On-the-ground Political Economy in the Middle East

from Edward Fullbrook

About seven months after the end of Israeli-Lebanese 2006 War I travelled in Lebanon for ten days.  At the time the UK Foreign Office was telling its citizens that Lebanon was not a safe place to visit, but my then partner and now wife needed to go there to do research for the novel that she was about to begin. In Beirut I made indirect contact with a Lebanese economist whom I had befriended a few years before at a conference in Venice.  After a series of phone calls and rides with strangers we rendezvoused in the south of the country, and then in a 4-wheel drive vehicle with United Nations plates he drove us through all the road blocks all the way to the Israeli border.  Yesterday, in response to the recent events in Tunisia, Egypt and Lebanon and in anticipation of more dramatic ones to come, he sent me his analysis of the political economy that lies behind them.  It is not the sort of thing you find in any textbook, nor the New York Times, nor do I necessarily agree with it all, but it is definitely real-world, on-the-ground stuff that merits reading.  It appears here under a nom de plume.

Imperial racketeering and civil war in Lebanon: Some notes for a blog

Salim Ahmad Kassem 

As the pro-Hezbollah opposition readies itself to assume executive power in Lebanon, there is every reason to believe that this time power will not be rotated. And the reason for this contention has nearly nothing to do with Lebanon’s internal political landscape, and a lot to do with the United State’s imperial ambitions to control the Persian Gulf. The United States is already on a war footing with Iran. The deepening sanctions, the Sunni jihadists and the Kurd secessionist are but the tip of an iceberg in an orchestrated covert and overt war against the Islamic republic of Iran. The US is preparing to strike and gain control of the Eastern flank of the Persian Gulf or the most strategic waterway worldwide, from which sixty percent of remaining oil reserves will pass over the next four decades. The US already controls the western shores and to control the eastern coast would undoubtedly place it at the helm of history for many years to come. If the US leaves things as they are and accepts Iranian partial control over Gulf waters, it would also have to accept a downgrading of its imperial stature, which would imply massive tectonic realignments of global powers, including an orderly workout out the defunct US dollar, among other losses structured around imperial rents. But the Gulf to be exact, just prior to the US invasion of Iraq represented a litmus test for the limits of inter imperialist collusion. Despite the many concessions made by the Baathist and the French, the 2003 invasion of Iraq was inevitable. The Persian Gulf for America represents the indispensible condition of empire. No gambler could dare meddle with the US interest in the Gulf.  It epitomises an existentialist question for an empire in crisis. For any other contending imperialist power to intervene in the Gulf, could mean an end to the entente in inter-imperialist rivalry as we know it. Some have gone as far as qualifying this event as world war three.  So, to understand the situation in sectarian Lebanon, it is best to project the course of developments from the broader political picture to the narrower one of Lebanon. Why so?

 

Because Lebanon is socially and constitutionally sectarian and geopolitically rent based. And, to boot, it is a society in which social classes are disarticulated along sectarian lines. Lebanon represents a rent-driven entity, which imports nearly seven times what it exports, nearly eighty percent of what it consumes is imported, and these imports are financed by internal borrowing, which is nearly three times its GDP or total income (55-60 billion dollars). One must use the qualifying ‘nearly’ here, for in Lebanon statistics, in the words of former prime minister Salim Elhoss, remain a point of view. Few other countries, apart from the US, can boast this internal borrowing record while maintaining a stable currency and low inflation rates; how could it do this? Because its family owned banking system had successfully bet against the regional stability arrangement and the reconstruction of Lebanon way back in the early nineties. So the government initially, in the early nineties, issued bonds at around forty percent interest rates, which were then bought by the banks, but because the rates were so high, the banks regained their initial capital and exorbitant profits were made in a very short period. Parts of their profits were usurped and placed abroad and parts were rolled over into additional debt as time went by. If political instability sets in now, already huge banking profits have been deposited abroad and family-owned banking losses would be minimal.

