Liberation came at a high price. The Kuwaitis expressed profound joy at the restoration of their independence, but their country had been utterly destroyed by the Iraqi invasion and the war. Hundreds of oil wells burned out of control, infrastructure had been shattered, and much of the country had to be rebuilt from scratch. The population of Kuwait was deeply traumatized by occupation and war, with thousands killed, displaced, or missing. The wider Arab world also came out of the conflict divided and traumatized. Arab citizens strongly opposed their governments’ decision to side with the coalition and fight against a fellow Arab state. Those governments that joined the coalition ostracized those who did not. Jordan, Yemen, and the PLO were condemned for having been too supportive of Saddam Hussein?s regime. All three were heavily reliant on financial support from the Gulf, and they suffered economically for the stance they had taken. Many Arab analysts expressed deep mistrust for the United States and concerns for American intentions in the new unipolar world. America?s single-minded pursuit of a military solution, and perceived obstruction of efforts to secure a diplomatic resolution to the Gulf crisis, led many to believe that the United States used the war to establish its military presence in the Gulf and to dominate the region?s oil resources. The fact that thousands of American troops remained in Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf states years after the liberation of Kuwait only deepened these concerns. Withdrawal from Kuwait brought no respite to Iraq. The Bush administration, believing it had destroyed Saddam Hussein’s prestige along with his military, encouraged the people of Iraq to rise up and overthrow their dictator in early February, 1991. American radio stations broadcast messages into Iraq promising U.S. support for popular uprisings. Their message fell on receptive ears in both the Kurdish districts of northern Iraq and the Shiite regions of the south that had suffered most from Saddam Hussein’s rule. Uprisings broke out in both regions in early March 1991. It was not the outcome the United States had hoped to achieve with its propaganda. The Americans wanted to see a military coup in Baghdad overthrow Saddam Hussein. The Kurdish and Shiite uprisings both threatened American interests. Turkey, which was an ally to the United States under the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), had been combating a bitter separatist insurgency led by the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (known by the Kurdish acronym, the PKK) since 1984 and opposed any measure that might give rise to an Iraqi Kurdish state on Turkey’s eastern frontier. The Americans for their part feared that a successful Shiite revolt would only strengthen the regional influence of the Islamic Republic of Iran. The Americans offered no support to either the Shiites or Kurds, despite having encouraged the Iraqis to rise up. Instead, the Bush administration turned a blind eye while Saddam Hussein reassembled the remnants of his forces to suppress the rebellions with ruthless brutality. Tens of thousands of Iraqi Shiites are believed to have been killed in the suppression of their revolt, and hundreds of thousands of Kurds fled Iraqi retaliation to take refuge in Turkey and Iran. Faced with a massive humanitarian catastrophe of its own making, the United States responded by imposing a no-fly zone over northern Iraq. U.S. and British aircraft patrolled the region north of the 36th Parallel to protect the Kurds from Saddam Hussein’s forces. Ironically, the no-fly zone created precisely the sort of autonomous Kurdish enclave that Turkey had most opposed. Elections to a regional assembly independent of Saddam Hussein?s state were held in May 1992, setting in motion the creation of what would become the Kurdish Regional Government in Iraq. Having failed to unseat Hussein by military means or domestic uprising, the Bush administration returned to the United Nations to secure a resolution stripping Iraq of its weapons of mass destruction, establishing Iraq’s responsibility to pay wartime reparations, and reinforcing economic sanctions imposed by earlier resolutions. Saddam Hussein recognized that these measures were designed to provoke his overthrow, and he responded with defiance. He commissioned a mosaic portrait of George H. W. Bush in the entrance of the Al-Rashid Hotel in Baghdad so that all its customers would tread on the face of his adversary. In November 1992, Hussein celebrated Bush’s defeat in the presidential elections. Bush had fallen; Saddam was still in power. The Americans could claim an outright military victory in the Gulf War, but only a partial political victory. The survival of Saddam Hussein meant Iraq remained a source of instability in a region of heightened volatility. And, much against the wishes of the Bush administration, Saddam set the agenda for regional politics after the Desert Storm Gulf War. By drawing parallels between Iraq’s position in Kuwait to the Syrian occupation of Lebanon, and the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory, the Iraqi leader forced the international community to address some of the outstanding conflicts in the Middle East.

