BOOK REVIEWS
LEBANESE VIEWS ON THE 1958 CRISIS

Malcolm H. Kerr

SIYASAH LUBNAN AL-KHARIJIYAH ("The Foreign Policy of Lebanon"), by Fu'ad 'Ammun. Beirut: Dar alNashr al-'Arabiyah, 1959. 154 pages. £L 1.00.

BA'D AL-MIHNAH WA QABLHA ("After and Before the Crisis"), by Michel Asmar. Beirut: Al-Nadwa alLubaniniyah, 1959. 122 pages. No price indicated.

HAQIQAT AL-THAWRAH AL-LUBNANIYAH ("The Truth About the Lebanese Revolution"), by Kamal Junblat. Beirut: Dar al-Nashr al-Arabiyah, 1959. 179 pages. £L 1.50.

WAQI' AL-THAWRAH AL-LUBNANIYAH ("The Reality of the Lebanese Revolution"), by Nadia Karami and Nawaf Karami. Beirut: Publisher unknown, 1959. 320 pages. £L 5 .00.

MOUDHAKKARAT SAMI AL-SULH ("The memoirs of Sami al-Sulh"), by Sami al-Sulh. Beirut: Maktaba, al-Fikr al-'Arabi, 1960. 766 pages. £L 15.00.

AL-AYYAM AL-ASIBAH ("Days of Crisis"), by Ghassan Tuwayni. Beirut: Dar al-Nahar, n.d. 62 pages. No price indicated.

THAWRAH AL-AHRAR FI LUBNAN ("The Revolution of the Free in Lebanon"), by Isma'il Musa al-Yusuf. Beirut: Manshurat al-Zayn, 1958. 268 pages. £L 2.5 0.

It is now over two years since the end of the Lebanese civil war of 1958, and during this interval a series of events have occurred which, taken together, signify the end of the crisis, and the clearing away of all the most dearly visible débris. There was, first of all the accession to office of President Fu'ad Shihab in September 1958; then the extraordinary four-man coalition Cabinet of October headed by Rashid Karami whose task it was to pacify and reconcile the country under the slogan "No victor and no vanquished." It accomplished this objective with enough success to enable a larger and more widely representative Karami Cabinet to take its place after a year had passed. In June and July 1960, it proved possible to hold elections for a new Parliament without serious incidents, thus replacing the Parliament elected in 1957 under President Camille Sham'un. Finally, following the elections, President Shihab installed a new Cabinet headed by Sa'ib Salam (like Karami a leading opponent of Sham'un) and the picture was complete: a new President, Parliament and Cabinet, plus a profusion of declarations of brotherhood and outlining of new government programs of national construction and public welfare, plus the general return of security and prosperity to the country, all signify the end of an unhappy chapter in Lebanon's history. If the factions fall to violence again, it will be in a new context of events and personalities.

In fact, to judge by some of the literature on the 1958 crisis that has been appearing in Beirut bookshops, one might suppose that the whole issue revolved around personalities. Alternatively, depending on whose axe is being ground, it was the "diabolical plots" of Camille Sham'un and his "'stooges" (Sami Sulh, Charles Malik) to turn Lebanon into a base for British and American imperialists to use against the "free Arabs" of the U.A.R.; or it was 'Abd al-Nasir's expansionist ambitions, abetted by his agents (Sa'ib Salam, Kamal Junblat), that precipitated the violence. An accompanying theme is the lust for office: Sham'un wanted to avenge the loss of their seats in Parliament in the 1957 elections.

Rather oddly, the opponents of Sham'un have had the stage pretty much to themselves in this propaganda orgy. Among the books under review, those by 'Ammun, Junblat , Nadia and Nawaf Karami and Yusuf are examples of this; on the other side, The Memoirs of Sami al-Sulh (whose author was Sham'un's Prime Minister from November 1956 to September 1958) is the only pro-Sham'un book to have been published, as far as this reviewer is aware, and it did not appear until the spring of 1960, on the eve of Sulh's unsuccessful bid for re-election to Parliament. This is a pity from the standpoint of balancing the arguments, especially since al-Sulh's Memoirs are so poorly written and tell us so little about anything except himself; but the imbalance is perhaps a fair reflection of the fact that while Malik and Sulh are politically dead and Sham'un removed from the center of the stage, all of the leading insurrectionists Salam, Junblat, Sabri Hamadah, Karami, Ahmad al-As'ad and others-are more alive than ever. It is also a pity that no neutral views of the crisis have been published except for the booklets of Michel Asmar and Ghassan Tuwayni, both of which are very good but cover only a few selected points. For these are the only two writers on our list who show much sobriety or intellectual integrity.

