Abstract
A key error committed by most pugnacious Lebanese who fought in the 1975–1990 civil war, then as now, was to keep the “state” weak. The Lebanese butchered each other for 15 years, without any meaningful permanent gains for anyone, and continued to dismantle the country ever since, on the assumption that their “Consociational democracy”—which the theorist Arend Lijphart defined as a “government by elite cartels designed to turn a democracy with a fragmented political culture into a stable democracy” (Lijphart, 1969, p. 216)—suited them best. Consociational democracy empowered confessionalism and allowed entrenched actors, Christian as well as Muslim, to flourish. What was necessary, perhaps even required, were true nationalist leaders who could forge a common Lebanese identity, but no such figures were (or are) available in a society that preferred mercantilism to security. Instead, the nation-state produced well-trained subordinates to foreign powers, which transformed various disputes into an ideal quagmire.
In this important book, Schulhofer-Wohl relies on quantitative as well as qualitative analyses to better understand not only the core case study—the civil war in Lebanon—but also to place that tragic conflict in the context of clashes that afflict numerous societies and that turn into quagmires. His hypotheses and evaluations are tested through a formal model that relies on game theory, cross-national statistical tests, original fieldwork in Lebanon, and comparative historical research on Chad and Yemen. The author derives solid historical concepts and compares them with a battery of global civil war cases going back to 1944, which clarifies the science in political science, and which will please quantitative analysts.
In fact, the author methodically defines his terms, and he frequently explains what he is writing, what will come next, and why his focus was drawn to one direction or another. This can disenchant some readers, but those motivated or moved by quantitative analysis will be delighted. Mercifully, Schulhofer-Wohl provides his mathematical model in the book’s appendices, keeping his text mostly free from technical discussions. Footnotes, which fortunately Cambridge University Press continues to print—thus helping those who tire of checking endnotes back and forth—are regrettably emasculated to author and date. 1 Be that as it may, readers who are curious to learn about civil wars will be amply rewarded here, as the author adds value to our understandings in relatively objective terms.
In his introductory chapter, the author clarifies his theory of quagmire, which is the “interplay between three sets of interactions that the literature has tended to consider independently: between the warring parties, between each warring party and potential foreign backers, and the international rivalry between these backers” (p. 12). He posits that the “theory’s two mechanisms—foreign assistance as a subsidy, and substitution between non-territorial warfare—account for quagmire in wars that run counter to standard expectations” (p. 13). He confirms that while foreign powers come under pressure when the cost of fighting rises, the “theory indicates that, instead of withdrawing, belligerents responding to increased costs of fighting are likely to substitute away from territorial warfare to non-territorial warfare” (p. 13).
Chapter 2 is entirely devoted to the theory itself and affirms that within the international context of civil war, the model:
incorporates it properly into the study of civil war dynamics by analyzing the set of strategic interactions between foreign states as potential outside backers and the domestic armed actors carrying out the fighting. External assistance, available once backers’ interests in the civil war country reach a sufficient but low level, interacts with the main constraints on the belligerents that characterize the domestic war environment – the cost of escalation and the stakes of the conflict. (pp. 51–52)
The author further demonstrates that “predictions regarding the relationship between the incidence of quagmire in civil war, on the one hand, and foreign interests and the domestic war environment,” lead to two specific extrapolations:
First…that foreign states may interfere in civil wars by providing external assistance even when their interest in the civil war country is fairly low, and that once foreign interests reach that low threshold level, quagmire becomes more likely as interests increase…(and), [s]econd, … that quagmire becomes more likely after the threshold level of interest is met as the cost of escalation increases and as the stakes diminish based on a mechanism of substitution into lower-cost types of fighting. (p. 52)
To be sure, Lebanon’s wars were bloody affairs, with atrocities galore committed by all sides, including outside forces. To his credit, the author provides his reader with comprehensive discussions of various aspects of the conflicts that literally destroyed a country that was once known as the “Switzerland of the Middle East.” Chapters 3 and 4 provide comprehensive discussions of the civil war itself, covering various contentions, including a thorough assessment of the so-called unwritten National Pact that was reached in 1943 between the Head-of-State, President Bisharah al-Khuri, and his Prime Minister, Riad al-Sulh.
