August 15, 2006–The “Cedar Revolution” of 2005 was largely hailed by Western leaders as the greatest fruit yet borne on the wave of democratic reform sweeping the Middle East in the wake of America's decisive elimination of the Ba'athist regime in Baghdad. Even those Western European capitals that were most skeptical of Bush's plan for regime change in Iraq were converted into true believers by the Cedar Revolution. Tens of thousands of Lebanese demonstrators, mostly in Beirut, began protesting Syrian domination of Lebanon following the mysterious assassination of Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri in February 2005. By April 27 that year, Syrian troops had been forced to completely withdraw, and the pro-Syrian government of Lebanon was disbanded. A new dawn was said to have broken; Washington was vindicated.

However, some observers further off to the side of the parade darkly pointed out that it was only Syria’s intervention in the Lebanese civil war, which ran from 1975 till 1990 and claimed 100,000 lives, which finally brought that mad bloodbath to an end, and that it might have been only continued Syrian troop deployments to Lebanon that maintained the security of state institutions sufficient to rebuild that country by 2005. When the Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon ended in 2000 under severe pressure from the Hezbollah militia, it was Syrian troops who filled the void and sustained day-to-day peace and security in the region.

There is no doubt that Syria was widely blamed for the assassination of Hariri, but other suspects abound, including the Israeli government, who was delighted to see in any event the Lebanese population, and the world, blame Syria for the assassination and press the Syrian government to remove its troops from all of Lebanon. Senior figures in the US government, including Condoleezza Rice, expressed prematurely the view that Lebanon was now ready to secure its own borders and maintain its own internal security. Certainly the younger and wealthier urban denizens of modern, post-war Beirut thought so, too.

But while Syrian troops on the street corners of Beirut might have jarred with the emerging sense of urban sophistication among the youth of Beirut who knew no war, a different story was developing in the much poorer, more rural (and mainly Shia Muslim) areas of south Lebanon. There, order was in serious flux. Civil War, beginning in 1975, had decimated the south. Israeli military occupation, beginning in 1980, subjugated the people and prevented their economic development. The Hezbollah resistance that grew up under the occupation ensured that neither the Israelis nor the Syrians ever gained full control.

When Israel finally did withdraw in defeat in 2000, they left behind a dangerously exposed and ungoverned region, since the Lebanese government was by then far from developing its own institutions and military to the point where it could effectively take over. The Syrian military moved in and maintained order for five years thereafter, supervising Hezbollah and restricting its ability to provoke Israel. But Syria was expelled from southern Lebanon in the Cedar Revolution in the capital to the north in spring 2005. That left the south of Lebanon without Israeli, Lebanese, or Syrian supervision—and still unbuilt, still impoverished, and still embittered from all the mounting scars of civil war and occupation stretching back 30 years. And after the withdrawal of Syrian forces, only Hezbollah remained in the way of an Israeli reassertion of power in southern Lebanon, an event which awaited only an inevitable provocation or two.

Would the current mess have happened, with tens of thousands of Israeli troops marching all over southern Lebanon, and over a thousand Lebanese civilians dead from Israeli aerial bombardment, if Syria had not, just one year earlier, been forcefully removed from the country? Most likely no. Israeli forces would have confronted Syrian state troops immediately across the border, not Hezbollah guerrillas, and would have touched off an instant international war. Furthermore, Hezbollah guerrillas, though largely autonomous from Syrian state control, would still not have been nearly as able to fire rockets into Israel and provide Israel with the provocation it was awaiting to reassert its occupation in Lebanon. Syria, like Israel, would likely have sought to avoid a war with its counterpart.

Canada’s less-than-optimal response

Both Canada’s official and popular response is summed up in one image: Prime Minister Stephen Harper welcoming aboard his diverted airplane some of the thousands of dual-citizen refugees evacuating Lebanon to return to Canada. It had been the slow trickle of return of the Lebanese diaspora to Lebanon in the last 15 years which most poignantly marked the return of peace, security, and prosperity to Lebanon. Those Lebanese leaving by the thousands and returning to Canada upon Israel’s renewed hostilities in Lebanon this year are the wealthy, connected, energized, and entrepreneurial class of the newly rebuilt Lebanon.

It was Lebanon’s future as a peaceful, prosperous and viable nation that Harper was blithely welcoming aboard his Canadian government plane. Their exile, probably for good this time, consigns Lebanon to another generation or more of impoverishment, directionlessness, and despair—exactly the qualities that build so-called “failed states” where modern industrious ones could have been. Their return to Canada transfers their wealth, their knowledge, and their entrepreneurialism from Lebanon to our country, like we need it more than Lebanon does. The fact the Prime Minister diverted his government plane to expedite the new diaspora of Lebanese wealth and talent to Canada must have made for a particularly crushing photo op in Beirut for those choosing to stay and wait out the latest war to rebuild their nation again.

Canada's policy now must be built around the return of the wealthy and connected Lebanese of the latest diaspora back to Lebanon to engage in the rebuilding, again, of that tragic nation. Given that something like only 10 percent of the 100 or so Israeli deaths in this war have been civilians, and that something like over 90 percent of the 1,000 or so Lebanese deaths have been civilians, and that it is the return of the Lebanese civilian business class that is critical to the re-building of Lebanon, Canadian policy in the next few years must be almost exclusively focused on the security of Lebanon and its civilians.

For all the threat Hezbollah is said to represent to Israeli civilians, remarkably few Israeli civilians have been killed, even under what must be the full weight of Hezbollah power. Even Israeli soldier deaths have almost all taken place on Lebanese soil. Therefore, little needs to be done to provide security for Israeli civilians; and as for our advice regarding security for Israeli soldiers, their best security plan is to stop invading and occupying foreign territory.