While all this literature includes rather little that is edifying or even credible, it does tell us a good deal in two respects. In the first place, it reflects much of the mentality of 1958, especially on the rebel side. If the reader has his doubts that Sham'un was a paid agent of the British intelligence service, he need not doubt that thousands of educated and uneducated Lebanese Muslims are firmly convinced of it. If he doubts that many rebels were more loyal to 'Abd al-Nasir and the UAR than to Lebanon, he need only glance at the sycophantic dedications and quotations on the flyleaves of Isma'il Yusuf's frantic, popularly written book. In the second place, some of these books, particularly Junblat's and Sulh's, reveal much about the personalities of their authors, who are themselves representative of two opposing currents in the political life of Lebanon since independence.

As a factual summary of the events of 1958, Nadia and Nawaf Karami's⁽¹⁾ "The Reality of the Lebanese Revolution" is certainly most comprehensive, describing in some detail the mounting tension in Lebanon since the time of Suez (when Sami Sulh replaced 'Abdallah Yafi as Prime Minister), the question of a second term for Sham'un, the efforts of neutral personalities to mediate between the two sides, the fighting in various parts of the country, the American landings and Robert Murphy's negotiations in Beirut, Shihab's election on July 31, his succession to office on September 23, the pro Sham'un "counter-revolution" of October, and finally, the formation of the four-man Cabinet, which ended the crisis. But the book is grossly unreliable, for it purports to offer an inside story, not so much on the rebel side (whom the authors hysterically support) as on the Sham'unist side, and here most of the mate consists of rumors and allegations, the truth falsity of which could not possibly be known to the authors, nor to many others either. Thus we learn the dark secrets of Sham'un's to buy support for his re-election from Salam, Yafi, Junblat, ex-President Bisharah al-Khuri and even 'Abd al-Nasir, in exchange for credible reversals of his policies (pp. 36-8); we hear the details of conversations between Murphy and the Maronite Patriarch, the leaders and Sham'un himself in which he roundly criticizes the Eisenhower Doctrine (pp. 294-8); and so on. Aside from such fantasies with which this book (and all the other books, except Asmar's and Tuwayni's) abounds, it is characteristic of the authors' mentality that, they dismiss the pro-Sham'un counterrevolution of October as an "artificial uproar" by those who "did not understand the new Lebanese reality springing from the revolution."  The chief motive of counterrevolutionaries was allegedly to provoke the intervention of the American troops so as to neutralize Shihab's accession to the Presidency (pp. 312-3).

Synthetic impatience with the interests of the Christian side is also a characteristic of Kamal Junblat's book, "The Truth About the Lebanese Revolution". The author, currently Minister of Finance in the Salam Cabinet, has been in Parliament since 1943 (with the exception of 1957-60), is the founder of the Progressive Socialist Party, and in 1958 led the rebel uprising in the Shuf mountain district. But unlike the Karamis, Junblat is no ordinary propagandist: he is a doctrinaire revolutionary pamphleteer and something of an intellectual, who does not hesitate to reject national, traditions, myths and slogans that are ordinarily considered sacrosanct by Lebanese politicians: free enterprise, intersectarian distribution of government jobs, the National Pact of 1943 (a formula of compromise between Christians and Muslims on various foreign and domestic issues), and the formula, "no victor and no vanquished" with which the crisis ended in October 1958. To borrow an American platitude, these represent "Lebanese Way of Life," with which Junblat is profoundly depressed and disgusted, foresees in it anarchy, grasping materialism, hypocrisy, corruption and the enshrinement of national mediocrity through half-way measures. "The National Pact," he writes, "is not an end itself, and creates nothing positive. On the contrary, it is a first step toward the achievement secularization of [public life]." If no further progress is made, "the Pact will inevitably fall to pieces without its place being taken by positive concept of the state, the community, the nation . At that point the Pact will become -  in fact it has already become, apart its [neutralist] concept of foreign policy ..- nothing more than a mutual exchange of lies.(pp. 153-4). "The recent revolution ended where it should not have ended, i.e., with the present régime newly re-establishing political sectarianism - fifty-fifty, no victor and no vanquished instead of  bringing forth [new leaders] . ..- who alone could reform Lebanese institutions with vigor, wisdom, and power ..." (p. 155). In proposing his socialist program he says, "The theory of liberalism, or absolute freedom in politics, is a mistake as far as Lebanon is concerned. It has bequeathed to us this individualist anarchy in our public and private life, so that people in this country have become selfish and wrapped up in their own interests, heedless of everything except what directly concerns themselves, exerting themselves only for what falls within their narrow horizons, interested in nothing that does not bear them a definite advantage." (p. 161). Lebanese economic prosperity in recent years, Junblat remarks, is in large part due to the fact that Beirut has become "a nightclub for the royalty and capitalists of the Arab world" and a cosmopolitan center for licit and illicit commerce (p. 33).

