Letter
I would like to make a correction to an article by my friend
and colleague Jim Quilty (“Lebanon’s Brush with Civil
War,” Middle East Report Online, May 20, 2008).
Jim wrote the following: “On the day the opposition action
began, Michael Young, opinion editor of Beirut’s English-language
newspaper The Daily Star -- many of whose readers associate
his opinions with those of American neo-conservatism -- published
a column suggesting it might be time for the rest of Lebanon
to seek an ‘amicable divorce’ from its Shi‘i
community.”
The “neo-conservatism”
label, even if indirectly dispensed, is just nonsense, and I
won’t validate it by protesting too much.
More disturbing was Jim’s assertion that I wrote
“suggesting it might be time” for an amicable divorce
from the Shi‘i community. This he then linked to “cantonization” plans
brought up during the Lebanese civil war. His passage is an utter
misstatement of what I said, placed in a highly tendentious context.
In fact I didn’t “suggest” a divorce from
the Shi‘a at all, and in no way subscribe to that view.
What I did write was this: “If [Hizbullah] wants its semi-independent
entity, it is now obliged to state this plainly. The masks have
fallen. And if Hizbullah does decide to reject Lebanon, then
we shouldn’t be surprised if some start speaking of an
amicable divorce between Shiites and the rest of Lebanon.” The
key conditional tense is obvious here, as is the fact that this
is an objective observation, not advocacy.
All I’m saying is that if Hizballah insists on defending
a semi-independent entity in the midst of Lebanese society, then
talk of separation from the Shi‘i community will start
growing within this society. Alas, that is precisely what has
happened in recent weeks, much to the distress of those Lebanese,
and I include myself here, who actually don’t want to see
their country broken apart.
Michael Young
Beirut
Jim Quilty replies: Any esteem that Michael holds for
this writer is more than reciprocated. Over the last decade,
the analysis informing his opinion pieces in The Daily Star has
generally been both keenly observed and eruditely expressed.
As a writer, I sympathize with any frustration he feels in
being misunderstood. Readers are, by their very nature, free
to interpret work in ways that the writer would not necessarily
intend.
I suspect that any misinterpretation on the part of Michael’s
readers concerning his advocacy of the neo-conservative project
stems from the engaged nature of his current writing, and the
fact that his scalding criticism is more likely to fall on Washington’s
adversaries in the region than its allies.
There are some readers, more skeptical than I, who question
the sincerity of Michael’s protests. They might point to
his 2003 piece in The Daily Star,
“Radical Cheek on Iraq,” which opens thus: “One
of the splendid media sagas in the last two years has been the
movement of journalist Christopher Hitchens from political left
to right on Afghanistan and Iraq.” Shortly afterwards,
he commences his defense of Hitchens’ newfound neo-con
position with the remark,
“Swinging from left to right is a venerable tradition.”
An incautious reader might assume from these lines that Michael
picked up on Hitchens’ career parabola as a means of illustrating
and justifying changes in his own ideological position. That
would be a misinterpretation, of course, because Michael’s
piece says nothing whatsoever about his own ideological position.
It merely celebrates Hitchens’
swing from left to right.
I fear that I myself may be guilty of drawing the same sort
of hasty conclusions from Michael’s self-headlined May
8 article, “Heading Toward a Lebanese Divorce,” to
which I refer in the closing paragraph of my piece. Michael’s
piece begins: “Once we accept that this week’s alleged
labor unrest was only the latest phase in Hizbullah’s war
against the Lebanese state, will we understand what actually
took place yesterday.”
In addition to condemning Hizballah, the piece deftly narrates
to its Western audience why it is that Michel Aoun, who has more
seats in Parliament than any other Christian political leader,
does not actually represent Christian Lebanese opinion. Much
has happened since the 2005 elections so his assertion may or
may not be accurate, but it’s really impossible to say
until after the elections in 2009.
Near the end of his piece, Michael writes: “The Lebanese
state cannot live side by side with a Hizbullah state. This theorem
is becoming more evident by the day, as the party's actions in
the past three years have been, by definition, directed against
the state, the government, the army and the security forces,
institutions of national representation, the economy, and more
fundamentally the rules of the Lebanese communal game.”
Another narrator might suggest Hizballah (and Aoun) have actually
been engaging in a political campaign to make their representation
within the institutions of state commensurate with the support
that the party has among Lebanon’s Shi‘i community,
but no matter.
Swept up by the rhetorical weight of Michael’s depiction
of how Hizballah has been pursuing a war against Lebanon’s
state institutions, a reader may overlook any conditionality
in his assessment. Having been told that the position of Aoun
is illegitimate, and that Hizballah is not only a state within
a state, but one that is at war with the Lebanese state, a reader
might jump to the conclusion that Michael is himself in favor
of some sort of ill-defined “sectarian divorce” in
which Hizballah rules over the Shi‘i community.
Such a reader would indeed be incautious. Clearly, Michael
is not himself calling for Lebanon’s political divorce
from its Shi‘i community. Indeed, the piece says nothing
whatsoever about his own position on the matter. His narrative
of Lebanese politics merely justifies the political rationale
for anyone who would make such a call.
If I am guilty of interpreting Michael erroneously, I can only
attribute my failure to the rhetorical verve of his prose. In
any case, I respect the man’s intellect far too much to
assume that he is among the few who have begun speaking of an
amicable divorce between the Shi‘a and the rest of Lebanon,
whether that involves the notion of cantons or not. This is precisely
why I conditioned the offending “link” between his
article and cantonization as follows:
“Deliberately or not, such calls evoke the discourse of
the ‘canton.’”
