BEIRUT: Lebanon’s new national-unity Cabinet signals that the March 14 and March 8 political camps have retreated from the tactics of confrontation which led the country to the brink of civil war in May 2008, a number of analysts told The Daily Star. Prime Minister Saad Hariri’s government will almost certainly not alter the status quo on the most divisive issues such as Hizbullah’s possession of arms or the UN Special Tribunal for Lebanon, but it will likely lead the rival factions to abandon the trench-warfare dynamic that has dominated the domestic political scene since late 2006, the analysts added. Progressive Socialist Party leader Walid Jumblatt, whose departure from the March 14 coalition in early August precipitated the softening of belligerent stances, said on Hizbullah’s Al-Manar satellite television station on Friday that the new Cabinet should lift the polarized camps out of their trenches. 

“I do see a reduction of tensions,” said Habib Malik, who teaches history at the Lebanese American University and is the son of Charles Malik, one of the country’s founders and co-author of the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights. 

“The rhetoric is down. There is a lot of practiced restraint. We’re looking at a period when neither the tribunal nor Hizbullah’s arms … will be allowed to mushroom into larger issues. 

“If the present deterrence equation holds in south Lebanon – and I expect it will – then we may be in for a period of calm. People would like the current calm to prevail,” Malik added.

Like Jumblatt, who has a history of such pirouettes, March 8 figures such as Amal Movement leader and Parliament Speaker Nabih Berri and Marada Movement head Suleiman Franjieh have also recently moved away from a rigid adherence to the Hizbullah-led March 8 alliance. Moving away from the black-and-white positions of the two camps has helped foster the budding detente, as well as creating space on the political map where centrist groupings could arise during this administration’s term, Malik said. 

“There’s been a lot of migration in and out of both camps,” Malik added. “There are more gray areas now. This fuzzy gray area between the camps can potentially be a healthy thing.” 

While the political atmosphere should cool under Hariri’s government, the balance of political power – defined by the May 2008 clashes when Hizbullah supporters seized large swathes of western Beirut after feeling that an earlier Cabinet had encroached on their security prerogatives – will continue to tilt toward Hizbullah because of its uncontested military superiority, said retired General Elias Hanna, who teaches political science at Notre Dame University. 

The political equation “is in March 8’s favor,” Hanna said. “The center of gravity is Hizbullah. It has the hammer.” 

Adding to the woes of the March 14 coalition, earlier rocked by the exit of its fiercest critic of Syria in Jumblatt, the new Cabinet line-up was repeatedly assailed last week by the Phalange Party of former President Amin Gemayel. The March 14 camp is “disintegrating,” Hanna added. 

Against this backdrop, the March 14-led unity Cabinet will sidestep the central political issue of Hizbullah’s continued possession of arms by voicing similar support for the right to resist against Israel as formulated in the previous government’s policy statement, said former Ambassador Abdullah Bou Habib, executive director of the Issam Fares Center for Lebanon, a non-partisan think tank. Hariri has said in speeches that he represented a personal guarantee for the inviolability of Hizbullah’s arms. 

While UN Security Council resolutions 1559 and 1701 have called on the Shiite group to disarm, the government will probably “relegate” the issue to the national dialogue forum, where no progress will be made, Malik said. In the longer term, no Lebanese Cabinet would be able to do anything about Hizbullah’s weapons absent a change in the regional deadlock between Israel and Palestine, Bou Habib added. The Lebanese might well have to wait until some future deal between the US and Iran – Hizbullah’s major backer – to resolve the matter, Malik said. 

As for the tribunal, the Cabinet will undoubtedly fulfill its commitment to pay for 49 percent of the court’s budget for its first three years of operations, Bou Habib said. Regardless of previous March 8 criticisms of the tribunal’s politicization, Hariri’s standing as prime minister means Lebanon will not waver in its support for the court investigating his father’s February 2005 assassination, Hanna said. Even if March 8 assertions are true that the court was meant as a political cudgel to be wielded by the US against Syria, Syria’s moves to restore ties with Saudi Arabia and the West have largely fulfilled US interests, making the tribunal a less contentious issue abroad and domestically, Malik said. 

The new government’s foreign policies will also be shaped significantly by Syria’s return to prominence after years of isolation, the analysts said. Lebanese-Syrian relations should witness a “steady warming-up,” thanks foremost to the Saudi-Syrian rapprochement sealed by Saudi King Abdullah Abdel-Aziz bin Saud’s October visit to Damascus, Malik said. Syria will not necessarily regain its pre-2005 dominant sway in Lebanon, but Damascus never lost influence completely after even Syrian troops departed Lebanon in April 2005 after a 29-year presence, Malik added. 

“The Syrians have retained a lot of clout,” he said. “They continue to have some very strong friends in town.” 

As Syria becomes perceived more and more as the “linchpin” to unraveling many of the region’s most vexing problems – the Israeli-Palestinian standoff, Hizbullah’s arms and the US-Iranian showdown – Hariri will face one of his most formidable challenges as premier in navigating Lebanon through a period of Syrian resurgence, Hanna said. 

“Everybody needs Syria, and Syria is taking its time repositioning itself,” he added. “Lebanon is in the laps of the Syrians.” 

This emerging regional dynamic will color the new Cabinet’s relations with the US as well, Bou Habib said. Hariri and the March 14 camp have been staunch US allies since his father’s killing, but with Syria-backed Hizbullah the strongest party in Lebanon and March 8 holding a veto in the Cabinet, the US knows Lebanon cannot buttress US strategy against Damascus, Bou Habib added. The US “will not be able to use [Hariri] against Syria – neither him nor Lebanon,” Bou Habib said. 

With the new government in place, the US will continue to voice its support for Lebanon’s sovereignty and provide assistance to the Lebanese Armed Forces, but Washington might scale back its aid to the military as Hizbullah strengthens its arsenal and furthers its supremacy here, Hanna said. 

In the end, the relative political peace expected to hold under the Hariri-led Cabinet, however welcome and constructive, will leave unsolved the country’s basic issues such as Hizbullah’s arms, Malik said. The new government will “hold the fort,” he added, but will also not face up either to the fundamental incompatibility of the visions for Lebanon in the March 14 and March 8 camps, or to the underlying fractures in Lebanese society. 

This Cabinet “is just another classic expression of the mendacious but often useful Lebanese formula of accommodating everyone,” he said. “What all of this amounts to is sweeping the thorny issues under the carpet.”