All these things, to Junblat's mind, were among the ultimate causes of the 1958 revolution - or, as he would have put it perhaps, among the justifications for his own participation in the insurrection, for as far as he is concerned, "the true causes of the recent Lebanese revolution still stand and cannot be treated except by means that are revolutionary in spirit and program" (p. 173). If radical reform was what Junblat was after in 1958, he was surely aware that this revolution was not that of his co-rebels Salam, Hamadah, Yafi and As'ad, whose chief objective was simply to continue playing the old game with their own deck of cards rather than Sham'un's. Perhaps it is Junblat's frustration arising from this realization that drives him to an almost insane state of frenzy in his attacks on Sham'un, to unspeakable bad taste in his vituperation of Charles Malik (pp: 73-6), and to self-deceiving hypocrisy in justifying his own record (see, for example, his attempt to explain away the part he played in forcing Bisharah al-Khuri's resignation and supporting Sham'un's election in 1952, though he was "well aware" that Sham'un was "an agent of the British intelligence service"-(pp. 23-32). From Junblat's explanation of the wide powers and opportunities for self-advancement inherent in the office of Lebanese President (pp. 37-41), the reader is left to conclude that Sham'un's chief fault in Junblat's eyes is that he behaved in office not as a revolutionary but according to the usual rules of the game.   The fact that traditional politicians also eventually resorted to armed rebellion, on the other hard, was not due to Sham'uns failure to institute radical reforms but rather because he overplayed his hand.

From Junblat's book the picture emerges of a passionate reformist, discouraged by his own penetrating vision of the all-too-real weaknesses of Lebanese public life and the enormity of the task of curing them, but driven by the combination of his passion and his discouragement to the loss of the tolerance, sense of proportion and realism he needs if he is to accomplish anything.

It would be difficult to imagine two more opposite personalities, temperamentally and politically, than Kamal Junblat and Sami Sulh. Junblat is young (43) French-educated, fiery articulate, radical, iconoclastic, reclusive. Sulh is old (70), Turkish-educated, banal in expression, tradition-minded, sentimental, convivial. Sulh is no littérateur and is very doubtful that much of his Memoirs was written by himself; indeed, many passages make no pretense of it. Even with the aid of his editor, the book is a literary monstrosity. The narrative is constructed like a coffeehouse conversation, with wild leaps from one subject to another without regard to chronology or logical connection. It is heavily salted with sentimentality, heroic poses, corny humor and a childlike sensitivity which takes all political opposition as a personal affront. The book quickly became known among Beirut jokesters as the "Musakkarat" (intoxications) of Sami Sulh rather than "Mudhakkarat" (memoirs).

As an account of the 1958 crisis the book is a great disappointment. The 300 pages devoted to the years 1957 - 1958 are filled chiefly with reprints of Sulh's public statements of the time, press clippings, photographs, long quotations from Kamal Junblat and Fu'ad 'Ammun's books followed by half-hearted and pointless rebuttals, and a woefully scanty narrative of events which occasionally leads up to the critical point and then drops it, leaving the reader hanging in mid-air. This section of the book, covering the crucial period is a scrap album rather than a memoir. Nevertheless, his general position is amply reiterated (e.g. p. 477); the causes of his insurrection lay in the anger of opposition leaders over their 1957 electoral defeat, in the government's failure to break relations, with Britain and France after the Suez attack, to join the Syrian-Egyptian defense pact and generally to subordinate Lebanese policies to those of Cairo and Damascus, 'Adb al-Nasir's failure to incorporate Lebanon into the United Arab Republic, and the rebel leaders' greed for UAR money. The smuggling of arms from Syria began in 1955; the question of Sham'un's re-election was no more than a pretext for the rebellion; the real issue was that of UAR interference, since without it the government could easily have dealt with the rebels, who had no genuine support; all formulas of compromise between the government and the rebels were "nonsense", for authority must prevail and the guilty must be punished. The 1957 elections were a model of fairness, claims Sulh, as attested by alleged expressions of satisfaction by Dr. Yusuf Hitti and Mohammad Bayhum, the two neutral Ministers of State appointed the Cabinet in order to placate the opposition (p. 395) - conveniently ignoring the fact that in actuality Hitti and Bayhum resigned midway through the elections in protest against the government's unneutral conduct. And lastly, Sulh stoutly defends his government's espousal of the Eisenhower Doctrine in 1957 and its appeal for US military intervention in July 1958.

