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	Workers Vanguard No. 849	27 May 2005

U.S. Hands Off Syria!

Lebanon: Imperialist Intrigues and the Spectre of Civil War

For a Socialist Federation of the Near East!

Since the assassination of former prime minister Rafik al-Hariri in a massive explosion on the streets of Beirut on February 14, Lebanon has been in the grip of political turmoil. American imperialists and the anti-Syrian "opposition" in Lebanon immediately pointed fingers at Syria. Not to be left out of the spoils this time, French imperialism, Syria and Lebanon's former colonial ruler, joined in to call for withdrawal of Syrian troops from Lebanon. In September of last year, France and the U.S. jointly sponsored a UN resolution (1559) demanding the disarming of the Hezbollah militia and the withdrawal of Syrian forces from Lebanon. Seizing upon al-Hariri's assassination, the so-called opposition, led by factions of the Christian Maronites, Druze and Sunni Muslims, organized demonstrations protesting the presence of Syrian forces. The Shi'ite Hezbollah countered with its own demonstrations that denounced U.S. meddling in Lebanon and expressed "gratitude" for Syrian troops in the country (though, notably, they did not call for the Syrian troops to stay).

In a false, made-for-television display of "national unity," both pro- and anti-Syrian demonstrators wrapped themselves in the Lebanese flag, abandoned their distinctive sectarian military fatigues and sang the national anthem. However, behind the thin facade of unity lie deep communal fissures fueled by centuries-old mutual hatred. In Lebanon, which has never been an integrated, united country, allegiance is first and foremost to the communal or religious sect. On Martyrs' Square, where the opposition pitched a tent city, each group kept to its own tent. As Moustafa Bayoumi wrote (London Review of Books, 5 May): "Unity is called for over and over again at the camp, but its geography demonstrates the confessional divisions that exist in the country itself." It was no accident that the Christians kept to the east of the square and Muslims to the west. "The crowds were meeting on the front lines that had separated the Lebanese during the civil war," wrote Robert Fisk, "indeed, on the very location of the Christian-Muslim trenches of that conflict" (London Independent, 9 March).

Syria's troops have pulled out. And now, with legislative elections set to begin on May 29, the opposition is breaking apart and a new lineup is forming of various Muslim groupings on one side and Christians on the other. Behind everything happening in Lebanon today stands the ghost of the brutal civil war that haunted that country for 15 years beginning in 1975. More than 150,000 people were killed and at least another 100,000 were wounded. Beirut, one of the most beautiful cities in the Near East, was turned into a pile of rubble.

The opposition's campaign against Syria has fomented chauvinist attacks against the estimated half million migrant Syrian workers in the country. According to Amnesty International, dozens of Syrian workers have been killed and scores of others beaten, shot, threatened or robbed in Lebanon since the assassination of al-Hariri. Thousands have left the country. Tents and temporary housings were set on fire. The aftermath of the assassination also saw a series of criminal bombings in predominantly Christian neighborhoods and shopping areas, evoking the memory of the civil war.

Bubbling with glee over the anti-Syrian demonstrations, Western bourgeois media hailed them with such grandiose names as "cedar revolution," "people power," "mini Ukraine," etc. Some Beirut residents aptly called them the "Gucci revolution" because so "many of those waving the Lebanese flag on the street are really very unlikely protesters," a BBC correspondent reported. He went on:

"There are girls in tight skirts and high heels, carrying expensive leather bags, as well as men in business suits or trendy tennis shoes. And in one unforgettable scene an elderly lady, her hair all done up, was demonstrating alongside her Sri Lankan domestic helper, telling her to wave the flag and teaching her the Arabic words of the slogans."

