Pity Lebanon. The charming Mediterranean nation, smaller than Connecticut, survived a fifteen-year civil war, from 1975 to 1990, that became a battlefield for the entire Middle East—sucking in arms, armies, and issues from around the world. It has endured bombings, hostage-takings, and mass killings by dozens of militias, including the powerful P.L.O. and Hezbollah, both of which used Lebanese soil in order to fight Israel. It has navigated the labyrinthine politics of eighteen religious sects, each officially recognized and allocated proportionate shares of government jobs. It picked up the pieces after the assassinations of Presidents and Prime Ministers, Cabinet members, and Members of Parliament and occupations by Syrian and Israeli troops. It’s been rocked by a series of national protests—from the Cedar Revolution, in 2005, that ousted one government, to the October, 2019, uprising that forced out another Prime Minister. For decades, Lebanon has defied the odds. During an interview on his old Comedy Central show, Stephen Colbert asked me which of the dozen wars that I’ve covered was my favorite. No question: Lebanon and its strife, for my wonderment of that country’s creative, resilient people and its physical beauty as well as the epic political stakes for the country, the region, and the world.
No longer. Lebanon is now on the verge of collapse. It was already a failing state before twin explosions ripped through Beirut’s scenic port, shortly after rush hour began, at 6 P.M. on Tuesday. The second blast set off a billowing mushroom cloud, reminiscent of a nuclear bomb, and registered seismic waves equivalent to a 3.3-magnitude earthquake. The explosion was heard as far away as Cyprus, an island more than a hundred and twenty miles to the northwest. The Lebanese government appealed to every ambulance in the country to head for Beirut. As of Wednesday afternoon, more than a hundred and thirty-five had died, more than five thousand were wounded, and untold numbers were still missing. Hospitals, already overwhelmed with COVID-19 patients, treated many of the injured on sidewalks and roads, or turned them away. “There is an acute shortage of everything,” the country’s health minister, Hamad Hasan, told reporters.
Lebanon now faces existential challenges. The blasts destroyed office buildings and apartment blocks across the capital as well as its largest port, which is critical to the trade and imports on which Lebanon is dependent. One governor estimated that more than a quarter million were left homeless, compounding the challenges of absorbing hundreds of thousands of Syrian war refugees in a country of fewer than seven million. A row of towering wheat silos, which play a central role in the country’s importing and storing of food, were among the facilities destroyed at the port. “No words can describe the horror that has hit Beirut last night, turning it into a disaster-stricken city,” President Michel Aoun said at an emergency Cabinet meeting on Wednesday, as smoke still rose from the port. “The Apocalypse,” a headline in the Lebanese daily L’Orient-Le Jour read.
The blasts could not have come at a worse time for the country. They may mark the end of modern Lebanon as we know it. The physical signs are everywhere: once famed for its robust night life and rich cultural outlets, Beirut recently has had no electricity for up to twenty hours a day. Rescue efforts were hampered by the power outages. Rancid garbage lines streets and fills open spaces, owing to squabbling among political factions over which of their allies should get the contract to collect it. Potable water is often in short supply.
Last month, Michelle Bachelet, the former Chilean President and the current U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, warned that Lebanon is “fast spiralling out of control, with many already destitute and facing starvation.” Once the banking center and economic pulse for the Middle East, Lebanon is now facing an economic crisis without precedent in its history, the International Crisis Group reported in June. The price of food and basic commodities has risen by at least fifty per cent every month since May. One in three Lebanese is unemployed, due to a long-standing economic crisis exacerbated by the coronavirus pandemic, the U.N. said. As of April, Bachelet reported, a staggering seventy-five per cent of the population needed various forms of aid. The national currency has lost eighty per cent of its value since the October uprising, which was triggered by a new government tax on WhatsApp usage but quickly escalated into demands for a political overhaul of the power structure dominated by warlords turned politicians since the end of the civil war, three decades ago.