 

This is not so unusual in the near east and it is typical of non-oil producing Arab countries, which became geopolitical rent states after the first Arab oil boom in the seventies. These near eastern Arab countries were not so dependent on rent before oil, but it was a combination of structural adjustment and Gulf aid and remittances to these countries that gradually de-industrialised them and made them heavily dependent on handouts. The process of rent acquisition itself became plainly linked with US’s political designs. Rents were channelled along sectarian lines and US policy laced rent unsteadied the capacity of the state to deliver social welfare. Already, for a nascent post-colonial Lebanon to depend on external sources of funding had de-legitimised the state and devolved power to subordinate social institutions and sects. Also, social class cohesion, which was in the process of formation during the initial industrialisation period incurred damages, firstly because rents were channelled to sects and, hence, socialisation occurred in the sect itself and, secondly, because a weakened state engulfed in a security crisis failed to provide the necessary support for working class reproduction, so once more the sect took over as the welfare conveyor belt.

 

Thus, although the North of Lebanon represents a predominantly poor Sunni region, the poorest in Lebanon indeed, the masses there still support the outgoing Sunni prime minister, Mr. Saad Hariri, who happens to be a real estate and banking tycoon with Saudi ties. The same measure applies to other sects with varying degrees. In the south where the majority is Shiite and have been on the defensive against Israeli aggression for over six decades, this majority supports Mr. Hassan Nassrallah, who happens to be bankrolled by Iran. Not that it is wrong to be anti Zionist or imperialist, but it is wrong to be so solely on Shiite grounds. However, no matter how sects are positioned on the inside, events in Lebanon will unfold with how the US fares in its ongoing regional war offensive, in particular, in the overt wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and, its covert war on Iran, which is about to play out in the open sooner than one expects.

 

Little effort is being spared in the preparation for the US final assault on Iran. The US is first fomenting the Sunni-Shiite divide, which is already at play in Iraq in order to isolate principally Shiite Iran from its Islamic milieu, and possibly to entice a peripheral but sizeable Iranian Sunni minority into revolt. Secondly, by raising tensions in the vital Gulf region and by virtue of its gigantic military presence there, it would hold the whole world hostage by the degree of its ability to infuse stability in this region. Even if all does not work according to some super plan, which is for the US to fully control the Gulf waters, the very process of calibrating the degree of instability in the Gulf, given the US’s huge military presence there, would still allow it to seek imperial ransom from the rest of the world. Strategically, unless the US suffers an outright defeat, a protracted but controlled state of military turmoil in the Gulf would further furbish the US with imperial rents, including the continuing issuance of enormous debts denominated in its own currency. One may infer that relative to its present imperial standing, the US could be worse for a while, but not worse than the degradation suffered in its position vis-à-vis other imperialist contenders had it not engaged Iran in a form of protracted warfare. War in the Gulf is a win-win situation for the US. In relative terms, there is more to gain from this imperialist venture than otherwise.

 

Regionally, Israel, a now self-proclaimed Jewish state, has an innate aversion to successful pluralistic or multi-sectarian models anywhere nearby and, an abhorrence of Hezbollah, especially after its tactical defeat in the summer of 2006.. Not that Hezbollah had proven anything new in the history of wars, for people’s protracted national liberation struggles in the twentieth century had nearly always won out, but what it did prove, once and for all, is that no military technological superiority can allow an occupier to rule over a people against their will, be they even ‘Arabs’ in the Orientalist meaning of the word. Outright victory of an occupier over an occupied people is no longer possible short of complete annihilation. That is a pretty relevant point given that the degree to which the technological divide has widened between North and South, Israel and the Arab world, and, as always, questions of degree do matter. For that reason, Israel’s position on Hezbollah consuming itself in a Lebanese civil war is just as adamant as that of the US. Zionist aggressions towards Lebanon and the region never ceased in recent history. Nevertheless, Israeli aggressions were always orchestrated in line with US imperial ambitions. The 2006 baleful aggression against Lebanon represented a collusion of US and Israeli strategic interests, but was in large part a fulfilment of US diktat to weaken an Iranian ally in Lebanon. Apart from the mightier weaponry available to Israel and, to a lesser extent Hezbollah, little has changed since.  The logistics for war are readied on both sides of the fence.

