Lebanon: Leaving Democracy to the “Jackals”

Lee Smith writing in The Tablet mourns “the collapse of the March 14 movement, the return of Syrian hegemony to Lebanon, and Hezbollah’s de facto takeover of the state.” Smith suggests that the Obama administration’s policy of engagement with Syria has empowered Hezbollah and deepened the cracks in the pro-democracy March 14 government, while under George W. Bush‘s policy of democracy promotion, the U.S. had previously “curtailed our relationship with Syrian security services and put more money into Lebanese political institutions.” However, Smith ultimately criticizes the American interest in institution-building abroad. Stating that “the premise of institution-building is that it is not the particular ideas and values of foreign cultures that determine how people in those places live; it is rather the absence of U.S.-style political institutions that have kept these foreigners mired in poverty,” Lee says that “this obsession with building political institutions betrays a parochial innocence.” In the case of Lebanon, he concludes, “the United States wanted to help the Lebanese build political institutions but were unwilling to do anything that might alter the balance of power,” adding that “we have abandoned the Lebanese to the jackals.”