Ukraine today hearkens back to Lebanon of recent years. We watch the invasion of its cities and streets, and we remember the battles of Achrafieh and Zahle, and the conquering vanguards of the Syrian Army and the Deterrence Forces which were under Hafez Assad’s sole command.
In many of his past utterances, Vladimir Putin has elaborated at length about his theory that Ukraine, with its plains and geography, its society and its origins, was no more than a Russian invention that was gifted by his ancestors to those orphans who survived on crumbs doled out to them by the Soviet Union as gifts and gratuities. He now finds it unbearable that this bastard country and its people would rise up and seize their independence, sovereignty, and free decision-making, after decades of a complete Russian hegemony over aspect of their lives.
In a recent meeting with Emmanuel Macron, Vladimir Putin deliberately seated his French counterpart at a provocative distance from himself that may have required his guest to yell or use a megaphone to get his points across, an image that distilled two fundamentally different views of the growing crisis. A crisis that starts with a personality of a petulant man with a countenance of extreme superiority that trickled down to his profile and behavior, and which doesn’t seem to end with an entitlement mindset underlying his policies of systematically subjecting neighboring countries to be part and parcel of Greater Russia. Which means that no one, not anyone, has the right to sit at a table of discussion or dialogue. Should anyone try to engage Putin in discussion or dialogue, he’d have to sit at the same table that Emmanuel Macron was made to sit, a table that by its shocking dimensions appeared to have one end in Moscow and another in Paris.
Feu Hafez Assad of Syria was made of the same cloth. As the dictator of Syria, he repeatedly refused to visit Lebanon and meet his Lebanese counterpart at the Presidential Palace in Baabda. Instead, he summoned the Lebanese presidents to come to Damascus, often in an expedited manner, as if they were governors under his command of a small Syrian province among its sister provinces in the Damascus governorate. He ceaselessly repeated that Lebanon was a mistake of history and geography, that it was and will always be a small piece in the Greater Syria mosaic, not deserving of embassies or consulates or diplomatic exchanges. Rather, Lebanon was worthy of lower-level hybrid boards and councils, of vassal personalities, and of a military and security regime no less oppressive than the worst political and military hegemonies and occupations the world has known. When, 50 years after their respective independence from mandatory France, Syria was forced by the international community to exchange diplomatic missions with Lebanon, the matter seemed more like a folkloric aspect of their bilateral relations.
Assad’s Putin
In his last conversation with Syria’s Foreign Minister Walid Muallem, Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri complained that Syria’s custody over Lebanon was beginning to choke off Lebanon. But Syria did not want an ally, or a friend, or a peer in Lebanon; it wanted subjects to its dominion, dependent vassals to its ambitions, and mere tools in its orbit that acted according to Assad’s interests. All of this was accomplished under the cover of undisputed deceitful slogans, and when the pathways diverged, the Syrian regime found no alternative but to kill and eliminate.
The Assad regime did it with Kamal Jumblatt who sought to become a peer, refusing to cower in Hafez Assad’s big prison. Then it did it with Mufti Hassan Khaled, Presidents Bashir Gemayel and René Mouawad, all the way to Rafik Hariri. Some of these people were in fact political opponents of each other, sharing only their common aspiration to a sovereign and independent Lebanon.
Putin is pretexting a presumed Ukrainian role in targeting Russia to justify his invasion of Ukraine. This is exactly what Hafez Assad did vis-à-vis Lebanon, both before and after The National Movement [an amalgam of Muslim and Palestinian groups affiliated with Syria], before and after the Lebanese Front [an amalgam of Lebanese groups opposed to Syria], before and after the Palestinian Liberation Organization of Yasser Arafat. The Syrian tyrant did not need justifications to invade and subdue Lebanon. He used every actor and every action to expand his intervention and his hegemony, as in the rumor that the selectmen of the town of Zahle called on him to invade the town, a call to which he could not but expediently respond, given his magnanimity, chivalry, and neighborliness!
Lebanon is not Ukraine
In 2005, in the aftermath of the Orange Revolution in Ukraine, Hezbollah’s Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah repeated his famous phrase, “Lebanon is not Ukraine”. We could not understand at the time the monumental similarity between two countries whose geographies made them lie inside the mouth of a bear or that of a lion [Assad in Arabic means lion]. We could not foresee that they’d be paying the ultimate price, not for any ostentatious hostility on their part, but simply for their natural right to freedom, liberation, and self-determination regardless of the whims of their Big Brother next door whom they knew only as a murderous hegemonic mad killer who did not desist from liquidating people, shelling cities, razing villages to the ground, whenever he so desired.
Ukraine today is like Lebanon of the recent past. We watch the invasion of its cities and streets, and we remember the battles of Achrafieh and Zahle, and the conquering vanguards of the Syrian Army and the Deterrence Forces which were under Hafez Assad’s sole command. We do not know Ukraine, nor do we know its people; we do not share borders, nor do we have a special relation or interests with it. But we do stand by them and feel sympathy for them, because we share with them the double curse of geography and history, for we know Russia and we know Putin, and we know from experience that Putin’s fabric is one that can only offer death, blood, and destruction to the world.
Now is not the time for nostalgia. The entire world is facing a difficult test and choices no less complicated, difficult, and sensitive. But the impact of allowing the fall of Ukraine is nothing less than igniting a Third World War.
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