By the end of the 1980s, the prospects for peace in Lebanon had never seemed more remote. Ninety percent of the country was under foreign occupation, with Israel in control of the so-called South Lebanon Security Zone, and Syrian troops everywhere else. Foreign funds flooded the country, arming a host of rival militias whose power struggles laid waste to towns and cities in all parts of Lebanon. A whole generation had grown up in the shadow of war, denied an education or the prospect of a earning an honest living. The once-prosperous model democracy of the Middle East had disintegrated into a failed state over which Syria exercised a tenuous control. The breakdown of the Lebanese state under the duress of communal fighting had put into question the very bases of Lebanon’s sectarian system of politics as set out in the 1943 National Pact. Many veteran politicians held Lebanon’s volatile mix of religion and politics responsible for the civil war and were determined to impose a root and branch reform as part of any peace settlement. Rashid Karami, a Sunni Muslim who served ten times as prime minister, had long called for a major reform of the Lebanese government to establish political equality between Muslims and Christians. Karami, who again held the premiership between 1984 and 1987, believed that all Lebanese citizens, regardless of their faith, should have an equal right to run for any office. Other reformist members of the cabinet shared Karami?s views. Nabih Berri, head of the Shiite Amal Party and minister of justice, dismissed the National Pact as ?a sterile system incapable of revision or improvement? and called for a new political system.²⁸ Amin Gemayel, whose six-year term as president represented the nadir of Lebanese politics (1982–1988), became the focus of the reformers’ attacks. The Druze transport minister, Walid Jumblatt, suggested Gemayel should be driven from office at gunpoint. Many ministers refused to attend the cabinet sessions that he chaired. Karami joined the boycott, and the cabinet ceased to meet, bringing the government to a complete standstill. Karami escalated the confrontation with Gemayel in May 1987, when the premier tendered his resignation. Many observers believed Karami had resigned to make a bid for the presidency in the upcoming1988 elections. The Sunni politician had tried once before, in 1970, and had been barred from running for a post that was reserved for Maronite Christians. Karami was a respected public figure with powerful supporters in the reformist camp. Perhaps, given the breakdown in Lebanese politics, he might have stood a better chance in 1988 than he had in 1970. However, he never got the chance to declare his candidacy. Four weeks after resigning as prime minister, Rashid Karami was assassinated by a bomb planted in his helicopter. Though Karami’s assassins were never found, the message behind his killing was widely understood: the National Pact was not open for negotiation. The isolated President Gemayel could not find a credible Sunni politician who was willing to serve as prime minister following Karami’s assassination. He designated the Sunni minister of education in Karami’s defunct cabinet, Selim al-Hoss, as acting premier. From June 1987 until the end of Gemayel’s term on September 22, 1988, Lebanon went without a functioning government. The challenge facing Lebanon in 1988 was to agree on a new president when the warring political elites could not agree on anything. Only one candidate stood for the presidency in 1988: former president Suleiman Franjieh. The public had no confidence in the seventy-eight-year-old warlord who had proved ineffectual in preventing civil war in his previous term of office (1970–1976). No one believed he would be any more effective at achieving national reconciliation twelve years later. The lack of presidential candidates proved a moot point, for by election day there were not even enough electors present to select a new president. In Lebanon, the president is elected by the parliament, and as no parliamentary elections had been held since the outbreak of civil war, the aging survivors of the 1972 parliament were summoned on August 18 to fulfill their constitutional duty for the third time. Many of the seventy-six surviving deputies had fled their war-torn country for a safer life abroad, and on election day only thirty-eight managed to take their seats. The parliament inquorate, Lebanon went without a president for the first time in the country?s history. According to the Lebanese constitution, in the absence of an elected president, the prime minister and his cabinet are empowered to exercise executive authority until a new president is installed. As President Gemayel’s term came to an end, this constitutional provision posed grave dangers to the Maronite guardians of the political status quo. As Lebanon had never gone without a president, no Sunni had ever exercised executive authority. Conservative Maronites feared that if al-Hoss were to assume such power, inevitably he would seek to reform the political system and dispense with the National Pact in the interest of (Muslim) majority rule. And that would mean the end of Lebanon as a Christian state in the Middle East. As the end of Gemayel’s term approached, at midnight on September 22, the Maronite commander in chief of Lebanon’s army, General Michel Aoun, took matters in his own hands. A native of the mixed Christian-Shiite village of Haret Hreik in Beirut’s southern suburbs, the fifty-three-year-old general demanded that Gemayel dismiss the caretaker al-Hoss government before it achieved executive powers by default. “Mr. President,” General Aoun warned him, “it is your constitutional right either to form a new government or not. Should you choose to do the latter [i.e., not form a government], we will consider you a traitor from midnight.”