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Welcome back to the show.
It's Antiwar Radio.
I'm Scott Horton, and I'm talking with Juan Cole.
He's a professor of history at the University of Michigan.
He keeps the blog, Informed Comment, at JuanCole.com.
He wrote a book called Engaging the Muslim World.
Juan, are you there?
I'm here.
All right.
Welcome to the show.
Good to talk to you again.
Likewise.
Tell us about Rafik Hariri, the former prime minister, I believe he was, of Lebanon, who was assassinated in 2005, I think it was.
Now there's all these developments and indictments and accusations on all sides and all these things.
It's really important if people stay tuned through this discussion, you'll figure out why it's so important, too.
Please tell us what you know, Juan.
Well, Rafik Hariri was a Lebanese from a Sunni background who made his money in Saudi Arabia and then came to Lebanon in the 1980s during the civil war there as a kind of envoy of the Saudi then-king.
And he ultimately emerged as the prime minister.
He had Saudi backing, the Lebanese political factions were getting together under Saudi auspices, and they ended the civil war with a conference in Saudi in 1989.
After that, Hariri emerged as prime minister.
In Lebanon, they have a kind of unwritten rule that the prime minister is Sunni, the president is Christian, and so on and so forth.
And Hariri kind of rebuilt Lebanon after the war, and did a fairly good job of it, became fairly popular.
Then in 2004, the question was posed as to continued Syrian dominance of Lebanon, because although the Saudis had a lot of political influence, the Syrians had thousands of troops in the country, and they tended to get their way with regard to who was president.
The president was a Christian, typically a former general, but somebody that the Syrians liked.
And their guy was going out of office.
It wasn't clear whether they would be able to keep control of the presidency.
Somebody might come in who didn't like the Syrians.
So the Syrians suddenly announced in fall of 2004 that they were going to arrange for the Lebanese constitution to be amended, to allow the then-president to have another three years.
And the Lebanese really, really didn't like this.
The constitution is a national symbol.
Having a foreign country mess with it to keep their guy in is very, very distasteful.
And Hariri came out against it.
And he became prime minister again, but then was assassinated in a horrible truck bombing in February of 2005.
A lot of people thought, well, the Syrians are just clearing the decks so that they can get their way.
And it's been a kind of big murder mystery ever since in Lebanese politics.
Well, now, if I remember right, there was all kinds of weird accusations and very strange circumstances surrounding the thing, right?
Initially, they said that the bomb was hidden under the road and how that was proof that the Syrians must have done it or whatever.
But then there were other people who said al-Qaeda did it.
And then, of course, whether it's true or not, a lot of people are going to say Mossad did it.
I don't know.
Maybe they did.
But I don't know even who had the most to gain or whether that's even – you know, Cubono is a clue, but it isn't always necessarily the right answer when you look at who had the most to gain, right?
You'd have somebody inherit a lot of insurance money, but still they didn't have anything to do with it.
That's right.
You can't go by who would benefit most, although that would be a consideration if you were trying to solve a murder mystery.
Well, especially in the Levant, there's so many factions, you never know, really, who's gaining, right?
Right.
Well, the obvious party is the Syrians or pro-Syrian groups because not only was Hariri assassinated, this wasn't a mysterious one-off thing.
There were a string of assassinations, bombings, and so forth through 2005.
And so Hariri is really one of a series.
And all of the people targeted had spoken out against Syrian dominance of Lebanon.
So, you know, if you see this as a serial murder, as one in a series, then it becomes more and more difficult to dismiss the idea of some kind of Syrian connection.
Now, it doesn't necessarily have to be Syria, it could be people allied with Syria who are afraid that if they leave, then their political position would be, you know, damaged.
So in recent weeks, there's a tribunal which has been looking into the murder and is going to give a report.
In recent weeks, it's become fairly clear that this tribunal is going to finger Ahmad Moghnia or some other Moghnia, somebody in that family.
Moghnia was a major terrorist figure and is associated with Hezbollah, the Shiite party militia in the Lebanese south.
So if they finger Moghnia or somebody like that, then it implicates Hezbollah.
And Hezbollah, if it's implicated, this is dangerous for Lebanon in so many ways because there have been Sunni-Shiite clashes in Lebanon.
There were in May of 2008, which the Qataris managed to broker an agreement over and stop it.
But you could have a return to Sunni-Shiite violence if Hezbollah was fingered in Hariri's death, because Hariri is kind of like a saint for the Sunnis.
And then there's a national unity government, which was cobbled together after elections last year.
It took five months to put it together.
And the government could fall.
Mr. Cole, it seems like the assassination of this...
Professor Cole, I should say.
The assassination of Rafik Hariri was used by George Bush and Connelisa Rice as the bludgeon to force the Syrian army out of southern Lebanon.
And it seemed like the Israelis agreed with that at the time, I think.
And then it was, I guess, from an objective point of view, the stupidest thing anybody ever did, because all it did was make Hezbollah much more powerful, and then they gained in the parliament.
And then the Israelis bombed Lebanon and left the place littered with cluster bombs.
Was that deliberate?
Why didn't Bush and Rice not think that it would probably be better to leave the Syrian army in Lebanon?
It was his father who invited them in there to get him into the coalition against Saddam Hussein in the first Gulf War, right?
So why did they undo that?
Was it stupidity or the plan?
Well, first of all, I mean, I wouldn't want to take the agency away from the Lebanese public.
A majority of Lebanese were very, very unhappy with the Syrian attempt to keep their hand-picked president in power for another three years.
And then a lot of Lebanese were convinced that the Syrians blew up al-Hariri.
So there was enormous public anger, which was manifested in these massive rallies in Beirut.
I mean, you're talking about hundreds of thousands of people.