What is taking place in Lebanon is a falling-out among equally corrupt gangs of warlords and robber barons. Those who call themselves the opposition today, for years worked hand in glove with the brutal Syrian regime. The leaders of the myriad religious and communal groups have every one of them been in treacherous, murderous shifting alliances against every other one. The essence of Lebanon's political scene was aptly captured by the Levant correspondent for the London Economist (5 November 1983). Reporting on the "national reconciliation" conference held in Geneva in the fall of 1983 in the midst of the civil war, he wrote:

"To compare this week's conference of Lebanese faction bosses in Geneva with a gathering of Mafia godfathers might be unfair to the Mafia, because it has never eliminated several hundred victims in a single day. There can seldom have been so many delegates around a table who were directly and personally responsible for killing the followers of fellow delegates."

The bourgeois press declares that al-Hariri had a "vision of prosperous Lebanon." However, the wealth generated by his opulent downtown Beirut construction projects following the civil war did not trickle down to the desperately impoverished Shi'ites in the south, the slum dwellers of Beirut's Belt of Misery, the hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees and Syrian migrant workers whom he exploited. Nor did it reach the mass of Lebanese working people, down whose throats al-Hariri shoved IMF-imposed austerity measures. When workers went on strike and took to the streets protesting high prices and demanding wage increases, al-Hariri unleashed his gendarmes on them. In May of last year, his troops shot at striking workers in the Shi'ite suburb of Hay al-Sellom, killing five people. It was not the first time that al-Hariri's security forces attacked demonstrators. In 1993, the army shot at demonstrators protesting the Oslo agreement between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization, killing more than a dozen.

The real estate magnate al-Hariri built his fortune through shady connections with the parasitic Saudi royal family, which rules on the basis of Wahabism, an extreme version of Sunni Islam. The Saudis granted al-Hariri citizenship, a privilege denied millions of Arabs and Asians toiling in the kingdom for decades. He maintained longtime close friendships with the likes of Iyad Allawi, the American puppet in Baghdad, and French imperialist president Jacques Chirac.

Whoever was behind the assassination of al-Hariri (whether the CIA, the Israeli Mossad, Syrian intelligence or disgruntled business rivals), American imperialists wasted no time exploiting his death to push "regime change" in Damascus. In an attempt to sell his sham "elections" in Iraq, which enshrined sectarianism in every government seat, Bush declared: "In the Middle East and throughout the world, freedom is on the march." It is not freedom that is on the march in the Near East, but rather the imperialists with their blueprint for the remaking of the region. In addition to occupied Iraq, the U.S. now maintains a military presence in six other countries: Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar and Oman. In addition, Jordan has been used as a staging ground for U.S. military activities in the region, including in the lead-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

The current belligerence against Syria has long been a policy of the neocons' Project for the New American Century (PNAC) which, in a 20 September 2001 letter to Bush, demanded that the "administration should consider appropriate measures of retaliation against" Iran and Syria, which were deemed to be "known state sponsors of terrorism." In November 2003, Congress, with the support of both Democrats and Republicans, passed the "Syria Accountability and Lebanese Sovereignty Restoration Act" and in May 2004 Bush imposed sanctions against Syria, lobbing at its rulers the usual litany of accusations, which included "support for terrorist groups," "pursuit of weapons of mass destruction" and providing a "transit point for foreign fighters into Iraq."

President Bush trotted out the same threats in his State of the Union address this February. It didn't matter that the U.S. regularly sends suspected "terrorists" to Syria, knowing they will be tortured. It didn't matter that Syria joined the imperialist coalition in their first Iraq war or organized polling stations for expatriates to vote in the recent Iraq "elections." The Syrian leadership's real crime in the eyes of both the neocons and their Democratic allies is its hostility to Israel, which the U.S. seeks to surround with a cordon sanitaire.

The international working class has no side in the current squalid power play taking place in Lebanon, but, as proletarian internationalists who called for the military defense of Iraq without giving any political support to the regime of Saddam Hussein, we say: U.S. keep your bloody hands off Syria! Down with the colonial occupation of Iraq! All U.S./British troops out of Iraq and the Near East now! Israel out of the Occupied Territories!