²⁹ In trying to prevent one crisis Aoun’s coup was creating another. As a Maronite Christian, he was ineligible for the premiership, which under the terms of the National Pact was reserved for Sunni Muslims. The man who claimed to be upholding the National Pact was actually undermining the foundations of Lebanon’s sectarian system. Yet at the eleventh hour—at a quarter to midnight, to be precise—Amin Gemayel succumbed to Aoun’s pressures and signed his last two executive orders. The first dismissed the caretaker cabinet of Selim al-Hoss, and the second appointed General Michel Aoun as head of an interim government. Al-Hoss and his supporters rejected Gemayel’s last-minute decrees and claimed the right to rule Lebanon. Overnight, Lebanon went from being a country with no government to a country with two governments, with mutually incompatible agendas: al-Hoss sought to replace Lebanon’s confessional system with an open democracy that would favor the country’s Muslim majority, under Syrian trusteeship; Aoun hoped to reestablish the Lebanese state on the basis of the National Pact, preserving its Christian dominance, with total independence from Syria. The rival governments split Lebanon into Christian and Muslim statelets. Few Christians were willing to serve in the al-Hoss cabinet, and no Muslims would participate in the Aoun government. Al-Hoss ruled over the Sunni and Shiite heartlands, and Aoun over the Christian districts of Lebanon. There was an element of farce in the rivalry, as both leaders appointed their own heads of the military, security apparatus, and civil service. Only the Lebanese Central Bank withstood the pressures of duplication, though it found itself financing the expenditures of both governments. The real danger came from outside patrons. Al-Hoss’s cabinet was openly supportive of Syria’s role in Lebanon and enjoyed the full backing of Damascus. Aoun condemned the Syrian presence in Lebanon as a threat to the sovereignty and independence of the country, and he gained Iraq’s full support. Baghdad was intent on settling scores with Damascus for having broken Arab ranks to side with Iran in the 1980–1988 Iran-Iraq War. Lebanon’s many feuds provided the Iraqi government with ample opportunity to punish Syria. With massive stores of weapons and ammunition, the Iraqi government was able to provide military assistance to Aoun in his opposition to Syria’s presence in Lebanon, especially after the Iran-Iraq War came to an end in August 1988. So emboldened, Aoun declared a war of liberation against Syria on March 14, 1989. Syria’s army responded by imposing a total blockade over the Christian regions under Aoun’s rule. The two sides began to exchange lethal volleys of heavy artillery, causing massive destruction to Muslim and Christian districts of Lebanon and displacing tens of thousands of civilians in what proved the heaviest bombardment since the 1982 Israeli siege of Beirut. Two months of horrific fighting and heavy civilian casualties galvanized the Arab states into action. In May 1989, an Arab summit was convened in Casablanca, Morocco, to address the new crisis in Lebanon. The conference gave a mandate to three Arab heads of state, King Fahd of Saudi Arabia, King Hassan II of Morocco, and President Chadli Benjedid of Algeria, to negotiate an end to the violence and set in process the restoration of stable government in Lebanon. The three rulers, dubbed “the troika,” ordered Syria to respect a cease-fire and demanded that Iraq stop arms shipments to Aoun and the Lebanese Forces militia. The troika’s efforts met with little success at first. The Syrians ignored the troika’s demands and stepped up their bombardment of the Christian enclave, and Iraq continued to supply its allies through ports under the control of Syria’s Maronite opponents. After six months of fighting, the troika finally persuaded all sides to observe a cease-fire in September 1989. The Arab leaders invited Lebanon’s parliamentarians to a meeting in the Saudi city of Taif to initiate a process of national reconciliation on neutral ground. The Lebanese deputies, all survivors of the election of 1972, ventured from their places of exile in France, Switzerland, and Iraq, or from their safe houses in Lebanon, to assemble in Taif to decide the future of their country. Sixty-two deputies attended the meeting—half of them Christians, the rest Muslims—providing the necessary quorum to make decisions on behalf of the Lebanese state. The Saudi foreign minister, Prince Saud al-Faisal, convened the opening meeting on October 1, 1989, warning that ?failure was forbidden.? Success took longer than expected. What had been planned as a three-day conference turned into a twenty-three-day marathon that produced nothing less than the blueprint for Lebanon’s Second Republic. The terms of Lebanon’s political reconstruction, enshrined in the Taif Accord, preserved many of the elements of the confessional system set out in the National Pact but modified the structure to reflect the demographic realities of modern Lebanon. Thus, seats in parliament were still distributed among the different religious communities, but the distribution had been changed from a 6:5 ratio that favored the Christian communities to an equal division of seats between Muslims and Christians. The number of seats in parliament was increased from 99 to 108 so that the expansion of Muslim representatives could be achieved without any decrease in Christian seats. The reformers failed in their primary objective of opening political office to all citizens without distinction by religion. It soon became apparent that such an assault on the confessional order would not gain consensus. The compromise solution was to preserve the distribution of offices as set out in the National Pact but to redistribute the powers of those offices. The president would remain a Maronite Christian, but the office was reduced to the more ceremonial role of “head of state and symbol of unity.” The prime minister and the cabinet, known as the Council of