Commendably, Schulhofer-Wohl raises troubling references to the political disputes, including an assessment of a speech delivered by the premier who belied the “Pact’s supposed ‘consecration’ of the sectarian system,” which al-Sulh wanted to abolish because he believed that “all sectarian features of the political system” were evil (p. 62). The author affirms that “the Pact was an instrumental alliance between two political leaders, each of whom represented a faction within his sectarian community against other factions that objected to his plans” (p. 62). Though the first post-independence president displayed Lebanon’s confessional pedigree par excellence, the same was also true for the prime minister, who was gunned down in Amman on July 17, 1951, by members of the Syrian Social Nationalist Party, allegedly in revenge for the execution of Antun Sa‘adih, one of the party’s founding leaders who insisted that Lebanon ought to be part of Syria (Seale, 2010). Ironically, Sa‘adih was arrested by Damascus and delivered to Beirut in July 1949, tried haphazardly, and executed by a firing squad less than 48 hours later in what probabbly stood as the shortest and most secretive trial given to a political offender (Beshara, 2010). What motivated al-Khuri and al-Sulh was the National Pact, which was not only “a bargain struck between Maronite and Sunni factions, [and which] favored the interests of Maronite and Sunni businessmen and to a large extent excluded the interests of the Druze, the Shi‘a, and other minority communities” (p. 63) but also because both leaders feared the presence of a nationalist voice in the mercantile society. Of course, both leaders stood for genuine independence from Syria, but the Sa‘adih execution did not end demands for representation and accountability.
Schulhofer-Wohl believes that Lebanese leaders turned “to outsiders as potential sources of power to augment a sect’s capabilities within Lebanon in order to stabilize or renegotiate the Pact,” which apparently “brought Lebanese politicians to court foreign states” (p. 67), though he avows “that the Pact was possessed of no institutional structure or informal practice for adjustments, let alone more drastic changes.” He concludes with a sharp assessment that the “Pact’s inherent inflexibility ran up against the reality of change to set up a politics of perpetual constitutional crisis” and compares this with the slavery that was enshrined in the US Constitution—which “sowed the seeds for the conflagration of the American Civil War.” In short, Schulhofer-Wohl perceives the Lebanese “National Pact” as the accord that “lay the groundwork for the Lebanese Civil War” (p. 68). That may, indeed, be the case, but many more reasons existed, which the author, of course, duly acknowledges and that led to the murderous conflagrations the world witnessed after 1975. Among these were the protagonists’ ideological commitments, social polarizations, foreign machinations, and, in the words of an innocent Lebanese warrior, “that the war in Lebanon was not among the Lebanese themselves, but was the result of foreign manipulation” (p. 91), which was only partially true because such views were and remain typical of what many Lebanese persuade themselves to be the true case!
Jonah Schulhofer-Wohl then assesses, in Chapter 4, the plausibility of the theory of quagmire’s mechanisms in Lebanon, by delving on the belligerents’ decisions at critical turning points in the war. Although the author’s focus is to evaluate foreign support as a subsidy, his prose is too diplomatic, his identifications too general (rightists vs. leftists), and his academic concentration, well, too academic. To be sure, the author does not skirt the Christian versus Muslim factors that consumed both sides, though he wonders whether rightists were aware of their precarious situations. Naturally, Christian belligerents turned to Israel—along with a number of other countries, including Syria—for assistance that, the reader is told, led to “clear losses on the part of the rightist parties” (p. 101).
This, in turn, led mainly Christian rightist parties to seek the “help of external patrons” that might ultimately allow them to fight and prevail over leftist groups. In the event, external patrons provided assistance to both sides, and their presence prolonged the conflict for years. It also transformed the civil war into a genuine quagmire, though the author rejects “conventional accounts” about foreign machinations. There were no doubts that geopolitical considerations “prolonged the war and prevented the Left from an earlier victory, or betrayed the Right at the last moment,” though it is probably incorrect to assume that “Syria would have liked to end the war sooner,” or that it “was prevented from doing so by the United States” (p. 131).
