Every Man in This Village Is a Liar_ An Education in War - Megan K. Stack [86]
The clash wasn’t country against city; poor versus rich; Shiites squaring off against the rest. It was all of that, a little bit, and none of that. It was deeper and darker, harder to say, and impossible to fix. Lebanon was pushing blindly toward change, and it had to decide what kind of country it was going to be: a protectorate of Syria, tied to Iran through Hezbollah, verging on pariah status, battling endlessly with Israel, or this new country that Hariri and the others were trying to forge—free from Syrian influence, oriented toward France and America, liberal and warless, luring tourists and making nice with the neighbors. Each side saw its own extinction in the alternate vision. They weren’t living in the same country anymore; they had become divided until they couldn’t even recognize one another. I was haunted most of all by the Christians who looked at the Shiites and said simply, “Those people are not Lebanese.” Because they believed it.
If they represent half, then we’re the other half.
We can’t get rid of them, and they can’t get rid of us.
In the end, the Americans managed to pry Lebanon out of Syria’s hands. They sent the Russians, the Saudis, and everybody else to lean on Damascus until they didn’t have a friend left in the world, aside from Iran. The demonstrations helped, of course. The protests, tent city, and anthems gave America an irrefutable screen to lean over the Atlantic and smack Syria across the jowls.
I watched the last Syrian soldiers pull out of Lebanon on an April day when the sun dripped like hot honey through the straight, fresh pines of the Bekaa Valley. The crust of words had flaked away. The politicians had raged; the kings and presidents had slathered on their threats. The Lebanese had called the Syrians dogs and bastards and sons of whores, hollered their heads off, beaten luckless Syrian construction workers. Now it was time to swallow the acid long enough to say good-bye.
A lot of questions massed under the surface that day: Can you undo long years of domination by emptying out a few army bases? What about proxies and undercover intelligence? What about Hezbollah? How will this country, which is really two countries, find its way forward? The day Syria left, nobody asked.
At a military base near the border, the Syrian and Lebanese army commanders strolled side by side through beds of roses and daisies, saluting the troops. The two national anthems wheezed from brass horns. Mountains loomed splendidly against the sky.
“Lebanon will endure. Its rocks, its mountains, its waters will stay. And that’s thanks to the Syrian military presence, which ensured the unity of Lebanon,” Syrian commander Ali Habib told the soldiers. “The civil war is over and Lebanon, once weak, is strong through its people, its army, and its resistance. Our relationship is bound by the pure blood spilled by our forces.”
Wordless, blank, the soldiers stood in straight lines under their berets—red for the Syrians, green for the Lebanese. Bugles blared, songbirds trilled, cell phones chirped.
The Lebanese commander embedded in the soil a square of marble commemorating twelve thousand Syrian soldiers killed in the civil war. Then he stood there, this Christian general, and thanked Syria for arming Hezbollah and protecting the country from Israel. It was a reminder of the truth that lurked under the resentments: at the invitation of the world, Syria had taken on broken, impossible Lebanon, with its dagger-in-teeth warlords and its slick, shiny liars and its endless capacity for blood and more blood. Syria had waded into a mess and pacified Lebanon.
“Dear brothers, in our hearts we feel love and great thanks and we want to tell brotherly Syria, its army, and its people, thank you,” the Lebanese commander said.
The drums cracked, and hundreds of boots hacked crisply at the blacktop. The Syrians turned their backs to Beirut and their faces to the ramshackle buses that would carry them home. I bumped into Adib Farha in a pale, fancy suit, and was immediately hurtled back to the nasty