From the Crusades to Grand Liban: A Harvest of Blood

The violence and intercommunal bloodletting that marked much of Lebanon's history is a legacy of Ottoman and French imperial domination and the interpenetration of myriad religious and ethnic communities, combining to retard capitalist development and prevent the consolidation of a modern state. Lebanon is divided into various sectarian fiefdoms, lorded over by tribal chieftains with private militias. Its political structures are built along sectarian confessional lines. Contrary to the myth of "Switzerland of the Near East" touted by the bourgeois press, Lebanon is not so much a bourgeois democracy as a pluralistic theocracy with Christian Maronite domination. To ensure this domination, the Maronites deny citizenship to most of the hundreds of thousands of Muslim Kurds and Palestinian refugees who have been living in the country for over 50 years. Each of the officially recognized 18 religious communities may have its own political party, its own members of parliament, its own health and social services, its own schools with an educational orientation often hostile to other communities, and its own laws governing marriage and inheritance and other matters of personal status.

To maintain the clannishness of the sects, civil marriage is illegal and the personal status laws of various communities prohibit interfaith marriages. While women were granted the right to vote in the 1950s, medieval practices like arranged and forced marriages are still in place. Honor killing is rampant, especially in the southern rural areas. It is estimated that an average of one woman is killed each month.

The rugged terrain of Mount Lebanon has historically provided a physically protected refuge for diverse religious and ethnic minorities fleeing persecution at the hands of both Christian and Muslim rulers: the Maronites originated in Syria in the seventh century when they split from the Eastern church of Byzantium. The Greek Orthodox and Greek Catholics of Lebanon also came from the same region. The Druze, a 10th-century offshoot of Shi'ism, fled persecution by the Fatimid caliphate in Egypt. The Shi'ites found refuge from the wrath of the Ottoman rulers in the hill villages of southern Lebanon. Christian Armenians were driven to Lebanon by the genocidal terror of the Young Turks during World War I.

Ever since the Crusades, when Raymond of Toulouse captured the flourishing port cities of the Tripoli emirate, French rulers have had interests in the Levant. The persecuted Christian Maronites saw the crusaders, with whom they allied against the Muslims, as liberators, thus providing the French with an avenue through which they would extend their influence. During the declining period of the Ottoman Empire and afterward, the Maronite population served as a base for colonial penetration. The British in turn became the benefactors of the Druze. The massacre of 12,000 Maronites by the Druze in the civil war of 1860 provided a pretext for French military intervention. On the eve of the French invasion, Karl Marx wrote:

"The conspirators of Petersburg and Paris had, however, in case their temptation of Prussia should fail, kept in reserve the thrilling incident of the Syrian massacres to be followed by a French intervention which...would open the back door of a general European conflict. In respect to England I will only add that in 1841 Lord Palmerstone furnished the Druses with the arms they kept ever since and that in 1848, by a convention with the Czar Nicholas, he abolished, in point of fact, the Turkish sway that curbed the wild tribes of Lebanon, and stipulated for them a quasi-independence which, in the run of time, and under the proper management of foreign plotters, could only beget a harvest of blood."

—New York Daily Tribune, 11 August 1860

"The conspirators of Petersburg and Paris" joined with the British to carve up the crumbling Ottoman Empire, and in the 1916 Sykes-Picot agreement France was given mandate for both Lebanon and Syria. The carving up of the Near East following World War I represented the balkanization of the region by the imperialist powers. Populations that wanted to be united were separated; those that wanted to be separated were forcibly united (as in the case of Iraq, for example). The point was to carve up the region in such a way that ethnic and religious strife would perpetually plague it. Lebanon provides a vivid example of this.

In 1920, seeking to fashion a pro-Western enclave in the Levant, France created the entity that it called "Grand Liban" or "Greater Lebanon" by annexing Muslim regions of Syria to Mount Lebanon. To divide and better rule, the French combined the Muslims, among whom nascent Arab nationalism was growing, with the Christian majority, among whom they nourished a myth of Phoenician origin and a non-Arab heritage, and who would look to France for protection. Thus, the French knowingly created a state constructed to ensure plenty of intercommunal strife to justify their imperial "peace keeping" presence.

