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NEWS & COLUMNS
In a
phone conversation about a year ago, I misheard something bizarre. A Midtown
financier named Ziad Abdelnour was talking to me about Lebanon, the country
of his birth and the center of his political interests. It was over six months
before the first Abrams tank crossed the first piece of concertina wire marking
the Iraq-Kuwait border, but there was little doubt among Washington’s political
class that the decision to go to war was already made.
Yet Abdelnour was talking about starting a whole different war. From his
Park Ave. offices, he enthused about a thousand Lebanese guerillas waiting for
him to give the go-ahead on an insurrection to oust both the Syrians, who have
wielded the levers of Lebanese politics for a generation, and Hezbollah, the
Shiite terrorist group nestled in the south, from the tiny swath of land on
the eastern coast of the Mediterranean. All we need, Abdelnour said, was American
air support.
But as I say, I misheard him. Abdelnour never said he had a thousand men under arms. "Much more than a thousand. Thousands," he corrects me in an interview late last month. Abdelnour explains that he’s in contact with his people in the Levant "all the time." He ticks off the names of groups with names like the Free Patriotic Movement and The Lebanese Forces, composed of men who loathe the Syrian occupation and want nothing more than to reestablish the Western-oriented, multi-confessional Arab democracy that predated the blood-soaked civil war, which in turn gave way to Syrian domination and the harboring of sundry terrorist groups.
By the time Abdelnour finishes explaining the vigor of his countrymen to me, he ups the estimate of his force strength. "We’re talking tens of thousands," he says.
As wars go, Abdelnour’s is antiseptic. His men are already in position to execute a rout: "It’s not going to take three weeks, like in Iraq. It’ll take 48 hours." And once Hezbollah sees the Syrian military and intelligence services flooding westward across the border, the keepers of the Khomeinist flame can start numbering their days.
"Wip[ing] out" what Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage once described as the "A-Team of terrorism" should only take another 48 hours, he continues, suggesting it’s a job "for either the Israelis or the Americans." By Thursday, Lebanon should be turned into a fruitful field, as predicted in Isaiah 29:17, which, incidentally, adorns the crest of Abdelnour’s lobby group, the U.S. Committee for a Free Lebanon. He even sweetens the deal: A retreat from Lebanon, a major economic asset to the sclerotic Syrian treasury, would humiliate Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, in a region where humiliation is a destabilizing force. So, as he sees it, about a week after Abdelnour gives the operation his thumbs-up, a new dynamic and democratic era will begin in Lebanon; an endgame for both Hezbollah and its Syrian patron will unfold; and the U.S. will have its fortunes in the war on terror significantly boosted. "You’ll be surprised how easy it is," he tells me, with characteristic understatement.
After my first conversation with Abdelnour, I called a prominent Lebanese-American businessman to get his read on a U.S.-supported insurrection in Lebanon. He wasn’t exactly bullish on Abdelnour’s proposal. "Stop and think what he’s suggesting here. I mean, I just think, what Lebanese [would participate]? I wouldn’t give any dignity to the suggestion." Then he threw an elbow. "It’s easy for these guys to call the shots when they’re 8000 miles away, sitting comfortably in New York City. You think Ziad Abdelnour would actually go over there?"
For the record, Abdelnour doesn’t hesitate to say he would.
If Abdelnour’s blueprint for a terror-and-tyrant-free Levant sounds fantastical, it should also sound familiar. It’s the indigenous-forces-plus-air-power model advocated for years and years by Ahmad Chalabi, the Iraqi National Congress leader whose perseverance and skilled cultivation of Washington neoconservatives resulted in an open-ended occupation of Iraq and a place for himself on the Iraqi Governing Council. In the 1990s, when a full-scale invasion was firmly outside the limits of acceptable policy discourse, Chalabi carped endlessly about the INC’s ability to do the dirty work of overthrowing Saddam Hussein. He told a Senate hearing in 1998, "Give the Iraqi National Congress a base protected from Saddam’s tanks, give us the temporary support we need to feed and house and care for the liberated population, and we will give you a free Iraq."
