Beirut and other port cities and which had a Maronite Christian majority. According to Cobban, however, "it had long been a basic tenet of Syrian nationalists that Lebanon was an integral part of Syria" (80).
Syria and Lebanon achieved their independence in 1946. Under the 1943 National Pact, Lebanese Christian and Muslim leaders agreed to share political power. The President of the Republic would be a Christian, the Prime Minister a Sunni Muslim and the Speaker of the Parliament (National Assembly) a Shi'a Muslim. The Christians would control Parliament by a 6-5 margin. Despite communal tensions which occasionally erupted into violence, such as in 1958, the Lebanese confessionally-based and democratic political system functioned fairly well. The National Pact, however, was based on a 1932 census. By 1970 or so, Muslims were in the majority and began demanding a greater share of power. Meanwhile, Syria, which experienced 13 coups d'etat in its first 21 years of independence, a political weakness which Israeli historian Rabinovich said "prevented Syria from exerting effective pressure on Lebanon," began under the more stable rule established by Asad to cast covetous glances toward Lebanon (36). In 1972 Asad advanced his Greater Syria thesis which he later used to justify Syria's intervention: "Syria and Lebanon are a single country. We are more than brothers" (Pipes 13).
As the Lebanese polity began to disintegrate in the early 1970s, Asad increasingly grew apprehensive at the possibly adverse consequences of civil strife in Lebanon to Syrian interests. Having proved to be no match for Israeli armed forces in four wars, 1948, 1956, 1967 and 1973, Syria feared that a partition of Lebanon along communal lines would likely result in an alliance between Israel and the Christian Maronites on Syria's western flank. As a member of the Alawi sect which constituted only 13 percent of Syria's population and which had traditionally been ke...