The French colonial system of Maronite privileges was preserved after the country became independent in 1943. Under the unwritten deal between the French colonialists and the various Christian and Muslim clan chiefs, known as the National Covenant, the president would always be a Maronite Christian, the prime minister a Sunni Muslim and the head of the Chamber of Deputies a Shi'ite Muslim. The Christians were allocated a six-to-five majority in parliament and the army officer corps was drawn predominantly from the Maronite elite.

The National Covenant was based on a dubious 1932 census. No census has been taken since, as such would reveal that the Muslim population has grown much faster than the Christian and now outnumbers the latter three to two. Maronite Christian domination increasingly came into conflict with these demographic developments. The first challenge to the National Covenant took place in 1958 when a Muslim uprising was sparked by an attempt of Maronite president Camille Chamoun to extend his term in office. However, Chamoun was able to suppress the uprising, as some 15,000 American Marines waded ashore Beirut's beaches in July 1958.

Lebanon was not the real target of the Marine landing. The imperialist powers were alarmed by the social upheavals that swept the region in the 1950s. They viewed the rise of Nasser to power in Egypt and his nationalization of the Suez Canal, the intensification of the Algerian War of independence, the declaration of union between Egypt and Syria with the proclamation of the United Arab Republic as threats to their imperialist domination. U.S. president Dwight Eisenhower warned that leftist uprisings could "result in the complete elimination of Western influence in the Middle East." But the immediate reason behind the Marines' landing in Lebanon was the eruption of revolution in Iraq and the overthrow of the British-installed Hashemite monarchy in July 1958. The Iraqi Communist Party stood at the threshold of power in the mass upsurge that followed. The Stalinist leadership, however, under direct orders from the Kremlin, betrayed the revolution for the sake of "peaceful coexistence" with world imperialism. In Lebanon, under U.S. Marine guns, a deal was worked out to preserve the sectarian political structure along with Maronite predominance.

1975-76: Revolutionary Upheaval Channeled into Communal Bloodletting

The steady growth of the Muslim population, concentrated in the lower classes, increasingly challenged the National Covenant. By the early 1970s, the mass of impoverished Shi'ites had become the largest religious communal grouping. Led by Imam Musa Sadr's Movement of the Disinherited, they demanded constitutional changes to redress the balance of political and economic power in their favor. Further, the OPEC oil boom of the early 1970s, which Lebanon shared as the main financial center and entrepôt for the Arab East, widened the social disparities between rich and poor. Shi'ite peasants from the countryside and migrant workers from Syria streamed into Beirut and other port cities looking for work, producing a class of desperate slum dwellers. The Beirut slums, known as the Belt of Misery, exist but a few miles from exclusive neighborhoods resembling the French Riviera.

The early 1970s also witnessed social ferment in the form of peasant revolts, labor and student strikes that shook the foundations of the sectarian system. The General Council of Labor (GCL), formed in 1970 by the union of nine trade-union federations, led a series of strikes demanding wage increases and price controls. Students waged strikes, sit-ins and demonstrations demanding a national educational system open to all, as opposed to the private and sectarian schools.

The forces potentially arrayed against the Maronite elite found an ally in the Palestinian commandos. Forced out of Jordan after the Black September massacres in 1970, Palestinians were concentrated in Lebanon where they could operate with some degree of freedom. The armed commandos, especially in the south, provided protection against the militias of the landlords and za'ims (Mafia-like urban bosses).

In early 1975, Lebanon stood on the brink of a revolutionary upheaval that could have radically altered the political situation in the entire region, most immediately by extending to neighboring Syria. A proletarian insurrection would have shaken the colonels of Damascus, the Hashemite monarchy and, not least, the Zionist rulers.

Underlying the conflict between the Maronite Christians on one side, and the Lebanese Muslims and Palestinians on the other, was a deep social conflict. As a New York Times (19 July 1975) article noted:

"The fighting was something of a class war between the haves, who are for the most part Christians, and the have-nots, who are for the most part Moslems and who are allied with the heavily armed Palestinian guerrilla movement."