Ministers, were the main beneficiaries of the redistribution of power. Executive authority would now lie with the Sunni premier, who would chair the cabinet meetings and was charged with implementation of policy. Moreover, although the president still named the prime minister, only the parliament had the power to dismiss the premier. The speaker of the parliament, the highest post allowed for a Shiite Muslim, was also given important new powers by the Taif reforms, including a “kingmaker” role in advising the president on the appointment of the prime minister. With these changes, the Maronites could claim to have preserved their key offices, while Muslims could claim to hold more powers than the Christians. As a reform measure, the Taif Accord provided a compromise that all parties could accept, even if it left all dissatisfied. Aoun’s supporters failed in their bid to force Syria from Lebanon through the Taif Accords. The troika found Hafiz al-Asad unwilling to compromise on Syria’s position in Lebanon, and recognized that an accord would be meaningless without Syria’s support. The Taif Accord gave formal thanks to the Syrian army for past services rendered, legal recognition to Syrian troops currently stationed in Lebanon, and left it to the Lebanese and Syrian governments to agree among themselves when to terminate the Syrian military presence in Lebanon at some unspecified point in the future. The Taif Accord also called on the governments of Lebanon and Syria to formalize their ?privileged relationships in all fields? through bilateral treaties. In short, the accord gave legal sanction to Syria?s position in Lebanon and bound the two countries closer together. The Lebanese politicians assembled in Saudi Arabia recognized the realities of their position and accepted a compromise solution in the hope of achieving better in the future. The final draft of the accord was approved by the Lebanese deputies in Taif without opposition. The announcement of the Taif Accord set off the final round of fighting in war-torn Lebanon. From his battered enclave in the Christian highlands, General Aoun persisted in his claim to be the sole legitimate government of Lebanon. He rejected the accord outright for the legal cover it gave to Syria’s presence in Lebanon. He issued a presidential decree dissolving the Lebanese parliament in a bid to prevent the implementation of the Taif Accord, but to no avail. Aoun was now isolated at home and abroad as both the Lebanese and the international community put their support behind the framework for national reconciliation in Lebanon. In a bid to forestall Aoun’s challenge, the deputies hastened back to Beirut to ratify the Taif Accord. On November 5 the Lebanese parliament formally approved the accord and proceeded to elect the sixty-four-year-old deputy from Zghorta, Renй Moawad, as president of the republic. Scion of a respected Maronite family from the north, Moawad was a consensus candidate who enjoyed the support of both Lebanese nationalists and the Syrians. Yet Moawad had dangerous enemies. On his seventeenth day in office, the new president of Lebanon was assassinated by a powerful roadside bomb detonated as he returned home from Lebanese Independence Day celebrations. Syria, Iraq, Israel, and Michel Aoun were all accused of the murder, but those responsible for Moawad’s assassination have never been brought to justice. Moawad’s brutal murder risked provoking the collapse of the Taif process—as his assassins no doubt intended. The Lebanese parliament reconvened within forty-eight hours to elect a replacement before Moawad’s death could set back the reconstruction process agreed to in Taif. The Syrian authorities were even quicker than the Lebanese parliamentarians in finding a replacement for Moawad. Radio Damascus announced Elias Hrawi as the new president before the Lebanese deputies had put his nomination to the vote.³⁰ By this deliberate gaffe, the Asad regime made clear to all that ultimate authority over Lebanon in the Taif era remained with Syria. One of President Hrawi’s first acts would be to take on Michel Aoun, now widely recognized as a renegade and an impediment to Lebanon’s political reconciliation. The day after his election, Hrawi dismissed Aoun as commander of the army and ordered him to withdraw from the presidential palace in Baabda within forty-eight hours. Ignoring Hrawi’s command, Aoun turned to his Iraqi patrons for resupply, securing arms, ammunition, and antiaircraft defenses through his own port near Beirut to reinforce his position against outside attack. The human shield surrounding Aoun?thousands of his civilian supporters camped out around the presidential palace in Baabda in a festival atmosphere?proved the greatest deterrent to Hrawi in facing down Aoun?s defiance. The Lebanese president did not have to take any action. Rivalries between Aoun and the Maronite Lebanese Forces militia turned into open conflict when the Lebanese Forces commander Samir Geagea declared his support for the Taif Accord in December 1989. Geagea, like Aoun, was supplied by the Iraqis. In January 1990, the rival factions went to war in fighting more intense than at any time since the outbreak of the civil war. Iraqi rockets, tanks, and heavy artillery were deployed with utter disregard for the safety of noncombatants in heavily populated neighborhoods, inflicting heavy civilian casualties. The fighting continued for five months before a tenuous cease-fire between the rival Christian factions was mediated by the Vatican, in May 1990. Though he faced isolation and growing opposition, Michel Aoun took some satisfaction in knowing that his battle with the Lebanese Forces had, for the moment at least, derailed the Taif Accord.