Protests in Iraq and Lebanon threaten an Iran-backed status quo

It has long been clear that Donald Trump’s policies and postures in the Middle East have an almost preternatural capacity to backfire. His sudden and messy withdrawal from north-east Syria last month has left Vladimir Putin’s Russia holding the ring — with an undeserved but understandable reputation for being more reliable than the US — and awards Turkey its third enclave in northern Syria.

His policy of “maximum pressure” on Iran has emboldened the Islamic Republic’s hardliners in the struggle with the Sunni Arab Gulf — to the point where Tehran in September devastated Saudi Arabia’s most neuralgic oil hub with missiles and drones, and the US has barely responded.

President Barack Obama tried to create a new balance of power in the Gulf in which Shia Iran and the Saudi-led camp would “share the neighbourhood”. His main vehicle was the 2015 deal Iran signed with the US and five other world powers to mothball most of its nuclear programme under international monitoring. This was a diplomatic breakthrough and landmark in arms control. But it did not make Iran part of the solution to the region’s endemic proxy warfare, whipped into an ethnosectarian whirlwind by the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Mr Trump ripped up the deal in 2017 and subcontracted the job of containing Iran to Saudi Arabia and Israel. That has not worked. Neither of these US-armed allies has been able to counter Iran’s forward-leaning strategy based on militias with missiles in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Yemen.

Yet, Iran’s position is far from secure. The spread of its power across the region has created significant tremors, the current epicentres of which are in Baghdad and Beirut. The people of Iraq, where the Shia are a majority, and Lebanon, where they are the largest community, are in revolt against the corrupt political classes that presume to rule — but also against the Iran-backed militias that stand behind them.

In the past few days, in Tahrir Square in Baghdad and in Beirut’s Martyrs’ Square, hundreds of thousands of demonstrators have challenged an Iran-backed status quo.

Also in the past week, Qassem Soleimani, commander of the Quds Force, the expeditionary arm of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, intervened directly to ensure Hadi al-Amiri, a Tehran-backed militia chief, reversed a commitment to bring down Adel Abdul Mahdi, the Iraqi prime minister. Unconfirmed reports in Lebanon also had Gen Soleimani in Beirut, which he visits regularly.

Clearly Iran and its allies feel threatened by these popular revolts. Tehran’s commitment of ground forces to Syria, including Hezbollah and Iraqi Shia militia co-ordinated by the Quds Force, were vital in saving Bashar-al-Assad’s regime.

In Iraq and in Lebanon, society is rebelling against an entire political class that, while ostensibly sharing power on a multi-sectarian basis, is actually looting state resources and failing to provide the most basic services.

The protesters, furthermore, do not want to be part of a quasi-Iranian protectorate. Ominously for Iran, the Iraqi protests spread like wildfire from Baghdad — a mainly Shia city — throughout the Shia heartlands and holy cities of the south.

In Lebanon, where demonstrations inside the capital have mixed Sunni and Shia, Christian and Druze, the Shia southern suburbs, and other Hezbollah strongholds in south Lebanon and the Bekaa Valley, have been a sea of Lebanese flags rather than the Party of God’s strident yellow banners.

In Iraq, militia snipers as well as security forces have shot protesters, with more than 250 dead. In Lebanon, a tense peace has held — so far. Nobody has forgotten the sectarian bloodletting of the 1975-90 civil war. Thugs from Hezbollah and allied Shia militia Amal have attacked demonstrators.

Is peaceful change possible or likely?

So much of Iraq’s political class has been twisted into tribal or sectarian shape by decades of war, tyranny, sanctions and foreign intrusion. Shia paramilitaries backed by Iran have captured many institutions of a crumbling state. They still have support because of their role in fighting Isis.

Barham Salih, Iraq’s respected Kurdish president, has proposed electoral reforms to make MPs accountable to their voters, moving from a party-list system under sectarian bosses to individual constituencies. That is highly unlikely to happen peacefully. In Lebanon, Hezbollah is in a bind. The kudos derived from forcing Israel’s withdrawal from Lebanon in 2000 and holding its army to a draw in 2006, and in helping defeat Isis in Syria, is fading. Now their sponsors are pushing them to defend a status quo rigged in Iran’s favour. But this means the Party of God, and its self-described immunity from corruption, is having to side with the kleptocracy.

The factory settings of Lebanon’s ruling classes are difficult to change because of the ubiquity of sectarian dynasties. Power is apportioned by sectarian quota, but inside the sects it is typically hereditary within the leading families. At the moment, the huge asset Lebanese society has is its cross-confessional unity. But the former warlords in suits and their progeny are bred to break this down. Rather like Lebanon’s chronic power cuts, things could turn dark at the flick of a switch.

Source: FINANCIAL TIMES