 

Yet, in the midst of it all, the Iranian ruling class has been very short sighted thinking that it could benefit from sectarian divisions in Iraq and Lebanon. Back in the late eighties, Iran had supplanted, with the able assistance of the Syrians, a secular national liberation movement in South Lebanon and replaced it with the present day Hezbollah. Ever since its inception, Hezbollah had sidelined all other progressive national groups when elementally anti-imperialist struggle involves front work. If the premise of larger and deeper fronts, especially one that involve grassroots support, better positions liberation struggles, then leading the struggle by one sect does exactly the opposite of what was intended. But anti-imperialism is not an inherent characteristic of Iranian ruling classes. The Iranian ruling class is in essence a rentier dependent class with mini imperialist ambitions of its own. The recent lifting of subsidies on basic commodities, rampant unemployment and deteriorating social conditions do not set Iran too far apart from its middle eastern neighbours. In Iraq, as a case in point, Iran did precisely the opposite of what is needed for a speedy anti-imperialist victory. Iran, to the surprise of the US, armed sectarian Shiite militias and provided the US invaders with their biggest political victory so far, that is, the setting up of the only elected pro-western Arab government in the Near East. Some would go as far as to question Iran’s anti-imperialist or anti Zionist role given that it had colluded with the US during the invasion of Iraq, which is far more significant to the US relative to Lebanon.

 

In Lebanon, when Hezbollah is not fighting on the front lines with Israel, it simply becomes another sectarian party in a social formation engineered by the colonialist French to be an extended homeland for the ‘uber’ Maronite, and a paragon of sectarianism par excellence.  Politics and sociology are intractable everywhere, but they are overly so in Lebanon. In this peripheral, geopolitical-rent based system, sect acts to vitiate class unity, consciousness and broader anti-imperialist struggle. In political economy parlance, the sect is the tool by which capital differentiates labour. Also, as elsewhere, the degree to which sectarian division surfaces is closely linked to a feebleness of working class ideology and the depth of the crisis, meaning the failure of reform. In the Near East both conditions are abound. Crisis, in particular, had  exhibited pretty high frequency and became steeper after the invasion of Iraq, where the rife Sunni/Shiite fissure is crisscrossing the Muslim world, and unmistakably finding a fertile terrain in Lebanon. Little that this mattered to Iran. Insofar as it was concerned, its principal sphere of influence lies in the Gulf and, by implication, what plays out in Lebanon is the sort of pressure that Iran exerts on the US as it does so elsewhere in Iraq and Afghanistan, albeit, by varying degrees. Whichever way one looks at it, the Iranian-US conflict is only superficially ideological but, more concretely, the determining and primary element wedging between interests is that of capturing rents derived from the level of control in the Gulf. This is where global inter imperialist rivarly plays out in the open.

 

As for Syria, the short of it comes from an Israeli government position: ‘Israel easily predicts Syria’s position for it is not its national interest or pan Arabism that counts, but the interests of its newly arisen Alawi military/merchant elite.’ Until the 2005 Hariri assassination and its ousting from Lebanon, Syria’ ruling class enjoyed tremendous rents from it political control of this neighbouring economy. It dollarised its usurped wealth from the Syria people by using the Lebanese banking system, thereby acquiring a niche and a ranking in the nomenclature of global capital. Pursuant to its departure from Lebanon, it continued to liberalise the Syrian economy to the detriment of the broader strata of peasants and workers who had seen their real incomes fall, whilst the incomes of the rich, their consumption and, what goes with it in the form of ostentations display of wealth, soared. Social conditions in Syria have gravely deteriorated ensuing to these neo-liberal reforms. The ruling class has prematurely liberalised prices allowing merchants the freedom of marking up prices whilst they held wages nearly steady and subsidised production inputs. They have also aligned the exchange rate, stabilised it with national resources and allowed merchants to veer foreign exchange from the national economy. They have further taken steps to lift tariffs protecting the national industry, exposing to unfair competition from abroad. The old equation of proportional resources being allocated to the production and consumption sides, which had maintained stability in Syria for a long time, had come undone. Syria is highly vulnerable to rent flows and the measures of inequality are rising by all estimates.

