When Syria sneezes, Lebanon catches a cold

 

Beirut

News that the Syrian regime has agreed to hand in its arsenal of chemical weapons is a great relief to Lebanon. For the past few weeks we have been wandering around like inmates on death row, fearing that a US-led strike would ignite a potentially apocalyptic conflict between Hezbollah and Israel or at the very least provoke a prolonged internal Shia-Sunni terror campaign. This was no idle fear. The salvos fired at the end of August brought back memories of the darkest days of the civil war. But Lebanon is still not in the clear, especially as a framework for handing over the chemical weapons still needs to be thrashed out. Sectarian tensions persist and there is the small issue of more than a million Syrian refugees in a country that has barely enough infrastructure for its own people. Oh yes, and an economy that has gone into deep freeze. Beirut is no longer a party town. The tourists have gone, foreign investment has slowed to barely a trickle and businesses are defaulting by the day. There are whispers of Christians selling up and leaving. Unlike 1975, when they opposed the growing power of the PLO, this is not their fight. The rest of Lebanon is divided into pro and anti Syrian camps, a position that is reflected in the country’s two main political blocs — each with their own outlandish conspiracy theories. Roughly half the country believes the rebels gassed their own people — in the same way they believe it was not Damascus but either Israel, the CIA or even al-Qa’eda that gave the order to kill former Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri. Why? Because the world is run by a US-Zionist cabal, of course. Meanwhile, those who back Assad forget a glaring contradiction: that in this apparently desperate fight against Muslim fundamentalism, Hezbollah, Syria’s ally and Iran’s proxy militia, has a core Islamic ideology equally as creepy as al-Nusra or al-Qa’eda.