There are only four million Lebanese, so you have hundreds of thousands of people on the street.
You've got everybody but the babysitters and the kids.
So I would interpret it that the Bush administration jumped on that bandwagon.
They saw that there was this popular movement to get the Syrians out, and Washington then backed it.
And they backed it just, I think, on basic, pragmatic political grounds.
The people were protesting against Syria.
Syria is allied with Iran.
Syria and Iran are allied with Hezbollah.
So if Syria were weakened and Lebanon, I think the Bushies thought this is a net plus for the United States.
It's a net plus for Israel, so let's go for it.
So what did the Israelis think of that at the time?
That they agreed with Bush that it's probably the best thing to – because it seems to me – and, you know, I'm not in the Israeli government or anything, but when I try to put myself in their shoes, it seems like it'd be better to have Baathists in power, like in Iraq before and Syria today, than to – and wherever they can, as opposed to having the self-proclaimed party of God running things, right?
Well, it's hard to know what the Israelis actually thought about these things.
It was the time of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, and Sharon was notorious for having all kinds of behind-the-scenes schemes and so forth.
And, of course, he had been deeply involved in invading Lebanon himself in 1982.
I think the Israeli right has this long-term misunderstanding.
Somehow, if they just moved the right pieces, the Christians and the more conservative Sunnis in Lebanon would permanently get into power, and that they'd be willing to deal with Israel, and everything would be fine.
And that was, in some ways, the point of the 1982 invasion, was to put in right-wing Maronite Christians in power.
And they just don't understand, apparently, in Tel Aviv, that the Lebanese population has shifted.
You know, the Christians are probably only about a third, the Maronite Catholics, the more conservative group, are probably only about 22 percent.
And they just can't control the country anymore, and the Israelis have this blind spot.
They don't understand that the Shiites have come up in the world, and are now politically very important.
And, of course, the Shiites are right on the Israeli border.
So, you know, I think that they just don't have a strategic vision, and they don't understand political sociology of Lebanon.
Everything is thought in these proxy terms of, well, this group is supported by Iran, therefore we must try to whittle it down, and so forth.
It's day-to-day.
And so it makes for poor policy.
And, of course, the Syrian withdrawal did allow Hezbollah to play more of a central role in Lebanese politics, become more powerful.
Its militia became more significant, because the Syrian troops were not there to counter it, and the Lebanese army is still weak.
And, of course, it did lead, in many ways, to the 2006 war.
Which only empowered Hezbollah more.
Well, in some ways.
I mean, certainly Hezbollah got enormous credit for standing up to Israel, although people were annoyed with it for seeming to go too far and help provoke that war.
I think it made Hezbollah more cautious.
But, yeah, I mean, I think the Israelis thought that Lebanon without Syria would somehow be more conducive to their aims in the region, and it turns out that that's not the case.
All right, now, it's kind of silly to even really try to ask a question like this with a few minutes on the clock the way we have here.
But I was hoping you could address radical Islam as a motivation for, you know, the few hundred al-Qaeda guys who were members of that group that attacked us back then.
It seems like it's not just the accusation with the current Moss controversy.
The accusation isn't just that all Muslims are somehow responsible for it, but really the core false assertion, it seems to me, anyway, is that Islam was the reason that they did it.
And so, as the neocons like to say all the time, radical Islam, radical Islam, it's our enemy.
And it seems like really they mean all Islam, because how do you differentiate a radical from a conservative or whatever when it comes to foreigners?
They're barely even people at all in most people's minds.
So, you know, it seems like this Moss controversy really brings us back to the core of how was it that those planes came out of the clear blue sky that morning and what drove the people to do what they did.
Juan, I was wondering if you could explain particularly about, I mean, we know there are real political motivations.
Explain about Islam and whether it does mandate that and whether that, you know, how much it really did contribute to their motivation, you think.
Well, I think Islam has almost nothing to do with it.
You know, the Al-Qaeda is a fringe cult.
It's kind of like the Timothy McVeigh of the Muslim world.
And they have very odd ideas from the point of view of the other Muslims.
And all they've got going for them is their extreme form of Muslim nationalism.
But look, you know, there was no Al-Qaeda until the 1980s when the Reagan administration called together what it called freedom fighters, Mujahideen, to fight the Soviet communists in Afghanistan.
It was CIA tradecraft that seeped over into the Arab volunteers.
You know, the Reagan administration appeared to have asked the Saudis to find someone to do fundraising for the Mujahideen.
And it was then that they fingered Osama bin Laden, who was a socialite from a wealthy family who could do the fundraising.
So, you know, the United States had a big role to play in fostering the rise of this small group of radical Muslims who were sent against the Soviets with essentially CIA tradecraft techniques of various sorts.
And it was the maelstrom of the American-Soviet war in Afghanistan and Pakistan that contributed to the radicalization of this group.
So, you know, to then turn around 20 years later and say, oh, well, there's something wrong with this law that it produced in such a group is the height of hypocrisy.
It was the Reagan administration and its policies that fostered that kind of group.
It didn't even exist in most of the Muslim world.
It was something peculiar to the Afghanistan-Pakistan region.
All right.
So if you and I are like astronauts floating out in space here and we're trying to take the biggest picture view that we can here.
I mean, after all, we're all six point something billion people sharing one big spaceship here.
And we have a long term future together, it seems like.
And after all, Muslims mostly are situated in a different geographical region than North America.
Most Americans don't have that much experience with them.
And in fact, is there any chance I can keep you one more segment here?
Because I got to go, unfortunately.
But let's do a whole segment on Islam.
Yeah, yeah.
We'll do this sometime very soon.
Thanks, Juan.
It's Juan Cole.
JuanCole.com.
Engaging the Muslim World at Amazon.com.
Go get it and read it.