The cost to the U.S., Chalabi implied, was minimal—all Washington needed to do was put money in the right bank accounts and drop bombs from safe distances. Eventually, with Chalabi’s allies holding senior positions in the Bush Pentagon, the level of requisite American commitment shaded up to March’s 150,000-troop-strong invasion, but hawks retained the idea of a bloodless war, famously expressed by ex-Reaganite Ken Adelman’s February 2002 "cakewalk" op-ed in The Washington Post.
Ziad Abdelnour just might be in 2003 where Ahmad Chalabi was in 1998.
There’s at least one difference, as Abdelnour sees it. Chalabi, argued many in the CIA and State Department before the war, had no constituency inside Iraq to match the one he cultivated among Washington neoconservatives through years of lobbying out of the INC’s offices on a remote southeast stretch of Pennsylvania Ave. Now, thanks to the U.S., Chalabi sits on the Iraqi Governing Council—and, for the remainder of the month, holds its presidency—but his organization is marginal at best, and suffered a serious credibility setback in April when the US Central Command arrested a Chalabi ally, Mohammed Moshen al-Zubaidi, who had proclaimed himself mayor of Baghdad.
When I asked Abdelnour how he compares to Chalabi, he conceded the point. "Well, you know, I’m fully aware you can’t liberate a country from outside. You have to have a power base at home," he says. "But we Lebanese are even luckier than Ahmad Chalabi. He did lot of work here but he didn’t have the support that we have at home."
A Christian, Abdelnour boasts a considerable pedigree, though not one without controversy in Lebanon’s famously fractious ethnic politics. His father Khalil and his uncle Salem held seats in the Lebanese parliament for a total of 35 years. Through his wife, he is related to the Gemayel family, which founded the right-wing Phalange Party and struck an alliance with Israel during the country’s civil war. The resultant Israeli invasion placed Lebanon’s presidency in the hands of Bashir Gemayel, who was assassinated within two weeks of his 1982 election as a puppet of Jerusalem. (That year, the Phalangist guerrillas, with tacit Israeli consent, massacred the inhabitants of two Palestinian refugee camps, Sabra and Shatila, in one of the most infamous acts of violence in the Lebanese civil war and the Arab-Israeli conflict generally.) The presidency passed into the hands of Bashir’s brother Amin, who is the first cousin of Abdelnour’s wife. Making family barbeques undoubtedly interesting, another cousin is married to the current president of the Phlangist Party, Karim Pakradouni. Last year, one of Pakradouni’s acts as party leader was to sue Amin Gemayel for libel after Gemayel called Pakradouni a prostitute. "This is a slutty handover [of power carried out] by sluts to sluts," Gemayel said. Some might argue that Gemayel had Pakradouni cold, and the only thing left to haggle over was the price.
Michael Young, opinion editor of Beirut’s Daily Star newspaper, recently excoriated Pakradouni as "living proof of Lebanon’s good-natured promotion of the ideologically amoral" whose "reputation for flightiness" makes him "incapable of generating loyalty." So if Abdelnour is going to rely on family ties as the basis for an anti-Syrian insurrection, it’s a dicey proposition even among Lebanese Christians, to say nothing of how the Druze and Shia will take to it.
But if he can pull it off, Abdelnour can boast of being one of the rare architects of insurgency who spent time as a high-rolling venture capitalist. (Depending on how you score it, Chalabi might be another—he was a financier in Jordan, though not one who escaped indictment for fraud.) If Abdelnour didn’t exist, Michael Lewis would have dreamed him up for a discarded chapter of Liar’s Poker, wherein the 41st floor of Salomon Brothers decides that a small Levantine country with breathtaking coastline is ripe for acquisition. Abdelnour spent five years working for Drexel Burnham at the knee of the legendary junk-bond giant Michael Milken. ("He’s awesome" is all Abdelnour will say about Milken.) Since then, he’s helped bankroll over 130 eclectic ventures, from numerous Silicon Valley projects to a futile attempt in 2000 to keep the indie film company Shooting Gallery afloat. Chalabi certainly can’t boast of that.
