Political chatter in Lebanon is finally airing its dirty laundry and is breaking through the long-held taboo: The country was artificially cobbled together after WWI by the ultra-conservative Maronite Church, despite the advice of the French not to enlarge the smaller, autonomous, 80% majority Christian Mount Lebanon Sanjak by annexing the Muslim Syrian regions of the Akkar, Hermel, Bekaa, Jabal Amel districts, as well as the coastal cities of Tripoli, Beirut, Sidon and Tyre.
The Christians have had enough and they now recognize the mistake their Church made in 1920 with the Greater Lebanon monstrosity that has proven itself ungovernable and incompatible with democratic practices. With every generation since 1920, the Muslims challenge the agreements made to keep Lebanon out of regional conflicts and alignments by taking the country down the path of civil strife. For decades, we've been told about the uniquely Lebanese "Consensual Democracy" in which the people's elected representatives do not implement the people's will, but rather sit down in backrooms together with the clergy of the 18 Bronze Age-vintage religious denominations, and make deals over policy. That is why the country has collapsed under the weight of the dissonance between what people really want and what their leaders do. Hence, the Mafia style client-boss relationships, the corruption, the stealing of public funds, the politicization of the judiciary, the supremacy of barbaric religious beliefs, all ills that have caused Greater Lebanon to die exactly 100 years after it was declared.
At this time, the Christians have had it with the Shiite Iranian militia of Hezbollah. While the 1975 war was instigated by the Sunnis (using the Palestinian organizations as their militias) who succeeded in transferring the powers of the Christian president to the Sunni prime minister (1989 Taef Agreement), it is now the turn of the Shiites to question the foundations of the country and are fighting both the Sunnis and the Christians. With Muslims, it never ends: They can't accept a non-Muslim at the helm. So it is time to recognize that the coexistence formula has never worked and will never work. It is time to stop feeding ourselves the same garbage because we keep getting sick.
Below is a map of the smaller Mount Lebanon (within the black dotted line) political entity that existed between the mid 1800s and 1918, surrounded by the peripheral Syrian provinces that were annexed to it in 1920. Mount Lebanon is essentially what its name says it is: A Mountain chain running along a north-south direction from the highest peak at 11,000 feet to the lesser hills at its southern edge.
From:
Lebanon religious groups distribution with Mount Lebanon 1862-1917 borders shown.svg
https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=25256265
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