A Marxist party standing at the head of the Lebanese Muslim toilers and the Palestinians would have put forward a socialist program capable of attracting the "have-nots" in the Christian community, splitting the Maronite leadership's base. Instead, the struggles of the Lebanese Muslims and the Palestinian commandos were channeled into the efforts of the Muslim elite to increase its influence in the traditional confessional system.

A key figure in derailing the incipient social revolution and transforming it into communalist bloodletting was Kamal Jumblatt, hereditary head of the Druze sect and leader of the so-called Lebanese National Movement (LNM), which included the pro-Moscow Lebanese Communist Party (PCL), the small Lebanese section of the late Ernest Mandel's United Secretariat and a host of Arab nationalist and Nasserite groups. The PLO leadership subordinated its forces to this sectarian demagogue, as did the entire Lebanese left. Because the PLO commandos and the "progressive" Lebanese fought on behalf of the traditional Muslim and clan chiefs like Jumblatt, the Maronite clan chiefs, like Chamoun, were able to mobilize the entire Christian community by appealing to its ancient fear of Muslim domination. The PCL, which until then maintained a significant base of supporters across the sectarian divide, was completely eliminated from Christian areas. As the Lebanese journalists Selim Accaoui and Magida Salman wrote:

"The PCL, which counted hundreds of Christian members and had a dominant influence in some Christian villages, saw its membership and its influence in the Mount Lebanon area crumble in a few months. Communist militants were chased out or massacred, and their houses burned.

"By going in on the Muslim confessionalists' game, the PCL was able to implant itself in the Muslim areas of Beirut; but at the same time it lost most of its ranks in the Christian regions."

—Comprendre le Liban (1976)

By the beginning of 1976, the war had become a succession of communalist massacres and countermassacres with Maronites sacking Muslim enclaves and Palestinian refugee camps, while PLO commandos and Druze militias responded by putting to the torch Christian villages, such as the village of Damur, home base of Chamoun. The conflict widened and a full-scale civil war raged for the next fifteen years.

The Third Worldist cheerleaders on the left naturally hailed the Palestinian/Muslim side, denying its communalist character and condemning the Maronite population to death as a pro-imperialist reactionary mass. Celebrating the destruction of Damur, Workers World Party wrote:

"The burning of Chamoun's mansion and the seizure of the stronghold of his National Liberal Party, the village of Damur, underlined the new weakened position the pro-imperialist rulers are now in."

—Workers World, 30 January 1976

In contrast, we wrote at the time:

"In the present fluid conflict, and particularly given the rapidly shifting allegiances, none of these nationalist and communalist formations are fighting a just struggle that would merit military support from the class-conscious proletariat."

—"Blood Feud in Lebanon," WV No. 115, 25 June 1976

To this day, leftists in the U.S. claim that the civil war in Lebanon was "between the forces of the right allied with Israel and grouped around the Christian Phalange, and the left, involving Arab nationalists, Palestinian and Druze formations and others," as Socialist Worker (18 March), newspaper of the International Socialist Organization (ISO), put it. Workers World now hails Hezbollah as a "national liberation movement" (9 March) and Socialist Action asserts that the "rise of the Hezbollah represents to a certain degree a social revolution" (April 2005). Hezbollah is jockeying for power like the rest of the Lebanese sectarian groups. Hezbollah, a reactionary mass movement financed and armed by Iran, is seeking to establish an Iran-style theocracy in Lebanon. In the 1980s, its leaders imposed strict codes of Islamic behavior on towns and villages in the south. Hezbollah in power is a deadly danger, especially for women and Christians.

Syrian Ba'athists Massacre Palestinians

By the spring of 1976 the once-privileged Maronites, squeezed into besieged enclaves, were on the brink of defeat, as Lebanon gradually moved toward de facto partition. In an attempt to reverse the tide of battle, Israel opened a supply line of weapons to the Christian forces, including Soviet-made tanks and armored personnel carriers captured during the 1967 and 1973 Arab-Israeli wars.