 

Despite the ringing alarms, Syria’s ruling military oligarchs continued on the perilous path of maintaining regime stability, more and more, by repression and violent coercion. Following the Hariri assassination in 2005, Syria came under pressure from a US sponsored ‘international tribunal’ linking its presidential monarchy to the Hariri and other assassinations in Lebanon. With this tribunal tool, the US wanted to pressure Syria to turn away from Iran, closely monitor its border with Iraq, and stop weapons shipments to Hezbollah.. Syria, in return, wanted to come back into Lebanon through proxy government and a ‘tribunal’ whitewash. Until late 2009, Syria was pointed to by the tribunal as the prime suspect in the Hariri assassination, but as the Syrian borders with Iraq came under more scrutiny, whilst an American-Iranian offensive ended Iraqi resistance, the finger swerved away from Syria and began to point to Hezbollah. There is a very peculiar nature to how international justice enacted in the tribunal follows American whims and desires. And so, Hezbollah, the party, which was least to benefit, if not get harmed by the Hariri assassination, now stands accused of it.

 

Apart from the predominant fact that Iranian/Shiite collusion with the US in Iraq casts its shadow over much of the Muslim world, there is enough of a momentum in Lebanon’s history as well for civil strife to erupt. The 1989 Taef accord did nothing to rectify a highly unbalanced sect based power distribution. And, if civil war in Lebanon would not start on its own, then Israel would either foment one or will strike to induce a civil war. Sectarians, like ultra-nationalists who cleanse the national spirit by war making, reproduce sectarianism by means of war as well. These wars that are similar on the surface to feudal tributary wars, but at heart, they are part and parcel of a global capitalist accumulation process that grows by dispossession and dislocation of the working poor. And, there remains the mere detail of the historical incidence. How to lure Hezbollah into a civil war or, in case that fails, into a war with Israel, disarm its fighters and deepen the Sunni-Shiite divide. The orders to US intelligence assets, Sunni fundamentalists being a part of that, will come from the US. But the real task of inflicting war horrors in Lebanon will ultimately be commissioned to Israel.

 

There is a principal commonality between these near eastern states that were mentioned above and, that is, they  are leveraged by oil or geo-political rents. To have come to be rent dependent took a long time in the making. The mode of integration of these states with the global economy changed as the ruling regimes aligned themselves with the type of accumulation imposed by America on the Gulf states. Rent dependency is a product of cross border class alliance. So far, the rents administered to every social group provide the sedation necessary to induce regime stability a la Americana. Where does all this leave an already meek progressive force in Lebanon? How can the progressive political forces organise social groups who are torn asunder by rents generetaed passively from outside with little value generated from the local economy to tie people together? As the Tunisian revolution has shown, the answer lies in the conditions of the struggle. For the progressives to play on sectarian contradictions as they did before will not suffice.. Now, the way to go about things is to debase the sect. To strip it from its constituents by demystifying the conditions of the struggle. A historical opportunity will come when Israel launches its impending assault on Lebanon. Although revolutionary moments, as always, are difficult to predict, an Israeli assault on Lebanon to weaken Hezbollah might catalyse an Arab domino effect, which will topple one regime after another. There is certainly now, a different imperial calculus taking place nowadays pursuant to the Tunisian revolution. What the Tunisian revolution did is that it shattered the image of the submissive Arab people. The handbook of the CIA, ‘the Arab Mind’ needs to be rewritten. Irrespective of that, Iran will be the next target for America, not by choice but by necessity. the clock is ticking for the moment of conception. As for the rest of the world, which is dependent on an accumulation process based on oil and dollars, a state of controlled turmoil in the Gulf will still furbish the US with the ammunition to expand its process of imperial racketeering.