The Warlord in His Castle

Michael J. Totten

08 September 09

"This country is like a cake. On the top it is cream. Underneath it is fire." – Hezbollah spokesman

"We don't want the great Syrian prison." – Kamal Jumblatt

The Middle East is a rough part of the world, especially for its ethnic and religious minorities. In the late 1980s, Saddam Hussein's Arab Nationalist Baath Party regime waged a war of extermination against ethnic Kurds in the north. Iran's Bahai community has been mercilessly persecuted by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his fellow Khomeinists for decades. The vast majority of Jews living in Arab countries were expelled to Israel, and many in the Arab world still hope to expunge them from the region entirely by destroying the country they fled to as refugees. Egypt's Coptic Christians are second class citizens, and many Christian women in Iraq feel compelled by Islamist extremists to wear Islamic headscarves on their heads even though the state doesn't require it. Libya's Moammar Qaddafi represses the indigenous ethnic Berber minority, and the Shias of Saudi Arabia live under the boot heel of fanatical Sunni Wahhabis.

I could go on, but you get the drift.

The Druze minority communities in Lebanon, Israel, and Syria have worked out a survival formula that works better than most. They're weathervanes. They calculate. They, more than other Arabs, side with the strong horse.

In Syria, the Druze support the Baathist regime of Bashar Assad. Israeli Druze are fiercely loyal to the state and fight harder than most against the likes of Hamas and Hezbollah in elite IDF units. Many Palestinians consider them traitors.

It's trickier for Lebanon's Druze. Politics there are vastly more complicated – as complicated as politics in Iraq, if not even more so. The country is, in many ways, a microcosm of Middle East politics generally. You can usually tell which faction in Lebanon has the upper hand both locally and regionally because the Druze tend to belong to that faction. But what happens when the region is stuck in stalemate and deadlock?

Lebanon's Druze leader Walid Jumblatt recently abandoned the anti-Syrian and anti-Hezbollah "March 14" coalition and declared himself politically neutral. Most seem to believe he did so because he thought Syrian power was on the rise again in Lebanon and didn't want to stay on the wrong side of the boss. A few say he fears a looming internal war between Sunnis and Shias and wants to step back and out of the way. He himself says compromise with Hezbollah, though it isn't desirable, is necessary because the Lebanese state is too weak to disarm a proxy militia backed by the powerful regimes in Syria and Iran. He believes, correctly, that Lebanon can't effectively take a hard line while the international community invites the rogue regimes in from the cold.

(Full article)