But it was the Syrian Ba'athists, the self-proclaimed "vanguards of the Arab revolution," who saved the pro-Western Christian rightists from defeat when they invaded Lebanon in June 1976 with a mandate from the Arab League and the approval of both Washington and Tel Aviv. Like Lebanon, Syria itself is a medieval patchwork of potentially hostile ethnic, national and sectarian groupings where the ruling minority Alawites hold sway over the Sunnis, Kurds, Druze and others. Behind the Syrian invasion was the fear that the breakup of Lebanon along sectarian lines would spill over into Syria. Besides, the Ba'athist rulers, who were negotiating via U.S. imperialism for the return of the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights, needed to demonstrate their ability to police the Palestinians in Lebanon.

The Syrian military intervention shifted the balance of forces in favor of the Maronite militia, culminating in the siege and fall of the huge Palestinian camp of Tel Zaatar in Beirut. The Syrian army provided logistical support for the Maronite militia that was surrounding the camp and prevented PLO commandos from lifting the siege. Hundreds died of hunger and disease. When the Palestinians surrendered, they were slaughtered en masse. At Tel Zaatar, the Syrian Ba'athists provided the Israeli rulers with a model for the Sabra and Shatila massacre of 2,000 defenseless Palestinians in 1982, which was masterminded by Israel and carried out by the same Maronite criminals.

When Syrian forces entered Lebanon in 1976, we declared: "Syrian Troops Out of Lebanon!" (WV No. 114, 18 June 1976). Our opposition to the Syrian forces was based on the fact that they intervened to suppress the Palestinian fighters and refugees as well as the Lebanese Muslims. It was not based on the notion that Syria was somehow violating the national sovereignty of Lebanon. As we wrote following the Israeli invasion of Lebanon ("Israel Out of Lebanon!" WV No. 308, 25 June 1982):

"There is a fundamental difference between the Syrian and Israeli armies in Lebanon, though both are oppressors and murderers of the peoples of Lebanon. Lebanon is not a nation separate and distinct from Syria, but a collection of religious-ethnic fiefdoms sharing a common ethnic makeup with Syria.... The Syrians in Lebanon are no more a 'foreign' army than the Maronite Phalange. Lebanon and Syria have been for centuries a common historical entity, united by language, culture and ethnic makeup."

1982: Israel Invades Lebanon

Israel's 1982 invasion and occupation of Lebanon, backed by U.S. imperialism, marks a watershed in the history of the region. Buried, along with the 20,000 Palestinians and Lebanese killed by the Zionists, was the fiction that Israel is one reactionary mass. As Sharon's blitzkrieg into Lebanon spread death and destruction, massive antiwar protests took place in Israel, an unprecedented development in the midst of a military campaign. The Lebanese war threatened to unravel Fortress Israel. In that war we stood for revolutionary defensism of the Palestinian commandos, also recognizing that—given the unpopularity of the war among Israelis and the fact that Israel's population is relatively small—rising Israeli casualties could serve to widen the wedge between the Hebrew-speaking population and the Zionist rulers of Israel. For this reason, the decision of the PLO leadership to withdraw from Beirut, a surrender arranged by U.S. imperialism, was especially catastrophic for the Palestinian people and the prospects for social revolution in the region.

If the war in Lebanon deeply upset liberal Zionists, it also shattered the myth of Arab unity behind the Palestinian cause. Not a single Arab state came to the aid of the embattled Palestinians facing Sharon's genocidal terror. As a Palestinian commando exclaimed bitterly to a Western newsman during the siege of West Beirut, "You see where the Israelis are. Well, behind the Israelis is King Fahd [of Saudi Arabia] and Hafez el-Assad [of Syria] and King Hussein [of Jordan]. They are all in this together." Indeed, from King Hussein's Black September massacre of 10,000 Palestinians in 1970, under the gaze of 12,000 Iraqi troops stationed in Jordan, to the siege and slaughter of Palestinians by the Syrian-aided Maronites at Tel Zaatar, Arab rulers have been as ruthless enemies of Palestinian national emancipation as the Zionists. For the Arab rulers, the Palestinian question represents no more than a diversion, whereby popular discontent is channeled into a "holy war" against Zionism.

