Beirut’s Brutal Anarchy

Arab League foreign ministers had planned to convene in emergency session today to talk about the murderous wave of violence in Lebanon, but the meeting was postponed when some of the officials discovered they had prior and presumably more pressing engagements. So much for any sense of urgency over the latest and possibly most destructive round of fighting in Lebanon’s 14-year-old civil war. The ministers may try to meet next week, or maybe they won’t. In the end, it may make little difference. If history is a guide, the fighting that has rocked Beirut for five weeks will subside only when those behind it--Iraqi-aided Christian army and militia forces on one side and Syrian-backed Muslim and Druse militias on the other--conclude that for now, nothing more is to be gained by continuing the killing.

Meanwhile, the carnage goes on and the demolition and displacement spread. As many as 300,000 people have fled the capital to escape the destruction brought by indiscriminate artillery exchanges. Beirut is now without water and electricity. Fuel is short, bakers can’t make bread and garbage goes uncollected, adding the risks of epidemic disease to the ruin brought by war. Except for intervals between shellings, life is lived largely in the bomb shelters.

There is no such thing as a national government in Lebanon to try to impose control. Instead, there are two claimants to power, one Christian, one Muslim, neither with any recognized political legitimacy. The latest fighting erupted when the Christian, Gen. Michel Aoun, imprudently tried to impose an air and sea blockade on the Mediterranean ports controlled by the Muslim and Druse militias. Retaliation was swift. Syria, whose 40,000 “peacekeeping” troops control about 60% of Lebanese territory, added the power of its artillery to the guns of its Lebanese allies.

The Christian forces in the meantime found an unexpected backer of their own in Iraq, Syria’s longtime ideological enemy. Iraqi weapons have given Aoun the means to continue fighting, even as Iraq’s involvement has given the battle on Lebanese soil the added dimension of a power struggle between two outsiders, compounding the difficulties of trying to restore an armistice.

And so it goes on, a brutal and remorseless conflict that long ago seemed to have moved beyond the reach of reason or international moral suasion. The fear that has long haunted the Lebanese is that their country’s chronic and seemingly irreconcilable tribal antagonisms would one day produce formal political partition. The frightful events of the last five weeks can only have deepened that fear.