There are many questions on which one would have hoped to find some detailed discussion in Sulh's Memoirs, but which are unfortunately glossed over. There is very little of interest on the 1957 elections, on the debate over the Eisenhower Doctrine, on the passive role of the Lebanese Army during the insurrection, on the even more passive role of the American troops, on the negotiations carried on by Robert Murphy, or on the steps leading to the election of Shihab (which, incidentally, Sulh opposed, for reasons unexplained: see pp. 693-8).

But if there is little to learn about 1958 from these Memoirs, there is much to be learned about Sami Sulh and the mentality he brought with him to the crisis after 38 years in Lebanese public life. "Papa Sami," as he was commonly called, was for many years a man of great popularity in the Muslim quarters of Beirut where he is now reviled as a renegade. His family mansion in the quarter of Burj Abi Haydar was known as "bayt al-ummah" ("home of the nation") owing to his expansive hospitality, until it was razed by the rebels in 1958 (a deed which appears to have wounded Sulh more deeply than the revolution itself). It is clear that he relished this popularity, just as he relished being eight times Prime Minister. "In reality," says Sulh, "popularity is not a feeling of general awe, nor of great prestige. Popularity is composed of numerous anecdotes and recollections and warm associations which weave a net of friendships between the masses and politicians. I like to be popular; this is one -of my petty faults. I see no harm in this; on the contrary, it is a source of satisfaction to the politician to know that the people whom he meets on the street are people who love him." (pp. 72-3).

In the little world of Sami Sulh, homely popularity counted heavily in politics, and indeed, politics revolved around personal relationships. Following the notorious 1947 elections, when the Parliamentary credentials committee reported irregularities in the election of certain candidates, Sulh unabashedly defended them on the grounds that they were eminent personages who surely ought to be welcomed in Parliament (pp. 194-5). In another passage, he recounts with disarming simplicity how he became Prime Minister in 1952 because Salam al-Khuri, brother of the President of the Republic, had grown tired of 'Abdallah Yafi (p. 124). Even when he embarks upon a long critique of the Lebanese Constitution, which grants many powers to the President of the Republic for which the Prime minister must bear the responsibility, the discussion is linked to personal differences he held members of Sham'un's palace entourage (p.313-21).

Unfortunately for Sulh, during his later ministries, particularly from the time of Suez onward, Lebanese politics became increasingly drawn toward international issues whose psychological impact on the population was so great as to render his familiar little world of personality politics suddenly obsolete. It was one thing to be Prime Minister in the last year of Bisharah al-Khuri's discredited régime, and Sulh emerged unscathed. It was quite another thing to cope with the events of 1957-1958, and the reader senses that Sulh was only partially aware of his growing estrangement from his own community, i. e. the Muslims of Beirut, as he became more and more irrevocably identified with the policies of Camille Sham'un and Charles Malik. It is at least to his credit that he had the courage to stand firm in this situation once the insurrection began, unlike two of his Ministers who quickly resigned.

Sulh ends his Memoirs on a note not unlike that of Junblat, that is to say, in a spirit of disillusionment and a sense of betrayal at the hands of an uncooperative and unappreciative world. "What was my crime?" he asks the reader at repeated intervals. He ended his career, appropriately, in exile in Turkey, where he had begun it as a young law graduate. But his final disillusionment came shortly after the publication of his Memoirs, when he not only was badly beaten in a bid for re-election to Parliament, but suffered various indignities at the hands of the authorities during the course of the campaign.

