The Killing Machine

The wonder of Lebanon is that after a decade of civil war, foreign invasion and repeated butchery its various militias and factions have retained their undiminished appetite for killing. The wonder of Lebanon is that even after a death toll that by now surely runs into the hundreds of thousands the willingness to go on taking lives remains unchecked. It is as if a vast killing machine had years ago been set into motion, and the means for stopping it forgotten. Perhaps only when Lebanon at last succeeds in depopulating itself will the slaughter finally end.

The killing is not without purpose, however purposeless it may sometimes appear. In multi-ethnic and multi-religious modern Lebanon, whose people have sometimes been at peace but seldom at ease, all violence stems from an urge for dominance or from the imperative of cultural survival. Lebanese apologists like to say that if it weren’t for the meddling of outsiders--of Syrians, Israelis, Palestinians--an internal accommodation could be reached and all would be well. It would be nice to think so. But the interference of foreigners has for the most part served only to make a bad situation worse. So long as an inequitable and thus threatening balance of power exists within Lebanese society, tensions will remain and violence will persist. Lebanese political leaders have consistently failed to agree on how power should be redistributed. Violence is the substitute for that effort.

The latest violence, excepting the car bombs that continue to claim so many innocent lives in Beirut, finds the Shia Muslim Amal militia determined to prevent Palestinian forces from regaining any armed presence in the capital or in the southern part of the country. The Shias have two aims. They do not want the Palestinians to have the kind of freedom of action that could invite future Israeli attacks into Lebanon. And they will not allow the Palestinians to reassert the rule that they once had over the south, which caused the largely Shia population there such suffering. The signs are that Amal will win this latest round, but its victory can be counted on to settle very little. In Lebanon, where alliances are created and dissolved daily, occasions for fresh fighting are always at hand. It is likely to be a long time before Lebanon runs out of excuses for violence. Its tragedy is that it long ago ran out of ideas that could bring it peace.