Lebanon Second Thoughts

While it's obviously A Good Thing in a broad sense to see the people of Lebanon standing up and trying to get the minions of a quite odious Syrian regime to leave their country, I feel like there are a few skeptical notes that ought to be sounded here. One is that, near as I can tell, there's no really clear sense in which the Syrian sphere of influence in Lebanon is bad for the United States of America. Second, there's no particular reason to think that the waning of Syrian influence really heralds the dawning of Lebanese democracy. Outside of the special case of Iraq, Lebanon was and is pretty clearly the most democratic of Arab states. They have elections which are vigorously contested. They have a quite robust politics at the local level. The legislature is a closer facsimile of a proper democratic one than anything else in action in the Arab world. And they have a reasonably free press and free media.

It's not what you would call a real democracy for a variety of reasons. I won't get into them but see this two part primer for all the gorey details. Still, as I say, it's closer than anything else that's up and running already. I don't see any particular reason to think that kicking Syria out will fundamentally change the nature of the Lebanese polity, which is a kind of facade of democracy at the national level masking what is, in fact, a very weak state apparatus governed by interest-group deal-making. Cracking open the Lebanese political system would be a very risky course of action, and I don't think we should be surprised to see enough influential people not want to see it happen in order to ensure that it doesn't happen. Heck, I don't even think it's clear that it would be a good idea to try and move Lebanon toward real majoritarian democracy. One could imagine that simply leading to a breakdown of the current settlement and a resumption of civil war.