Faced with the impotence and betrayal of the Arab states, the PLO leadership turned to U.S. imperialism as a potential savior. Arafat agreed to allow the U.S. Marines and the French Foreign Legion to disarm the Palestinian commandos guarding West Beirut and escort them to their new exile in Tunisia. American troops were sent into Lebanon for that purpose, eventually becoming a target in the Lebanese quagmire. On 23 October 1983, a powerful bomb exploded near the U.S. military barracks in Beirut, killing 240 Marines. It was to divert attention of the American population, outraged over what many perceived as a senseless intervention into the bloody Lebanese civil war, that President Ronald Reagan ordered the invasion of the tiny island of Grenada (see "Rape of Grenada, Bloody Mess in Lebanon—Marines Out of Lebanon, Now, Alive! U.S. Out of Grenada, Dead or Alive!" WV No. 341, 4 November 1983).

Meanwhile, Arafat's betrayal in withdrawing from Beirut—setting the stage for the Sabra and Shatila massacre by Sharon's fascistic Maronite henchmen—liquidated the PLO as an independent military force. In the end, Israel withdrew its forces from southern Lebanon in 2000, concluding its nearly 20-year occupation of that country.

For a Socialist Federation of the Near East!

Comparing the initial defeat of the Maronites in 1975 to the events of the French Revolution, LNM leader Kamal Jumblatt declared, "This is our 1789." In that revolution, the bourgeoisie swept away the feudal order and consolidated a nation-state. However, in this epoch of imperialist domination, the national bourgeoisie in countries of belated development, like Lebanon, is incapable of realizing such goals as national consolidation. In their struggle for hegemony, colonial bourgeois forces may clash with the imperialists that ravage their resources, retard their economic development and create innumerable barriers to national emancipation. But in the age of imperialism, the colonial and semicolonial bourgeoisie can only exist as middlemen and brokers for imperialism. From the oil sheiks of the Gulf emirates to the bankers of Beirut and the bonapartists of Cairo and Damascus, the ruling classes of the Near East are as dependent on the backwardness and balkanization of their countries as the imperialists themselves. Their interests are firmly intertwined with those of imperialism. As Trotsky wrote of the Chinese Revolution in 1927: "Everything that brings the oppressed and exploited masses of the toilers to their feet inevitably pushes the national bourgeoisie into an open bloc with the imperialists" ("The Chinese Revolution and the Theses of Comrade Stalin," Leon Trotsky on China [1976]).

In such backward countries, the perspective for resolving the fundamental democratic questions posed by combined and uneven development, such as ensuring the democratic and national rights of all peoples in the Near East, is provided by the theory of permanent revolution developed by Bolshevik leader Leon Trotsky. He wrote in Permanent Revolution (1929): "The complete and genuine solution of their tasks of achieving democracy and national emancipation is conceivable only through the dictatorship of the proletariat as the leader of the subjugated nation, above all of its peasant masses." The genuine liberation of colonial and semicolonial countries can be achieved only through the successful struggle of the proletariat for state power, leading all the oppressed.

Within the historic cauldron of national hatred and communal warfare of the Near East the prospects for even a modicum of intercommunal harmony in Lebanon are bleak under capitalism, for if the historic exclusion of the Muslim population is reversed it will simply lead to the victimization of the formerly dominant Christians. There is no possibility of an equitable solution to national and communal conflict short of the dictatorship of the proletariat.

As we wrote in the last part of our four-part series, "After Lebanon: The Left and the Palestinian Question—From the 'Arab Revolution' to Pax Americana" (WV No. 335, 29 July 1983): "The struggle for the democratic rights of all the peoples of the Near East and for the survival and national emancipation of the Palestinians must necessarily sweep away the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan and the bloody Ba'athist bonapartists in Syria, bring down the rotten medieval structure in Lebanon and shatter the Zionist state. This struggle must place the revolutionary proletariat with its vanguard party at the head of the exploited and oppressed, and can only find its fulfillment in a socialist federation of the Near East."