The Levantine state is in even worse shape politically than it is physically. “The devastation is far beyond anything I have seen. And I have lived through multiple wars in this country,” Maha Yahya, the head of the Beirut office at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told me on Wednesday, in an e-mail. But, she added, “Lebanon has been collapsing in an exponential manner prior to this explosion.” In a report published two weeks ago, Yahya warned that four of the five key pillars that have sustained Lebanon since it gained independence from France, in 1943, are now crumbling. The power-sharing agreement among sects is deeply dysfunctional. Lebanon’s middle class is disappearing. The country can no longer pretend to be a merchant republic, its long-standing role in the Middle East. Personal freedoms—including freedom of speech, which provided for rich intellectual debate unknown in other parts of the region—are disappearing, as repression and intimidation increase. Even the military, the one national institution that works (sort of), has been weakened by the economic crisis. “Lebanese politicians are pushing their country over the precipice,” Yahya wrote. “Eight months into a complex crisis that is threatening Lebanon’s foundations, they have yet to take steps to stem the collapse.”
Since the civil war ended, in 1990, Lebanon has been built largely on a political Ponzi scheme, Paul Salem, the president of the Middle East Institute and the son of a former Lebanese foreign minister, told me. The state is now “grievously wounded,” but not yet dead. It faces two stark alternatives, he said: civil-society protest movements that have struggled for fifteen years to provoke change can push even harder for reforms and new leadership, or the “criminal oligarchy” can stitch its corrupt deals and continue to rule—and ruin—Lebanon. “There’s been a new variable since the October protests, when a wide cross-section stood up and rejected the corruption and old sectarian way of doing everything,” he said. “If nothing is done, then we are headed to becoming a failed state.”
At his briefing on the pandemic, on Tuesday, President Trump described the blast as a “terrible attack.” It was “a bomb of some kind,” he said. In Lebanon, which is always rich with conspiracy theories, speculation ranged from sabotage by Israel to an explosion at an arms depot maintained by Hezbollah at the port. But President Aoun said that the blast was sparked in a warehouse that stored almost three thousand tons of ammonium nitrate confiscated from a Russian-owned cargo ship that had docked in Beirut in 2013 with unspecified problems. The ship was subsequently abandoned by the owner; and the cargo—one of those dual-use commodities that can be used both for good (as fertilizer, to enrich agriculture) and evil (as explosives, to make bombs)—was deemed too risky to leave on the ship. So it was offloaded onto the Beirut dock, where it has apparently been sitting in a warehouse for seven years. The fact that the government failed to deal with so much explosive material in the nation’s most strategic port was a microcosm of its broader failures. Given the description of the two explosions, including the orange cloud that was set off by the first, arms experts said that the official story sounded correct. “Storing 2,750 tons of ammonium nitrate in a hot warehouse in the middle of a port city is not an ‘attack’—it is tragic incompetence,” Daryl Kimball, the executive director of the Arms Control Association, told me. “As if the Lebanese people needed more evidence of the abysmally low performance of their successive governments,” Jeffrey Feltman, a former U.S. Ambassador to Lebanon and former U.N. Undersecretary-General for political affairs, told me.
The political aftershock from the twin blasts—and the criminal negligence that they exposed—will be much bigger than the explosions themselves, Rami Khouri, the director of global engagement at the American University of Beirut and a nonresident fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School, told me. “There will be enormous public pressure to finally force the political élite to get out of their lives. This will ultimately be seen as the decisive blow that brings down the system.” During the nine months since the October uprising, he said, Lebanon has felt new rumblings among young activists, the media, professional associations, and civil society “getting ready to replace the crappy old system.” The sectarian divide of power—and its fifty-fifty split between Christians and Muslims of all government and civil-service jobs—will remain, he said; it was this division of power that ended the civil war. The primary focus will instead be ejecting the corrupt political élite, who have created a spoils system that excludes all but their own. “This is a turning point,” Khouri said. “It’s not the end of Lebanon. It’s the beginning of a different Lebanon.”
I adore this little country. I return as often as I can. Despite their exhaustion, the Lebanese will almost certainly rise up against the political mafia yet again, possibly in even greater numbers, to demand accountability—and more. Some heads will roll. Some officials will certainly have to resign. But more meaningful and enduring change? I can only wish the Lebanese well—and hope they once again defy the odds.
