Review: Charles Winslow, Lebanon: War and Politics in a Fragmented Society 1st Edition (1996)

(Disclaimer: the author of this review has no professional expertise in the Middle East. This is only a review of a book. Also, readers need to know that "Mount Lebanon" refers to a part of Lebanon surrounding Beirut; it's about half the land area of the modern republic.)

This book is exceptionally difficult to obtain; this is no doubt a result of unfair neglect, not unmet demand.¹ There are several books about the Lebanese Civil War, however, and sorting out which one is reliable is pretty hard. In the case of the Lebanese Civil War, this event was so long and so complicated that practically any allegation made about any side has a grain of truth (at least), and any defense made by any side for its conduct in the war likewise has a grain of truth. The war involved at least eight major dyadic conflicts (i.e., conflicts between pairs of enemies, including enemy coalitions), and these varied depending on which region of Lebanon we're talking about.

Most books I've seen insist on simplifying the story by reducing it to a struggle between the Israelis and the Palestinians, with the Syrian role presented in a very time-sensitive way. Western accounts tend to play it up, mostly as a bad thing (like Iranian influence). Prominent accounts like Robert Fisk's Pity the Nation and David Gilmour's Lebanon: The Fractured Country tend to side with the Palestinians against the Israelis ²; few explain the historical background of Lebanon.As a postwar, generalized history of the War, therefore, this book is unique. It focuses on the 1975-1990 war, but it also includes critical background: the emergence of the Maronites as a nationality (as opposed to the congregation of a particular denomination of Eastern Catholicism³), their enduring and ambiguous conflict with the Druze⁴), and the Mandate politics that overtook Ottoman rule in Mount Lebanon. In a way, Ottoman rule in Mount Lebanon was a precursor to the French Mandate, with the Turkish authorities constrained by international "humanitarian" interventions into treaty obligations.⁵) Lebanese politicians used the Mandate (or mandate-like military regime) to shape events to their preferences, with civil conflict returning in 1958 and 1975.

The main reason for invoking Lebanon's past in a narrative of its recent history is that there is no other way to explain the parties and their relationship to each other. The matrix of ethno-confessional (and class, faction, and clan) identities makes no sense without some allusion to the pre-1860 history. Another reason for invoking this pre-1860 past is that it explains the institutions of power and power-sharing. In the 1860 Mount Lebanon Civil War, for example, the Maronites launched a peasant rebellion that was also a sectarian war, against their Druze amirs. But this came on the heels of a successful peasant rebellion against the (Maronite) Khazin sheikhs, which Druze peasants failed to join. When the peasant rebellion extended to the Shouf, the Druze counterattack led to perhaps 20,000 deaths and a French intervention.⁶ This pattern was to be repeated, with an Allied (later French) Mandate in 1918, US intervention in 1958, and Syrian intervention in 1976.

Winslow is almost unique in the Western-authored histories in mentioning the collapse of Yousef Baydas's Intra Bank (Gordon-1980 is another) as a potential factor in the breakdown of civil order in Lebanon. Winslow does not mention the enormous importance of hashish trafficking in the post-1943 economy, which is apparently a pretty important omission (drug trafficking is an essential feature of most protracted civil war economies) and in fact explains the especially serious nature of Lebanese official corruption. Regarding Intra Bank and the Baydas business empire, Winslow offers no sources--I felt the need to chase these down myself.

The account of the political factions and their successive re-shufflings is quite well-done, especially since he usually manages to incorporate crucial aspects such as the way political actors affected the livelihoods of important segments of Lebanese society.⁷ He uses several formal methods from game theory and conflict analysis to explain the shifting nature and historic implications of the war as it unfolds, which adds value.

One of the problems I had with the book is that it does tend to treat the distasters of recent Lebanese history as reflecting negative character traits of the Lebanese themselves, which I feel is very unfair. Perhaps it's true that Lebanese journalists and politicians don't do an adequate job of accepting responsibility for the war (in which case my understanding of the civil war is still quite wrong). But even Robert Fisk names his book after a poem by Khalil Gibran, with its implicit condemnation of the Lebanese national character.⁸ Most other writers, including this sociologist, acknowledge there really is a dynamic force beside "the Lebanese are amoral relativists" (and BTW, how is an amoral relativist different from a moral one?)

