What gives

I’ve never been on the inside of a large, complicated international news event before, and it’s been enlightening to see how the news media — particularly the American and British news media — tackles events like this. As far as I can tell, it’s a never ending cycle of oversimplification followed by “breakthrough” article revealing how complicated things really are — conventional wisdom followed by debunking c.w. and then all over again. Take, for instance, the relatively straightforward (if not simple) issue of how to describe Hezbollah’s role in this election.

Hezbollah is a powerful force in Lebanon. Its leader, Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, holds sway over the bulk of the Shias in the country, and its military components are significantly stronger and better organized than the military. They have held a certain sort of indirect influence over the workings of the government for many years now, because the government — made up of members of parliament and ministers and the President and Prime Minister — have always known that they can’t steamroll Hezbollah, so any decisions they make must be more or less agreeable to the group. This is surely not an ideal way to run a country, but it is how it is. Since 2005, Hezbollah has had 11 MPs, and (since 2008) a formalized veto power, which means is has a certain traditional role in governmental decision-making in addition to its non-standard influence — but its true power is outsized compared with its formal governmental role. (And as for that veto power — the Lebanese system mandates that the Council of Ministers must make their decision “by consensus.” The formal veto power granted to Hezbollah in 2005 was exceptional, and is now inflammatory, but in some ways it was merely a standardization of the general practice.)

In this election, Hezbollah aligned with a large Christian party, the Free Patriotic Movement, with the intent of combining their 11 seats (they did not pursue more) with 50 or so from the FPM and other Shiite groups to reach a parliamentary majority.

So in the States, in the run-up to the election, you get an endless stream of articles about the looming “Hezbollah majority” in Lebanon. This of course is not correct. Then the pushback starts: Paul Salem, of the Carnegie Middle East Center, writes in FP that Hezbollah might not actually want a majority role in the government, since this responsibility would hamper their other sources of power. Elias Muhanna’s pens a terrific essay in the National which, among other things, reminded readers that Hezbollah was technically NOT going to hold the majority itself. And these simple re-revelations make the rounds in the blogs, with titles like “What’s really happening in Lebanon?” (not to pick on Matt Yglesias, who is a genius).

Then the election arrives. A British journalist friend here said recently that his editors back home were asking him for days whether they could just say that “Hezbollah won,” or “Hezbollah lost.” No, he said, because that’s not how it works. But it’s simpler that way, they insisted, and our readers don’t care about all the details. True enough. And, more or less, that’s what happens. The March 14 alliance wins 71 seats, the March 8 alliance wins 57, and the standard story since then has been that Hezbollah lost, that the election was a sign of the Lebanese rejecting Hezbollah, that Obama has been handed a big opening, and victory, in the Middle East. (The next stage, if I may be so bold as to predict, will be a series of analytical articles suggesting that Hezbollah may have “lost,” but it’s still a dangerously powerful force in the country, ala this one, from Ha’aretz, or this quote from Jon Alterman, a program director at CSIS, from end of this Reuters piece: “I don’t think this is anything more than the end of a round, it’s not a decisive defeat for anybody.”)

My frustration with this does not come from a know-it-all attitude: that now that I know so much more about this subject than I did before, I thumb my nose at the people back home who “just don’t get it.” Instead, it has to do with what I see as a real danger with the sort of journalism that is constantly shifting its definition of what happened here, because it suggests some sort of progress, or that things have changed here, when in fact they have not at all. Electorally speaking, Hezbollah won all of the seats they were expected to and, although there isn’t enough data on this yet, they appear to have done so with as many or even more votes than in the past. As the Lebanese blogger Ms. Tee recently pointed out, in a post called “Erase and Rewind,”

Back in 2005, March 14 and allies won 72 of the 128 seats, Hizballah/Amal and allies won 35, and the Free Patriotic Movement won 14. In terms of overall numbers, there is not much change this year…. We are back to the status quo that existed after the alliance between Hizballah and March 14th broke down in 2005.

And practically speaking, Hezbollah is still Hezbollah, and, as one of its MPs stated yesterday, the question of taking away its weapons is off the table. Any move down that road by the ruling coalition — as this LA Times article recently showed — is bound to go nowhere, or worse.