Lebanese politics invariably gives rise to the most baroque conspiracy theories and the most ludicrous political spin. Yesterday’s election has proven no exception, with both Israelis and Hezbollah-supporters racing to try to flip defeats into victories.

Amir Peretz, who was Israel’s Defense Minister in 2006 during the disastrous Israel-Hezbollah war, preposterously claims that, “The election results in Lebanon mark the culmination of a process that matured with the breakout of the Second Lebanon War." In other words, Peretz is trying to take credit for the Lebanese election, arguing that it is some kind of delayed effect of Israel’s ill-conceived, botched and brutal Lebanon adventure three years ago. Obviously, you can’t blame this guy for trying to find some justification for miscalculations and indefensible actions that visited a tremendous amount of death and devastation on innocent Lebanese, greatly strengthened the political hand of Hezbollah and plainly backfired badly against Israel. But this idea that the 2009 Lebanese election is the culmination of a brilliant strategy put into place by Israel in the summer of 2006 is frankly comical.

As I noted in my posting several days before the election, the whole thing hinged not on Hezbollah’s performance as such, since all its candidates won their seats, but on the performance of its quasi-fascist Maronite allies led by the “eccentric” General Michel Aoun. His party was not able to pull their weight, instead dragging the Hezbollah-led March 8 coalition to defeat.

Some Hezbollah fans in the United States, most notably Assad AbuKhalil of the Hezbollah Support Network of Stanislaus, are trying to spin the March 8 defeat as a deliberate dive. The Angry Idiot had been predicting, along with everyone else, that Hezbollah’s coalition would not do very well in the election, but has been intimating on his blog that this is in fact a deliberate strategy. In the face of the defeat he asks: “So did Hizbullah deliberately work to ensure the defeat of the opposition? If that was the case, I have to say that they have done a magnificant job.” [sic] This has all the qualities of the most maudlin and machista ranchera (“te vas por que yo quiero que te vayas,” so to speak), rationalizing defeat as a kind of self-imposed renunciation. It’s a ludicrous conspiracy theory, especially since all of Hezbollah’s own candidates actually won. But saying, in effect, “we were defeated, because we wanted to lose” (Jose Alfredo Jimenez could not have put it better himself), sounds better than admitting that, “we have been defeated at the polls.”

As in all complex political phenomena, this election result is obviously overdetermined, and can’t be attributed to a simple and discrete set of causes. However, plainly crucial factors included serious overreaching on the part of Hezbollah last summer and their use of their militia for domestic political power which significantly weakened the arguments of its main Maronite allies. In addition, it is likely that many Lebanese voters understood that international isolation would be a disaster for the country and that therefore a Hezbollah-dominated government had to be avoided.

One final thought – one of the most consistent patterns in Lebanese political history is that whenever any organization, sectarian grouping or force gains too much power in the country and threatens to emerge as a defining interest, everyone else gangs up on them and makes sure that they are not able to assert control. The Lebanese, having no majority grouping and defining themselves in terms of a plethora of subnational identity orientations, appeared to possess a political default that ensures that any power that threatens to become dominant in the country is suppressed by coalition of most other forces.

Although this is hardly any kind of “brilliant” Israeli scheme, it’s certainly true that Hezbollah’s demonstration in 2006 that it possessed an independent foreign policy and was able, willing and ready to plunge the country into an avoidable war on its own and for its own purposes was a very important step in convincing many other Lebanese that they had simply acquired too much power. The tipping point, however, was probably its use of its militia for domestic political purposes in the summer of 2008, violating every assurance it had ever even anyone about its arms simply being for the purposes of “the resistance.” Having demonstrated that its militia was now primarily for the enforcement of its domestic political interests, and that its military power was at least equal to that of all other armed forces in the country combined, the eventual coalescing of a strong backlash against this kind of accumulation of domestic political power by one sectarian force was virtually guaranteed. It is further likely that this election is only one element of the backlash and that the process will continue, although as long as Hezbollah remains a major armed power, its extent will be limited to constraining the party’s ability to dominate the Lebanese national scene.