A lot of gas...

September 30, 1997

The Whole Disgusting Scramble

When is a country not a country?

From the capital of Jordan to the capital of Lebanon is a drive about equal to the New York-Boston run on I-95. Road conditions vary, but the entire journey moves along more or less modern turnpikes, so that if you want to drive from Amman to Beirut, the trip should logically take you between four-and-a-half and six hours - about the same as the Northeast Corridor trip. Instead, as you pass through a gauntlet of checkpoints and four excruciating passport controls (two for each border), you're lucky if you make it in 12 hours. This may be the last place on earth where a long commute can be blamed on the World War I allies. What's most striking when you enter Syria from Jordan, or Lebanon from Syria, is not the differences among the cultures, but the shocking similarities. The houses look the same, the stores sell the same products (it's a little harder to buy booze in Jordan), the people speak not only the same language, but the same dialect. To be in the Levant is to see the culture not as it is written about in the CIA fact book, but as it is actually lived, and throughout Syria, Lebanon, most of Jordan, all of the Palestinian territories, and (on the evidence of language and culture) western Iraq, the differences among the Mediterranean Arab cultures are so slight as to be barely noticeable - even to the people who live there. All of these countries were carved by the English and French out of the remains of the Ottoman Empire, generally in a big hurry and with an eye toward paying off wartime clients (Faysal ibn al-Hussein, who led the Arab Revolt, briefly earned himself the kingdom of Iraq; his brother Abdallah got the throne of Jordan). None of the countries that emerged from what Woodrow Wilson called "the whole disgusting scramble" over the Near East is larger in size than Pennsylvania (Lebanon is smaller than Connecticut; the Palestinian territory smaller than Rhode Island). Geographically, culturally and ethnically, the borders are an arbitrary mess. So it's no coincidence that none of these places have ever developed any freestanding sense of nationhood. At present, Hafez al-Asad maintains Syrian integrity through a cult of personality slightly less absurd than the one Saddam Hussein maintains in Iraq; the government of the Palestinian authority is a cronies gallery that could be stamped out any day; Lebanon's raucous parliament still concerns itself more with sorting out sectarian claims than promoting anything like a national interest. In Jordan, Abdallah's grandson, the structurally unpopular King Hussein, keeps himself on the throne of a ruthless, if subtle, police state. Enforced shows of loyalty aside, there's a distinct lack of patriotism in the Near East, because none of the countries is worth saluting.

Which may be why unity, despite opposition from virtually every organized political force in the region, continues to grow. On several fronts, polities (or at least confederations) are appearing that will be larger than the current countries. Whatever entity finally emerges in the Palestinian autonomous regions (if any emerges at all - the odds for a Palestinian nation get worse with every dollar Irving Moscowitz sends east) will be far too small to survive on its own, leaving at least a confederation with Jordan as its only option. Between Syria and Lebanon, the job of unification has, for better or worse, mostly been accomplished. It's hard to imagine either country going back to the state of quasi-sovereignty that existed before the Lebanese war. And as the two countries solidify free trade practices and ease border crossings (at least that's the plan), they will continue to look more and more like one country. Lebanon has made a Faustian bargain in that respect. There aren't many things worse than being controlled by Asad, but trying to run the puny, toothless and corrupt banana republic that Lebanon was in its "Switzerland of the Middle East" days may be one of them. Ironically, Israel's own efforts to isolate the individual Arab countries may in fact accelerate the process. One of the first results of Israel's recent entente with Turkey - a clear attempt to hem in Syria - has been that the Syrian and Iraqi governments are talking for the first time since the Gulf War. Whether this leads to anything, the new opening makes clear that the two dicators have more in common than either would like to admit (both lead the local Ba'ath parties, took power at the same time, etc. And the urban populations of both countries need relief of any kind - even from a suspicious neighbor). All these are independent, isolated events, and the stillborn history of Pan-Syrianism is full of such isolated items, which eventually led to nothing. More important, any talk of unity will remain a pipe dream as long as the current governments - none of whom have demonstrated an affinity for power-sharing - are in place. Right now, unity is happening even under a bad set of governments, but for the Eastern Mediterranean Arabs to form a workable nation, they will not only have to penetrate some large-scale political differences - they will have to knock down a string of dictators (or wait for them to die - Lebabese Prime Minister Rafiq al-Hariri is the closest thing the Levantine governments have to a spring chicken). But again, in this decade alone, European history has shown that this is in fact possible. And as the grueling road trip through the Levant makes clear, it may also be inevitable.

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