These days, he splits his time between the Upper East Side and Beverly Hills; diplomatically bicoastal, he sheds his typical all-purpose enthusiasm and refuses to comment on which he likes better. Speaking to his New York bona fides, he’s pissed at Mayor Mike—"it’s too much, the bars, those things, the restrictions"—and mourns the passing of the age of Giuliani, "though he did put Drexel out of business."
While Abdelnour was wheeling and dealing, however, Syria was consolidating its hold over Lebanon—most importantly through the signing of the 1989 Taif Accord, brokered by Damascus’s stooges in Beirut to transform the war-ravaged country into a sphere of Syrian influence. Abdelnour says it would have been pointless to stay in Lebanon to resist the Syrian yoke. "I think I’ve [made] a bigger difference doing lobbying here in the U.S." An early board member of the American Task Force for Lebanon, he quit the lobby in 1994, when "they started changing their agenda and playing with the Syrians. (ATFL Executive Director George Cody refused to respond to the allegation.)
Soon afterward, he joined controversial scholar Daniel Pipes’s neoconservative Middle East Forum. Not only did he help subsidize its operations, he contributed substantively to its research, coauthoring with Pipes a 2000 study of the Syrian occupation of Lebanon urging Washington to ratchet up pressure on Damascus—militarily, if necessary. Abdelnour had started a new, harder-line lobby—the U.S. Committee for a Free Lebanon—three years before, but the Middle East Forum study put him on the neocon map. The study had heavy-hitter signatories who went on to positions in the Bush administration, including former Defense Policy Board chairman Richard Perle, Under Secretary of Defense Douglas Feith, National Security Council staffer Elliott Abrams, and Under Secretary of State Paula Dobriansky. (Dobriansky and Feith declined to comment on the study.) When in April Donald Rumsfeld angrily warned Syria not to interfere in the U.S. occupation of Iraq, it seemed like Abdelnour was finally on the verge of going from Michael Milken associate to herald of the next stage of the war on terrorism.
Except he wasn’t. The U.S. found it had bit off more than it intended to chew in Iraq. Chalabi’s sweet nothings about a swooning Iraqi population embracing the U.S. as it quickly allowed the Iraqi National Congress to form the backbone of a democratic Iraq have given way to 150,000 troops and civilian administrators undermanned, underfunded and under siege. As George W. Bush asks Congress for $87 billion and Colin Powell goes hat in hand to Turtle Bay, the appetite for fomenting an insurrection in Lebanon and taking out Bashar al-Assad looks practically nil.
But Abdelnour is still expecting a bite. "Yes, right now the top priority is Iraq. But Syria and Iraq are very connected," he says. As evidence that Bush understands the connection, Abdelnour points to a piece of pending legislation known as the Syria Accountability Act. The act would slap sanctions on Syria until it vacated Lebanon and divested itself of terrorism. It now claims wide majorities in the House and Senate. Yet last year, the administration—not wanting its foreign policy made on Capitol Hill—successfully lobbied against the bill; now, its backers are holding off on bringing it to a vote until Bush signals that he wants it done.
Says New York Democrat Eliot Engel, an architect of the bill, "The State Department hasn’t officially weighed in either way. But a good sign is that Secretary of State Powell told Syrian President Bashar al-Assad that if Damascus continues to support terror, occupy Lebanon, and produce WMD, the Syria Accountability Act would likely become law. The majority of Congress has cosponsored the Act and experience leads me to believe the President would sign it if it passes." Even if Bush signs off, one Capitol Hill source thinks Abdelnour would be a lunatic to consider it a personal victory, saying he’s done practically "zero" lobbying for the bill.
Whatever the fate of the Syria Accountability Act, Abdelnour is continuing to make his case and make his connections. Last week, he was at the Grand Hyatt on the East Side for a Republican leadership meeting, alongside Ann Coulter. At the end of the month, he’ll appear on a panel sponsored by the neocon Foundation for the Defense of Democracies about the prospects for change in Syria. While Abdelnour described the panel to me as about "regime change in Syria," its sponsors quickly backed off that characterization. But persistence pays off. Just ask Ahmad Chalabi.
