McNamara and a Lesson for Lebanon

BEIRUT -- I heard about the death of former US Defense Secretary Robert McNamara this week just as I was researching two different news events: the fresh American and NATO military offensive in Afghanistan, and the Byzantine backroom negotiations among Lebanese, Syrians, Saudi Arabians and maybe even a few stray Michael Jackson fans to form the next Lebanese government. The moment was ironic for highlighting a perpetual reality of world politics: Countries try to influence each other by using various combinations of military force and political negotiations, with mixed results over time.

In later years, McNamara genuinely anguished over the cost of the Vietnam War that he was so instrumental in managing during the period 1961-1968. I was at university in the United States in 1966-68, and followed events there with fascination as the power of the American military was slowly neutralized by the determination of North and South Vietnamese fighters and the skepticism of American citizens. Over 58,000 Americans would die in that war. We learned later that McNamara had concluded even while serving at the Pentagon that the war was futile. Only in the mid-1990s would he admit in public that the war was "wrong, terribly wrong."

So what does this have to do with Afghanistan, Lebanon and Syria? It reminds us that countries everywhere feel they have the right to use all available means to protect their national interest or extend their influence -- and they use very different means to achieve those ends. The fact that the United States today has several hundred thousand troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, along with dozens of new military basis throughout the Middle East and Asia, suggests that Washington is slow to absorb the lessons of McNamara's life. Foreign troops in distant lands tend to generate resistance among the natives, not acquiescence. The foreigners also always leave at some point, reverting the local terrain to the indigenous players to battle it out for power.

In the universal quest for answers on how major powers achieve influence or protect their national interests in distant lands, McNamara's life and policies were inconclusive. They provided only a costly lesson in failed policies, more unanswered questions, and a gripping tale of one man's tortured attempt to come to grips with his own moral responsibilities.

Negotiating power relationships in the Middle East is a very different process, offering a southwest Asian counterpoint to the Southeast Asian lessons from the Vietnam War. Syrian influence in Lebanon is an important example of how neighbors try to influence each other. Syria's military dominance and control of Lebanon for a quarter century ended ignominiously in 2005, with both a Lebanese popular uprising and a unanimous UN Security Council resolution making it clear that Syria's rule over Lebanon was no longer acceptable.

Damascus -- ancient and Middle Eastern -- understands power and its shifting realities. Syrian troops left Lebanon four years ago, but Syrian influence remains a constant factor. How Damascus tries to exercise that influence, after its army left Lebanon, now evolves in a manner that Robert McNamara would never have understood.

It seems outrageous that the formation of a Lebanese government should depend so much on Syrian-Saudi Arabian relations, or sensibilities in Tehran, Washington, Paris, Tel Aviv or Cairo. It is Lebanon's harsh fate to be the proxy chessboard and battlefield for Middle Eastern and world powers. So both waging war and forming a government after a lively election tend to be exercises in regional and global power politics.

Syria has core national interests in Lebanon that it defines in a combination of strategic, commercial and emotional terms, most of which are widely disputed by a majority of Lebanese who seek normal, friendly ties with their large neighbor. Some Syrian interests are valid, reflecting uncomfortable historical realities -- such as preventing Beirut from being a hotbed of anti-Syrian plots, a global springboard for anti-Syrian pressure, or a local conduit for Israeli machinations.

Syrian and Saudi contacts, among others, to shape the new Lebanese cabinet reflect a much wider dynamic than merely protecting one's real national interests or narrow selfish ambitions. Four principal regional powers -- Syria, Iran, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia -- are engaged in a lively but secretive process to influence the formation of the Lebanese cabinet. This process can be seen as either a delicate diplomatic dance, or a crude case of national smash ball. A new, credible, legitimate and determined Lebanese prime minister-designate, Saad Hariri, is working overtime to form a government that subtly acknowledges the sentiments and interests of these regional players, while restoring core legitimacy and independence to the battered Lebanese governance system. He, now, is the latest novice who learns how to dance and smash, in the timeless game of negotiating power relationships.

Remembering McNamara's ways half a century ago and watching Hariri's deliberations today should remind us that military power, political legitimacy and national influence are three different things -- beautiful when they converge, and catastrophic when they collide.

Rami G. Khouri is Editor-at-large of The Daily Star, and Director of the Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs at the American University of Beirut, in Beirut, Lebanon.