MIDDLE EAST: THE ARAB WORLD

Sumary
Question
¿What makes Lebanon such a potentially explosive factor in an unstable region as the Middle East is?

First we must know that Lebanon is the most politically complex and religiously divided country in the Middle East, even people in the Middle East find its politics confusing. Set up by France after World War I as a predominantly Christian state, Lebanon is now about 60% Muslim, 40% Christian.

It has 18 officially recognised religious sects and sharing power between them has always been a complicated game. Lebanese Muslims have tended to look east for support from the other Arab states and from Iran. The Christians have tended to look west to Europe and the United States.

The country's proximity to Israel mean it is also intimately tied to the Arab-Israeli dispute. While Lebanon has plenty of problems of its own, it has also become the arena where many of the region's conflicts and rivalries are played out.

Also is important to know that it has too much Syrian influence, the long conflict which ravaged the country from 1975 until 1990 was both a civil war and a regional war. It left Lebanon firmly under Syria's thumb, and with a southern strip of territory occupied by Israel as a buffer zone.

Lebanese politics have resulted in a succession of wars and atrocities, Israel has repeatedly intervened in Lebanon to protect its northern border. The civil war also drew in Iran to fight Israel and support the Lebanese Shia.
But while Syria no longer has a military presence, it has retained political influence through its relationship with Hezbollah. The government is badly split between anti-Syrian and pro-Syrian factions. The first is a loose alliance of Sunnis, Christians and Druze (a heterodox offshoot of Islam) and enjoys the support of the United States. The second is an essentially Shia grouping dominated by Hezbollah, with the backing of Syria and Iran. Symbolising the polarisation is the fact that the president is pro-Syrian and the prime minister anti-Syrian.

Others see a different but no less worrying possibility, that radical Islamists of the al-Qaeda type now see Lebanon, like other failing states, as attractive terrain in which to establish a foothold.

Bilbiography
PE HALEY, LW SNIDER, MG BANNERMAN. Lebanon in Crisis: Participants and Issues. Syracuse University Press

GH SNYDER. Crisis Bargaining. Council on International Studies