A singular exchange took place last week on X, formerly Twitter. The U.S. envoy to Lebanon, Morgan Ortagus, reacted to a tweet from one David Daoud, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, who had posted a rundown of Walid Joumblatt’s interview last week with Al-Araby, a satellite channel based in Qatar.
According to Daoud’s summary, in the interview Joumblatt affirmed that Ortagus’ “conditions are impossible, including ‘excising Hezbollah, including Hezbollah’s weapons. But have they determined all the locations, is there readiness to support [the Lebanese Army] which needs weapons ...’” In response to Daoud, Ortagus tweeted, “Crack is whack, Walid,” a popular anti-drug slogan. It’s difficult to understand why Ortagus responded with such gratuitousness to a comment that did not attack her personally, implying drug use had clouded Joumblatt’s judgement. Generally, the role of U.S. envoys is not to enter into infantile social media spats with politicians from the countries they cover, but this is, well, a whacky new era in American diplomacy.
In response, the Druze leader tweeted Hans Larwin’s famous painting of death standing behind a soldier during World War I, and described Ortagus as “the ugly American.” His implication was that the Americans are trying to push the Lebanese into armed conflict with Hezbollah, which would bring only death and ruin.
This extraordinary exchange aside, the episode did raise an important question about U.S.-Lebanese relations. Since last November, when the United States imposed a surrender agreement on Hezbollah, the Americans have become the new strongman in the country. On the Lebanese side, the new president, Joseph Aoun, and prime minister, Nawaf Salam, have committed themselves to implementing Security Council Resolution 1701, which calls for Hezbollah’s disarmament south of the Litani River.
The news in Beirut is that Ortagus is unhappy with the pace of the disarmament process, even if officially the Lebanese authorities have sought to stress that she was impressed by the deployment of the Lebanese armed forces in the south on her last visit. Joumblatt’s remarks appeared to confirm a more reserved interpretation of the American mood. However, Ortagus would benefit from reading up on Lebanon’s history since 1982, the year she was born, to understand why the Lebanese are so reluctant to trust the Americans when it comes to the state’s ties with Hezbollah.
In summer 1982, the Israelis invaded Lebanon to expel the Palestine Liberation Organization from the country. The Americans, represented by retired diplomat Philip Habib, negotiated a Palestinian withdrawal, eventually leading to the election of Amin Gemayel as president (after the Syrians had assassinated the president-elect, Amin’s brother Bashir). The Americans sponsored negotiations for a Lebanese-Israeli withdrawal agreement, a project favored by George Schultz, then the U.S. secretary of state. However, the agreement, signed on May 17, 1983, was, in fact, a peace agreement, provoking considerable Syrian hostility. Schultz’s desire to see it through was one reason why he was able to prolong the U.S. military presence in Lebanon, within a multinational peace-keeping force, amid mounting opposition in Washington.
Schultz’s opponent on this question was the defense secretary at the time, Caspar Weinberger, who was far more cautious about the U.S. military presence. In the end, Weinberger was proven correct when the Americans lost 241 servicemen in a suicide bombing at Beirut airport and the Lebanese government failed to ratify the May 17 agreement. In the meantime, the Americans encouraged the Lebanese government to assert its authority throughout the country, leading to clashes between the army and the Shiite and Druze militias allied with Syria. By January 1984, the army was at war with a portion of its own population, and was bombing Beirut’s southern suburbs. After an uprising by the militias against the Gemayel government on February 6, 1984, the Americans “redeployed their forces to ships offshore,” a gentle way of saying they were cutting and running. While the Reagan administration portrayed this as steadfastness, by the end of March it had terminated the U.S. mission in Lebanon.
From then on, America viewed its failed Lebanon experience as a stinging defeat, and for well over two decades it completely disregarded the country. When Saddam Hussein’s forces invaded Kuwait in August 1990, the Americans allowed Syrian forces to violate the “red lines” agreement of 1976 and use their aircraft to oust Michel Aoun, the head of Lebanon’s military government who had opposed Syria. They did so because they were seeking Syrian military support for a major operation to liberate Kuwait. On October 13, 1990, the Syrians invaded Aoun’s areas, consolidating Damascus’ stranglehold over Lebanon until the Syrian pullout in 2005.
The detrimental consequences were on display in April 1996, when Israel launched its Grapes of Wrath operation in Lebanon against Hezbollah. The U.S. secretary of state at the time, Warren Christopher, traveled not to Beirut but to Damascus to negotiate a resolution with Hafez al-Assad, the Syrian president. Lebanese officials were marginalized, even though the accord reached in the Syrian capital had profound repercussions for their country. What came out of this was the so-called April Understanding, which established “rules of the game” in the south, placing Hezbollah on the same level as the Israelis, to the detriment of the Lebanese state. When U.S. officials today blame the Lebanese for legitimizing Hezbollah, they conveniently forget that they endorsed a far-reaching agreement in 1996 that did precisely the same thing.
From the Lebanese perspective the lessons after 1982 were clear. First, that the Americans wouldn’t hesitate to precipitate them into a domestic conflict in pursuit of favored U.S. and Israeli objectives, only to abandon them when things went sour. Second, that Washington would readily use Lebanon as a bargaining chip when doing so brought valuable dividends, as it did in late 1990. And finally, that the Americans would make surreptitious deals behind Lebanon’s back that only undermined its sovereignty, or what passed for sovereignty, before blaming the Lebanese for the consequences, as Christopher’s approval of the April Understanding made apparent.
So, today one doesn’t need to be a crackhead to realize that trusting the Americans is frequently a bad idea. That’s even truer when their representative comes to Beirut and prefaces her comments by thanking Israel for defeating Hezbollah, oblivious to the fact that the Israelis killed thousands of Lebanese civilians and destroyed a significant portion of the country in doing so. Furthermore, officials in Beirut can plainly see that the Americans have allowed Israel to violate the ceasefire agreement Washington itself negotiated. Since we’re using drug terminology here, perhaps the real message is that the Lebanese just don’t want to get high on a bad product.