The wily Syrian President Hafiz al-Assad, like his predecessors and successor, hoped to maintain hegemony over Lebanon. Simply stated, Damascus never acknowledged Beirut’s independence, refused to delienate its borders, and while the two countries exchanged ambassadors in October 2008, relations were as undiplomatic as could exist between two neighboring states. In fact, brotherly ties, allegedly between “a single nation divided into two states” (terminology often used by the late Hafiz al-Assad), went from bad to worse after 2011 as a million and a half Syrians (mostly Sunnis) escaped the civil war that started there after the Arab Spring kindled the quest for liberty.
“The theory of quagmires rests on the link between continuing war and dynamics of external support and the cost of escalation,” writes Schulhofer-Wohl, and adds: “In the presence of external support, warring actors can sustain the decision to continue to fight in otherwise untenable circumstances” (p. 131), which shows the mechanisms behind continuing fighting that highlight how “armed actors’ continuing participation was underwritten by external assistance, and, second, that ongoing non-territorial fighting resulted from conscious choices to avoid more costly territorial offensive operations.” In both instances, and even when losing ground to their opponents, the author affirms, “parties deepened their participation in the war” (p. 132), though he believes that rightists lost much more ground and, therefore, sought foreign assistance.
The fact that leftist Lebanese were duly supported by Syria, surely a foreign party, also resulted in an erosion of their military positions even if it is correct to state that rightists had a lot more to loose. Truth be told, all warring factions in Lebanon sought foreign assistance at one point or another, and while it appeared—which the quagmire theory analyzed here confirms astutely—that rightists were disadvantaged, this did not result in any advantages to so-called leftists. Lebanon was complicated before the war, stayed so during it, and expanded its political difficulties after 1990, thereby earning the label of a land immersed in quagmire during war as well as in relative peace.
To its credit, and to further buttress the model’s accuracy, “Quagmire in Civil War,” devotes Chapter 5 to civil wars worlwide between 1944 and 2006, illustrating through the tested theory that “the probability of quagmire increases as foreign interests increase” (p. 167). This is a well-thought-out exercise that strengthens the theory and confirms earlier findings. Finally, in Chapter 6, Schulhofer-Wohl provides a useful comparison of the Lebanon’s case with Chad and Yemen, to further test why a “most-different” contrast (Chad) as well as a “most-similar” case (Yemen) explained the presence and absence of quagmire in a war. Parenthetically, it was fascinating to read that Chad had a minuscule navy (p. 180), which raised the question why a landlocked country needed such a force. 2
“The comparative perspective gained by examining the Lebanese Civil War,” concludes Schulhofer-Wohl, “indicated that civil war quagmire occurs even in the absence” of specific factors, including “the use of an insurgent strategy against the incumbent government, the sheer impoverishment of Chadian society, the debility of the government bequeathed it upon independence, and simply the country’s geographic unmanageability,” all of which emphasized “that including in the explanatory mix the consequences of the ethnic composition of the society, a linear mapping of strategic interest onto foreign involvement in the war, and previous conflict within the polity—all risk factors present in Lebanon but absent in Chad” (p. 206) added value to the analysis. Still, puzzles emerged, including a comparative perspective on the standard risk factors for Yemen, where quagmire did not emerge in the 1994 civil war. Despite the country’s mountainous terrain, previous experiences of civil war, strategic value to foreign states, and ethnic polarization, all key criteria for the phenomenon, Yemen did not compare well with the civil war in Lebanon—a country that shared all these characteristics.
One of the most important findings from the statistical analysis in Chapter 5 is that neither the cluster of variables capturing the domestic war environment nor the cluster sizing up foreign interests has, on its own, a statistically significant effect on the probability of quagmire. Furthermore, one may add that the conclusions of the qualitative analysis of Chad and Yemen reveal how other, equally critical items, clarified specific conditions. “In Yemen,” for example, “a large-scale conventional war ended quickly due to strategic choices that led one side to defeat. Yet had that side received external assistance as it expected, these same choices would have been sound ones, and could have resulted in a devastating quagmire” (p. 207), which can now be verified after Iran supported Huthi rebels in the ongoing struggle for political supremacy.
Consequently, placing Lebanon, Chad, and Yemen in terms of the parameters of interest in the theory of quagmire provides deeper support for the book’s argument.
