Can the Lebanese Civil War be prevented?

[Vinization]

Alert: awfully generic information incoming.

Before the outbreak of its civil war in 1975, Lebanon was a relatively prosperous country, whose capital, Beirut, was known as the "Paris of the Middle East". All that prosperity went down the drain after 15 years of infighting between more armed groups than any reasonable person can bother to count, and to make matters worse the country was occupied by Syria until long after the end of the civil war.

So, was there any way this horrific string of events could be prevented with a POD from 1950 onward? Perhaps if the 1958 crisis ended differently? What would it take for the sectarian tensions to be dealt with before everything goes to hell?

 

[how]

Would a decisive Israeli victory through a pre-emptive strike in the Yom Kippur war change things? Might not prevent the civil war but the Syrians would not be able to involve themselves so less escalation?

 

[YYJ]

Alert: awfully generic information incoming.

Before the outbreak of its civil war in 1975, Lebanon was a relatively prosperous country, whose capital, Beirut, was known as the "Paris of the Middle East". All that prosperity went down the drain after 15 years of infighting between more armed groups than any reasonable person can bother to count, and to make matters worse the country was occupied by Syria until long after the end of the civil war.

So, was there any way this horrific string of events could be prevented with a POD from 1950 onward? Perhaps if the 1958 crisis ended differently? What would it take for the sectarian tensions to be dealt with before everything goes to hell?

If Black September had not happened, and the PLO remained based out of Jordan, or moved to Syria, or moved to another Arab country, that destabilizing effect might not have pushed Lebanon over the edge. Or if the PLO did not have such a provocative attitude towards the laws and government of their host countries.

Even without the PLO, the frictions within Lebanon were leading it in the direction of political breakdown.

Could the Constitution have been written better in the first place by the French, to serve Lebanon better, rather than serve French colonial management? Or re-negotiated?

I'm not sure what would work, without grabbing the political leaders of the day, stuffing them in a time machine, and taking them forward, saying "Look what happens if you do not compromise."

 

[Monk78]

Right wing nationalist military dictatorship comes to power by 1970
It pro-US without being overtly anti-Syrian or pro-Israeli

 

[Griml0ck122]

It'd be harder for the civil war to start if Lebanon was not organised along confessionalist lines, which made it very easy for all the various religious sects to a) fracture society along religious lines b) start fighting each other along religious lines.
Not sure how that would work when actually forming the country out of French Lebanon but if things were much more organized conventionally, then the eventual stresses of being next to the israeli-palestinian conflict would eventually might be alleviated to keep things from turning into a full scale civil war

 

[aaronupright]

Would a decisive Israeli victory through a pre-emptive strike in the Yom Kippur war change things? Might not prevent the civil war but the Syrians would not be able to involve themselves so less escalation?

No.

 

[walmart]

No, the civil war was inevitable

 

[walmart]

It'd be harder for the civil war to start if Lebanon was not organised along confessionalist lines, which made it very easy for all the various religious sects to a) fracture society along religious lines b) start fighting each other along religious lines.
Not sure how that would work when actually forming the country out of French Lebanon but if things were much more organized conventionally, then the eventual stresses of being next to the israeli-palestinian conflict would eventually might be alleviated to keep things from turning into a full scale civil war

The existence of Lebanon is down to sectarianism. No sectarianism no Lebanon

 

[Lord Cheddar]

I'm not an expert in Lebanese history, but it probably wouldn't be that hard to avert the Lebanese civil war in the over 30 years between independence and the OTL civil war; many things can happen in that time, and even the smallest butterfly can have a huge effect. 30 years of relative peace, prosperity, and democracy where sectarian tensions have the time to be mended or fade away.

Maybe an election goes slightly differently, and different policies are adopted; maybe certain interesed parties fund different groups in Lebanon; maybe the economy does slightly better; maybe Israel somehow manages to piss off both the Maronites and the Muslims, maybe it doesn't piss anyone off; maybe the West is more careful...

So many maybes, so many ways for the situation to have gone better than it did OTL, which is kind of depressing when you think about it; maybe we do live in the worst timeline.

 

[Superninja76]

If you want a stable Lebanon, don't expand it as far past the Mutasarrifate's borders- the Islamic populations of the Beqaa and south swing demographics way too hard towards one end.

 

[starman]

Would a decisive Israeli victory through a pre-emptive strike in the Yom Kippur war change things?

Dunno if that would've been possible. It would require better intelligence or better interpretation of intelligence info by Zeira or someone else. On the 6th, Israel in fact did know an arab attack was coming but opted not to preempt. American pressure played a role in that. Kissinger had said "Don't you ever preempt!" Dayan too opposed a preemptive attack. He noted that in '67 the political damage of being the aggressor was offset by the vast damage done to arab air forces. In '73 however, arab jets were protected by hardened aircraft shelters and the SAM network was more potent. "For an uncertain gain" Dayan noted, "Israel could suffer losses which would affect its airstrike capability for the rest of the war."
On the ground, if Israel had mobilized days prior to the attack, the Syrians would've deployed defensively. Had the Israelis then attacked, it would've resulted in a kill ratio much worse for them than in OTL when their tanks picked off large numbers of attacking T-55s etc.

Might not prevent the civil war but the Syrians would not be able to involve themselves so less escalation?

Even in OTL when the Syrian army was demolished in '73, it had recuperated sufficiently to intervene in Lebanon in '76. Had Syrian forces been on the defensive in '73, with dug-in tanks, saggers and RPGs, they probably would have been in a better position vis a vis Israel in '76, or to go into Lebanon.

 

[Vinization]

I wonder, how would a surviving United Arab Republic affect Lebanese politics? Could its survival scare the ruling class into giving real concessions to the Muslim population before it's too late? I assume preventing the PLO's expulsion from Jordan would also help (perhaps by averting the Six-Day War?), since they settled in Lebanon afterwards.