part of "Greater Syria" and the Syrians, all Syrians from Ba'athist to monarchist, are still pissed off at the French for detaching it from Mother Syria and making it a western "Protectorate." Trust the French to grab the beachfront. And remember, nothing pisses a country off more than somebody fencing off all the waterfront property. Take Bolivia: they lost their coastline to Chile in a pretty interesting little war I'll have to write about one of these days. The Chilean navy coughed up a true hero, Capitan Arturo Prat. An Englishman in his genes, which is probably why he took the ironclad Huascar with his wooden ship Esmerelda in one of the finest naval duels since John Paul Jones took the Serapis. Poor old Bolivia doesn’t have any naval heroes and never will have, now, not unless they start staging naval battles between the floating cattail islands in Lake Titicaca. The Bolivians have never been the same since they lost their coasts—stuck with the Kurds and Tibetans in the hell of Landlocked tribes. Every damn year, crowds of fat little Inca girls in derby hats and Eastwood serapes get together in La Paz to sing, "Queremos nuestro mar!" I read that in a National Geographic article when I was 12, and even though the Bolivian girls weren't that cute and wore way too many clothes for my tastes, I always liked Bolivia after that. They seemed like my kind of people somehow, something about that pathetic demonstration and that slogan, "We want our ocean back!" I agreed with them all the way, especially since Chile is such an ocean-hog, nothing BUT beachfront. So you can see why the Syrians have been infiltrating Lebanon steadily, like surfers from the Valley trying to grab a wave at Huntington Beach or Zuma—only with more access to mercury-tilt switches. But still, you really can't be totally positive it was Assad's agents, just because so many Lebanese are ready to kill nearly all other Lebanese. It's not just Christian vs. Muslim; a lot of it is family hate, al-Hatfield and al-McCoy stuff. These are hill folk—the Maronites pitch their villages way up on hilltops to make it harder for the Muzzies to come uninvited. But even Christians hate each other, and kill other clans when they get the chance. Then there’s the Druze, my favorite Lebanese tribe, who ain’t really Muslim or Christian, though they try to act Muslim to avoid getting decapitated and gang-raped too often by the Faithful. When a Druze boy hits puberty they have some secret ceremony where they tell him, “OK, here’s the thing, and be sure you don’t blab this around, but see...we’re Buddhists. Yup, Buddhists. Go figure. Just the way it is.” Now naturally everybody hates a closet Buddhist, one of these secret vegetarians, so the Druze need to have their own warlord family, the Jumblatts. Kamal Jumblatt explained the Lebanese view of democracy when he was warned that he was about to be killed: “The Jumblatts are usually killed,” he pointed out. An occupational hazard, like transfats for data entry drones. If you can’t take the heat, get your intern to start the car, as they say in political circles in Beirut. Here again, it's a matter of names. The same families keep popping up and getting knocked down; only the Frenchified first names change. Start with the Chamoun family, one of the oldest Christian warlord clans. He was the Lebanese boss who called in American Marines in 1958—that was the time the Marines DIDN’T get blown to bits in Beirut. Chamoun was pissed because the demographics were getting scary, too many Muslim babies and too many Christians emigrating. Of course the Marines couldn’t do anything about birthrate, so they stood around on the beaches for a while and then went home. In a way you could say that our 1958 mission to Beirut summed up what makes life hard for contemporary armies: standing around some place you don’t speak a word of the language trying to help a local Phalangist, meaning a guy to the right of Franco, try to stop a birthrate differential. What do you do, send a PFC to every Shia hut in South Beirut at the midnight hour to kick the door down and yell, “Now cut that out!” Talk about demoralizing missions—military peeping Tom-ery on a mass scale. All the tribes turned on each other in the Lebanese Civil War, with the Syrians playing every side against every other. But the one tribe everybody hated all the time was the Palestinians. For starters, it terrified the Christians, because suddenly the demographics were even worse: boom, 1948, Israel boots the Pals and Lebanon has to take a lot of them in. All these Palestinian camps around Lebanon, as if the place wasn’t crowded and creepy enough. By last count there are now 402,000 Pals in the country, a tenth of the population. One thing those folks can do is breed—you’ll notice the boss of Gaza has 13 kids. The Pals, naturally, are Lebanon’s least popular tenth too. The rest of the Lebanese hate each other but in a family way; the Pals were like being forced to take in boarders, and worse yet boarders who claim to be related to you: “Help us, fellow Arabs!” That didn’t go down well at all with the Maronites, who call themselves Phoenicians and don’t want to hear any of that Arab crap; and it wasn’t much more musical to the Sunni or Shia’s ears. They needed work, and suddenly they were undercut by these desperate refugees who’d work for nothing. The Lebanese passed laws forbidding Pals to work at any decent trades, meanwhile talking loud about solidarity with the PLO. The Pals had a saying: “Lebanon is for Palestine but against the Palestinians.” There used to be 15 Palestinian camps in Lebanon, pocket ghettos like the Western Addition in San Francisco, only with more minarets than projects. Then came a wacky little Israeli dude with buck teeth named Menachem Begin, sort of a Jewish Phalangist, and he invaded in 1982. That was bad news for the Pals, especially the ones in two camps you may have heard of: Sabra and Shatilla. Begin and Sharon sicced Bashir Gemayel's killing teams, the "BG Squads," into those camps and a few hours later a couple thousand Pal civvies were dead. It was so embarrassing they had to close down three of the 15 Pal camps; today, there are 12 Palestinian camps in Lebanon, 12 little tumors popping out unemployed Jihadis who have a career choice pretty much limited to driving a one of two types of car: either a taxi or a car bomb. Just to show you why Pals in Lebanon don’t mind martrydom so much, it’s against the law for Pals to own taxis in Lebanon. In fact it’s illegal for them to own property at all! But they can drive taxis, under the table, for next to nothing. Like one Pal whined, “We are less than the Sri Lankans here!” Which is pretty low on the scale, because Sri Lankan girls are imported to Beirut to be “maids,” meaning beaten in the daytime by “Madam” and raped at night by “Monsieur.” And even they’re respected more than the Pals. And that is why one of these twelve hellholes exploded this summer in a very interesting flare-up: Nahr al-Bared camp, where the Lebanese Army lost 200 men trying to boot out a little gang called Fatah al-Islam with less than that many members in it. It was a good look at the misery of urban combat under the current set of rules, with all that nonsense about sparing civilians. In my next installment of this Lebanese soap opera, which I’m going to try to keep going day by day thanks to the new eXile website, I’ll go into detail about what happened at Nahr al-Bared. But just for a tease, and sort of a punchline, lemme tell you what one "prominent Christian politician" just said about the Pal camps: "I see no reason why the Palestinians should be armed." The kicker is, the dude who said that was Dori Chamoun, son of ol' man Camille (I guess girl's names are cool with the Christians—call the kid anything but Muhammad). Dori's brother Dani used to be the official spokesperson of the family, till he got zapped. Now his brother's totally shocked that the Pals would want to hold onto their guns: what have they got to be paranoid about? What's wrong with those suspicious sons'a-bitches? What could happen? Ah, you gotta love Lebanon—just to be able to say that with a straight face, that's pure style, Phoenician class, baby!
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