It remains surprising that Lebanon and Jordan have not exploded, being two countries that are deeply and intimately affected by what happens in Syria and Iraq. True, conditions in the two small states are very bad, and the widespread reputation of Jordan and Lebanon holds that they are among the most fragile Arab countries. To be sure, the prosaic talk about "fragmenting the Arab homeland," often leads to identifying these two countries as merely the outcome of that "fragmentation." Furthermore, as soon as the subject of sectarianism is brought up, Lebanon is almost always the country intended, and as soon as the subject of communal conflict within the same country is traditionally mentioned, Jordan is almost always the country in question. Such fragility justifies expecting an explosion in the two countries, which can take many forms and which has many fuses. However, this has not happened. For one thing, in Lebanon as in Jordan, there is no ‘regime' whose collapse would lead to the collapse of everything else, because everything else is linked to this regime. For another, there remains a margin for polity in these two countries, no matter how narrow it may be. It is this that allows, for example, King Abdullah II to benefit from the setback suffered by the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, or Lebanese President Michel Suleiman to benefit from the preoccupation of the Syrian regime away from him and his country. In truth, Jordan and Lebanon were mostly called fragile essentially in comparison to the other two ‘serious' countries in the Arab Orient, namely, Syria and Iraq. The latter two countries, in addition to being larger and far more populous, are two countries under strict control, where the regime is extremely centralized and authoritarian, where the president is unquestionably a regional leader, and where the armies are formidable and security services are commanding. Such was the case with Saddam Hussein and Hafez al-Assad, the most prominent examples of strongmen in the Asian Arab Orient during the second half of the twentieth century. The first required the creation of an international alliance to force him out of Kuwait, while the second continued for three decades to fight convoluted wars against the United States and Israel. But beyond this, one may sum up the so-called national liberation movement in the Levant as being nothing more than a continuous Iraqi-Syrian assault on Lebanon and Jordan. To be sure, both Saddam and Assad Senior were keen to sponsor the fragmentation in these two small neighboring countries, made hostage to them by virtue of their geography. This policy ranged from threats and tutelage, to expanding and exploiting contradictions in Lebanon and Jordan. Before Saddam and Assad, Gamal Abdel Nasser, as the president of Syria under the United Arab Republic between 1958 and 1961, had catapulted this relationship mode to a climax. This is how we saw the two concurrent explosions in Lebanon and Jordan, in the late 1950s. And this is how later on, Jordan exploded in 1970 and Lebanon in 1973 and 1975, as the two regimes in Baghdad and Damascus used the Palestinian revolution as the locomotive for their projects, giving Lebanon and Jordan a choice between subjugation and disintegration. Throughout that period, the radical notion for struggle, Palestinian or otherwise, focused on subverting the entities of Lebanon and Jordan, either with support from the Syrian Baathist dictatorship or the Iraqi one. But the truth that is coming more and more to light today is that the Lebanese-Jordanian fragility is more durable than Syrian-Iraqi durability, whose founders thought they were mimicking Bismarck, when they should have realized that mimicking smaller European republics and princedoms would have probably been wiser.