Lebanon, with a high level of ethnic polarization and previous experience of civil war, can be thought of as having low stakes, but a high cost of escalation due not only to its terrain but also to its high population density, as well as its ethnic composition coupled with additional geographic ethnic sorting as the war progressed. (p. 207)
In fact, Lebanon’s moderate level of strategic importance proved to be enough to produce external assistance, which transformed the 1975–1990 civil war into a genuine quagmire.
As the author advances, Beirut’s fate was “characterized by fighting with non-territorial objectives” (p. 207), which is revelatory, indeed. Importantly, and largely because of the presence of Palestinian guerrillas who participated in the war on the side of leftist groups, the majority of Lebanese were aghast, since their priorities were not what leftist parties fighting in the country wanted. It is worth repeating that Syria sided with both the left and the right to protect itself from a partitioned “Christian Lebanon,” as well as from a pro-Palestinian “Muslim Lebanon” entity had the leftists prevailed, which could have challenged the Ba&ath Party’s Arabist credentials. Above all, Damascus never accepted Beirut as an independent political entity, a key point that must be repeated time and again because this was and remains a fundamental reality of Levantine political developments.
Jonah Schulhofer-Wohl concludes his book by acknowledging that he set out “to define the concept of quagmire and provide an explanation for its incidence in civil war.” He adds:
As a project, it has been motivated by an underlying puzzle: The path to war can be accidental, unintended, unforeseen, while the path to peace is nearly always deliberate, painstaking, and beset with the prospect of failure. This fundamental characteristic of civil war can be counted among its many cruelties: It appears a state of affairs much easier to embark upon than to find an exit from (p. 210).
Still, and to the author’s immense credit, the book touches on “human suffering.” He describes in clear and unequivocal terms how young men are sacrificed on the alter of political objectives; how “lofty aspirations and cynical dealings of political leaders” carry the day; how survivors are expected to continue the struggles after belligerents accept cease-fires; how the “dreams for future generations [are] dashed to build anew”; and how new generations are denied the knowledge of what tragic losses could well mean to them (p. 210).
Therefore, and at the core of his investigations, the author evaluates how civial wars impoverish human beings, adding the insults of “disease, poverty, natural disaster, and traffic accidents” to the actual injuries of raw fighting. He rejects the “suffering born of the idea that political outcomes justify killing” and relies on the Hobbesian notion that “the use of organized violence, even extreme cruelty, for political ends is not surprising,” though he emends that notion with the more accurate emphasis “that the Hobbesian world comes into being not by any natural imperative, but by the choices humans make.” In fact, his best assessment is that while life in “civil war is nasty, brutish, and short, by dint of human agency and interaction, … quagmire compounds the tragedy” and becomes a “full catastrophe.” Quagmire, Schulhofer-Wohl, affirms “is made, not found,” as he invites readers to think of quagmire in each country that experiences civil war (p. 210).
Despite its very small size, Lebanon harbors one of the most complex societies on earth, with numerous nations inhabiting it that share little and whose ideological interests differ so sharply that the “land of milk and honey” is, in fact, a land wallowing in blood. Moreover, and because the Lebanese failed to forge a single national identity over the course of nearly 3,000 years (including the past century as a relatively independent country [1920–2020] after the French created “Greater Lebanon”), internecine fighting allowed outside powers to meddle in their affairs.
From the Canaanites to the French, dozens of nations expressed interest in the coastal and mountainous regions that form the minuscule Levantine entity. Whether it was the Hittites, Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Sassanids, ‘Umayyads, ‘Abbasids, Fatimids, Mamluks, Ottomans, and many others, all wished to leave a presence there. In recent times, Syrians, Iraqis, Egyptians, Israelis, and Iranians found local allies to triumph or at least believed that they could prevail over fellow citizens, which guaranteed that internal disputes would quickly escalate into civil wars that, in turn, evolved into quagmires. While Jonah Schulhofer-Wohl touches upon some of these notions, his superlative work warns of the consequences that division generates. If nations seek peace and stability and, presumably, wish to avoid civil wars and quagmires, it behoves them to develop identities around which all citizens unite. A good place to start is to heed the warnings included in this exceptional study.