After 12 years of war, the Lebanese people looked to their elections as hope for the foundation of national peace. Instead, their hopes have been dashed and national unity seems further away after the election than before.
On September 23, 1988, the mandate of Amin Gemayel expired, and the Lebanese parliament could not agree on a successor. A new crisis ensued, which threatens to split the country officially in two. If the crisis is not resolved, and if a new president is not elected, the de facto partition of the country would become a de jure partition, and the geographic lines of demarcation between the confessional communities would become boundaries between the communal cantons.
The selection of a president in Lebanon has never been a purely domestic affair; outside powers have always had a say in Lebanese presidential politics, thus affecting the foreign policy orientations of the small nation. Indeed, the independence of Lebanon came about in 1943 as a result of British-French rivalry. Lebanon's first president after independence, Bisharah al-Khuri, was favored by the British and the British-supported Arab governments who sought to diminish French interests in the Levant. France was seen as a protector of Christian influence in the Arab East, while Britain was promising to champion the cause of Arab nationalism as espoused by the conservative pro-British Arab governments at the time.
Lebanon's second president, Camille Chamoun, was a strong ally of the United States and was encouraged to take a strong stance against the Nasserist tide in the Arab world. In For Lust of Knowing: Memories of an Intelligence officer, former CIA official Archie Roosevelt writes that in the 1950s the United States, "confused nationalism and fundamentalism with Marxism, attributing them almost entirely to the machinations" of the Soviet Union. The confrontational and provocative policies of Chamoun alienated the Muslims and deepened the sectarian rift in society. The Muslims closely identified with Nasser and resented Chamoun's total association with the West.
The United States was unaware of the impact of Chamoun's policies on the delicate confessional fabric of the country. The result of Chamoun's policies, which were perceived to be in violation of the 1943 National Pact that set the arithmetic formula for the confessional distribution of political power in the country, was the eruption of the 1958 civil war. Again, the new president of Lebanon, Gen. Fu'ad Shihab, was chosen by outside powers, as his election was the outcome of an agreement between Egypt and the United States, the two major players in Lebanon at the time.
In the 1960s and 1970s, Lebanon continued to attract international and regional powers; it became an arena for foreign intrigues. Lebanon's relative freedom and cosmopolitanism, as well as the large Palestinian civilian and military presence, closely linked its internal problems to the larger Middle East conflict. As Lebanon was woven into the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian confrontation, Beirut was turned into a center for foreign intelligence services, as depicted in David Ignatius' Agents of Innocence. But although the Lebanese blame their problems on outsiders, and although all warring factions in Lebanon attribute the eruption of the civil war to international conspiracies, the underlying causes of Lebanese war stem from deep social and economic problems that are intrinsically Lebanese. To be sure,
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