There is little that need be said Fu'ad Ammmun's booklet on The Foreign Policy of Lebanon, except to note the fact that the Director General of the Lebanese Foreign Ministry (he returned to this post, which he had left in 1956, after Sham'un's departure) is capable of such superficiality, ignorance and demagogy. We learn in the first chapter that Amir Fakhr al-din II, Governor of Lebanon in the 17th Century, had laid the foundations of modern Lebanese diplomacy by following a policy of positive neutralism in the cold war between Spain and France and by securing "technical assistance" from Tuscany. We learn also that India is a Buddhist country (p. 72) and that U Nu of Burma is " an outstanding personality representing the Soviet bloc" (pp. 45-6). The author approvingly quotes Benjamin Franklin allegedly telling the Constitutional Convention in 1789, "There is a great danger threatening the United States, the Jewish danger... If the Constitution does not specify the exclusion of the Jews from the United States they will be ruling us in less than a century... I warn you ... if you do not eliminate the Jews once and for all, your children and grandchildren will curse you from their graves." The Truman record, adds 'Ammun, bears out Franklin's prophecy (pp. 80-1).

In addition to these points, 'Ammun offers a general castigation of Sham'un, but says nothing noteworthy that Junblat does not say much better.

After the heavy dose of propaganda, fantasy, blindness and a simple foolishness served by Messrs. Yusuf, Karami, Junblat, Sulh and 'Ammun, one can only welcome the antidotes of Ghassan Tuwayni and Michel Asmar, which serve at least to show that calm reflection and common sense were not altogether absent from Lebanon in 1958. Tuwayni, the brilliant young editor of the independent Beirut daily, al-Nahar, and a former member of Parliament, has published in booklet form a collection of his editorials appearing between March 9 and August 5, 1958. He was also a member of the so-called "third force" of prominent personalities which attempted to mediate a compromise solution between the two sides. But he did not hesitate to rebuke both sides sharply, nor to speak frankly on some of the most sensitive issues. On March 15 he remarked candidly that the Muslims in Lebanon generally look to 'Abd al-Nasir for leadership almost to the point of deification; many Christians who are upset by this want their own symbolic leader, thus creating a natural opportunity for a man in Sham'un's position, as the latter could not but realize. This brief statement, made two months before the outbreak of violence, summarizes in a nutshell what was perhaps the most fundamental psychological issue of the crisis.

Tuwayni's major criticisms of Sham'un relate to two questions: re-election and the internationalization of the crisis. While insisting that Sham'un should finish his legal September 23 rather than resign at on opposition demanded, he equally insisted that Sham'un's clear duty was to renounce publicly all thoughts of a second term, and that his failure to do so only lent moral support to the opposition. (See especially the editorials March 20 and May 23.) On the other hand, Tuwayni urged Sami Sulh to resign in order to enable a coalition Cabinet to take office, since it was clear that internal security had slipped beyond the government's control (May 28).

Tuwayni opposed the government's action in taking their complaint against interference from the UAR to the Arab League and United Nations, not on the grounds that there was no interference, but because appealing for outside aid would only increase the primary need, which was to restore the internal unity of the country. The real crisis, wrote Tuwayni on June 10, would come after the fighting ceased: "the problem deciding the future of a country which we have made a state, but which we have not known how to make into a nation."  He was likewise critical of appeals to the United States: "For what kind of independence is this which cannot subsist without foreign 'aid', not to say protection; and what self- government lasts for an hour whose régime depends on foreign troops to solve the crisis?" (July 1.) "It is a cause of regret that Foster Dulles has more faith in Lebanon's independence than do the Lebanese authorities" (July 3). This was of course before the US decision to land the Marines; and when this was done, Tuwayni reserved his criticism not for Washington's response, but for Sham'un's appeal: "To certain Christians who still tell themselves that the age of protectorates and Crusades is not over, we say quite frankly that the Sixth Fleet did not land its troops to protect them, but to protect its own vital interests; and that its vital interests have no religion, but that if we must give a religious label to those with whom its interests lie, we should say that it is the Muslims with whom the West will try to make friends" (July 16). Not long afterward, many an embittered Lebanese Christian felt that this was exactly what was happening.

On the other hand, Tuwayni repeatedly taunted the opposition leaders for allowing themselves to become prisoners of their own followers' extremism, for continuing the insurrection long after the re-election of Sham'un was out of the question, and for being more interested in their own advancement than in the welfare of the country. He declared that much as he wished to see radical reform in Lebanon, he was not with the revolution because it promised nothing worth the shedding of a drop of blood. "Shall we liberate the people with the tribes of Sabri Hamadah or the gangs of Sulayman Franjiyah?" (June 15).