Showdown in Beirut

For the better part of a week Syria has been huffing and puffing and warning that it would soon send 7,000 troops into southern Beirut’s Shia Muslim slums to prevent the area from falling under the control of the pro-Iran Hezbollah militia. Two things have so far kept Syria threatening instead of marching. It is reluctant to jeopardize its political and economic ties with Tehran by openly intervening on the side of its Lebanese Amal militia ally against the Hezbollah. And it is not eager to commit its army to the high-cost street fighting that would follow if 4,000 Hezbollah gunmen chose to stand and fight.

Reluctant or not, Syria can’t afford to see its Lebanese ally bested by Hezbollah in a factional fight of considerable consequence to Lebanon’s political future. Were that to happen, Syria’s prestige within Lebanon--or at least among Lebanese Shias, now an estimated 40% of the population--would sink while Iran’s would rise. More is involved here than the satisfaction of coming out ahead in a contest for influence. Syria, which has a historical claim to hegemony over Lebanon, wants no rival power there competing for influence, not Iran or Israel or the United States. Certainly it wants no rival whose local clients are a constant threat to stability and so to Syrian interests.

Hezbollah, religiously more intense than Amal and politically more fanatic, presents an implicit danger to the cautious policy that Syria prefers to follow in Lebanon and in its confrontation with Israel. Hezbollah, strongly linked to recent aircraft hijackings and bombings, also holds 22 Western hostages, among them nine Americans, whose lives it has threatened if Syrian forces enter southern Beirut. Syria doesn’t want to be blamed if the hostages are killed. But neither can Syria afford to see ultramilitant Hezbollah, and through it Iran, triumph and so add to the unpredictability of an inherently volatile area.

This is one of those unusual cases in which Syria seems to be on the moderate and responsible side of things.