Because of this, the author often seems bemused by strategic thinking of Lebanese figures like Walid Jumblatt and Hassan Nasrallah. He's a galaxy away from their point of view, which is understandable but an obstacle to comprehending what happens next.

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NOTES

1. The same problem exists with Hanna Batatu's The Old Social Classes and the Revolutionary Movements of Iraq: A Study of Iraq's Old Landed and Commercial Classes and of its Communists, Ba`thists and Free Officers (1989); obtaining copies is amazingly difficult. This is definitely one of the finest books about the recent history of Iraq, but most of the time copies are in the high three figures.



2. Fisk is harshly critical of Yassir Arafat and al-Fatah, however. He also has a negative spin on Syria's role. See Pity the Nation, p.86 (Re: Arafat) and p.182 (Re: Rifat Assad, the head of Syria's security services). These are just two examples; Fisk's choice of words seldom leaves any of his views to the imagination.



3. The Maronites are named for St. Maroun and his descendants, the patriarchs of an autocephalic church in the far north of modern Lebanon. This church is about 1500 years old and has been uniate with the Roman Catholic church since the time of the Crusades. One point that can be made is that, with the Mediterranean littoral, there is a general tendency for religious sects to correspond to quasi-ethnographic divisions. The situation is a little more complex, as some clans (like the Assads and the Shihabs) have branches belonging to more than one religion. The Assads of Lebanon are Twelver Shi'a; those of Syria are Alawite. The Shihabs were traditionally Sunni, but Bashir II (a ruler of Mount Lebanon) converted to Christianity in the late 18th century (Winslow, pp.20-21).



4. Winslow doesn't say much about the Druze and recommends we read Philip K. Hitti, The Origins of the Druze People and Religion (1922). I've read a bit of Hitti's book; I've also read Nejla M. Abu Izzeddin, The Druzes: A new study of their history, faith, and society, E.J. Brill, (1984). The key point is that the Druze[s] are a variant of Isma'ili Shi'ism, concentrated in two small areas of Lebanon/Syria, and they have a very tight communal structure. One also notes that they are extremely effective on the battlefield. One of their leaders, Fakhr al-Din b. Uthman, was made "sultan" of Mount Lebanon in 1517 by a victorious Ottoman Salim II; his Ma'n dynasty ruled to 1697.
   
   Conflict with the Maronites was occasional; it seems to have been at least partly driven by class antagonism, although Winslow says nothing to encourage this point of view. The iqta (Mamluk/Ottoman tax farms) were usually administered by Druze clans, while in much of Lebanon the Maronites were arriviste laborers.



5. After 1834, the Ottoman Empire (Turkey) was propped up by several European powers, who feared its collapse could lead to Russian control over Anatolia and perhaps even the Levant. This intensified during the 19th century, even as the Ottomans lost most of their territory in the Balkans and North Africa. In 1860, the Ottomans were able to restore direct military rule over Mount Lebanon as a result of extreme communal violence between Maronites and Druze.



6. See Joel Beinin, Workers and Peasants in the Modern Middle East (The Contemporary Middle East), Cambridge University Press (2001), pp.59-61; Winslow, pp.34-42. Earlier, the Maronites had failed to join in a Druze rebellion against Ottoman Rule. At this time, splits occurred in both Druze and Maronite leadership. Winslow cites an estimate of 12,000 killed in the 1860 civil war, but agrees that the "war" was mostly a series of massacres.



7. For example, on p.180, he mentions the much-overlooked effort by ex-Pres. Camille Chamoun to create a large commercial fishing company out of Sidon, which would have put many (Sunni) fishermen out of work.



8. "Pity the nation that is full of beliefs and empty of religion/Pity the nation that wears a cloth it does not weave/and eats a bread it does not harvest." (Khalil Gibran, "Pity the Nation," The Garden of the Prophet) Fisk (correctly, in my view) strongly implies foreigners are to blame for Lebanon's most recent problems, and so we really ought to have another poem that goes, "Pity the nation that is full of treasures/That foreigners think they can pack up and take;/Whose allies are rapists and whose brokers are thieves." Of course, a sensible Lebanese poet would probably hesitate to write such a poem, precisely because it would be accurate.