A Tangled, Mangled Web

"This is still a conflict limited to tribes and families but the more kidnappings there are, the more the security situation will degrade.

"We could be heading toward chaos and an uncontrollable security situation."  Talal Atrissi, Beirut analyst

It is not all that long ago in recent enough memory that Lebanon itself exploded into a cataclysmic celebration of violent hatred, revenge and misery.  Once a country where its diverse population of tribal clans, religious sects and political ideologies managed to avoid confrontation, living in what can be expressed as harmony keeping in mind that this is part of the Middle East, it was completely transformed by a raging, ravishing civil war.


Intermediaries from the West thought they could help iron out differences between sworn enemies and for their troubles, they were abducted, taken prisoner, and lived for lengthy periods of time in fear and pain, sequestered, hearing the clash of arms all around them, bombs falling and people dying.  Some survived, some did not. Some wrote books, as did the envoy of the Archbishop of Canterbury.


One of the most famously brilliant and audacious female reporters who earned the distinction of being the only woman ever to come face to face with Ayatollah Khomeini for a rare interview, wrote a novel about the aftermath of the civil war: Oriana Fallaci's Inshallah, brought a human face with all its hubris and humour to the reading public.


There is nothing amusing and much that is inhuman about the 'honour' motivating tribal warfare, exemplified in the current explosions taking place in the Middle East, misnamed the Arab Spring, a conflict of wishful thinking, turned into mass slaughter.  The fears of the Western world that the conflict now raging in Syria would spill over into neighbouring countries is being borne out.


Jordan, Turkey and Lebanon have taken in tens of thousands of fleeing Syrian refugees.  The Syrian military has created cross-border lightning-conflicts, shooting down an Turkish war plane, firing across the border into both Jordan and Lebanon after desperately escaping Syrian refugees.  Both Iran and Hezbollah in Lebanon have placed their military and militias as the service of President al-Bashar.


The Syrian Alawite militias, the shabiha, have distinguished themselves by the ferocity of the atrocities they have visited on the civilian populations of Sunni Muslim Syrians.  And abductions by the Free Syrian Army of Shia Muslims whom they believe to be doing the work of skilled marksmen, shooting rebels and civilians alike have been fair game for summary executions.


The Free Syrian Army opposition have been capturing Lebanese whom they claim to be Hezbollah members, and the Lebanese clans whose members have been captured and are threatened with death have returned the compliment, capturing rebel Sunni militia members, threatening their lives in exchange for those of their own clan members.


The total dysfunction of the Middle East with its Byzantine and convoluted hatreds has been unleashed in an orgy of defined and unrefined lunacy as tribes and their sectarian religious affiliations mark the separation between tolerance and avenging martyrdom.  "The more kidnappings ... the more security will degrade..."  Security?


Can the indelible hatred between peoples who share a land be more fundamentally pathological than what has been witnessed of late in Syria and beyond its borders, reflecting the divisions and simmering chaotic hatreds that exist in Lebanon? 

Ah, yes, there is an enemy a common one that is held in detestation by all the tribes, spoken of by one of the abducted Syrians who accused Israel of creating unrest in Syria, saying "I have nothing to do with all of this."