Over the past couple of years, Gebran Bassil has not ceased demarcating himself from his terrorist Hezbollah ally. For those unfamiliar with the history of this political dwarf, let me give you an overview.
In October 1990, then-Prime Minister Michel Aoun hid in the basement of the French embassy in Beirut after Syria used its air force, encouraged by the US and unimpeded by Israel, to dislodge him from the presidential Baabda palace. Aoun wanted the newly minted Taef Accord, which he had accepted in principle, to include a schedule for the withdrawal of the Syrian occupation forces present on Lebanese soil since 1975. But the Sunni Muslims, the winners of the 1975-1990 war, backed by an unnatural alliance between Saudi Arabia, Syria, the US, Israel, the Christian "Lebanese Forces" Party and every Tom, Dick and Harry in the neighborhood, rejected Aoun's demand. After a year in the basement of La Résidence des Pins, Aoun was eventually whisked into exile to France where he continued a civilized opposition against Syria and its Sunni, Shiite and Christian traitor proxies.
One of Aoun's sons-in-law (Aoun has three daughters) by the name of Gebran Bassil became politically active on the ground and rose through the ranks of those opposing Hezbollah and Syria's domination of Lebanon. He married Chantal, one of Aoun's daughters, in 1999, which in nepotistic, feudal, sectarian Lebanon guaranteed him a position of choice in the Free Patriotic Movement (FPM) of Michel Aoun. Just like in the Mafia, when you marry the boss's daughter, you become king, according to the Lebanese saying, كلب المير مير, which translates as, "the prince's dog is a prince". In February 2005, Syria and the Iranian proxy Hezbollah terror organization assassinated the Sunni prime minister Rafik Hariri, a slave of Saudi Arabia and the US, yet a supporter of Hezbollah's so-called "war of liberation" in the south against the Israeli occupation. Despite Hariri's claims to want to fully implement the Taef Accord, he allowed Hezbollah to be the only militia not to disband and disarm as required by the Taef Accord. This conflicted with his pedestrian - Hariri was an uneducated construction contractor who made billions kissing the behinds of the Saudi Sheikhs - desire to rebuild Lebanon's economy. He refurbished a few destroyed buildings downtown to show he was rebuilding the country, but he naively believed that he could revitalize Lebanon with the Syrian dictatorship and occupation troops breathing down his neck and running his country.
The Hariri assassination forced the US (in the post 9-11 era) and most political parties and forces to "re-evaluate" their complacency with Hezbollah's violation of Lebanese State sovereignty. Suddenly, all those who had signed on to the Taef Accord and were effective allies of the Syrian regime's occupation and domination of Lebanon became Syria's enemies, having received their marching orders from Washington DC which, beginning in March 2003, changed its formula of the Syrian "presence" as a "factor of stability" into one of a Syrian "occupation". All those who had surrendered Lebanon to Syria now wanted the Syrians out. The Syrian army withdrew in late April 2005.
In May 2005, Michel Aoun returned from exile within a week of the Syrian withdrawal. All those who had not compromised with the Syrian occupation and who suffered repression at the hands of the Rafik Hariri puppet regime and its Syrian bosses now sought their revenge. From exile, the nucleus of what was to become Aoun's Free Patriotic Movement (FPM) had crystallized around French, American, Australian, Canadian and other Lebanese expatriates. But the resident Aounists, those who stayed and did not go into exile eventually managed to dominate the Aounist opposition camp. The resident Aounists included Michel Aoun's son-in-law Gebran Bassil whose hatred of America and its Arab allies would eventually drive him into the hands of Iran and Syria, his erstwhile enemies.
Those who had watched the United States between 1976 and 2005 deliver Lebanon to the dictatorships of Damascus and Tehran, were very ambivalent about the US. On one hand, Aoun had personally experienced the betrayal of Lebanon by the Sunni Arabs and the West who delivered the country to Syria, but on the other hand, he had relied on the EU and the US during his exile to lobby against Syria and Iran's takeover. For many Lebanese, especially the Christians, the West was their ally and a model they aspired to, despite its chronic betrayal of their existential cause.
In November 2005, Aoun traveled to the US where he met with policy-makers in Washington DC. He apparently tried to convince the US to work with him, but he couldn't convince them: They were wary of his antics (as when he threatened to seize US hostages to gain the respect of the Americans who had betrayed him and Lebanon to rescue their Hezbollah-held hostages). As a result, he returned to Beirut and jumped headfirst into the Syrian-Iranian camp: he visited Assad and reconciled with him, then in February 2006, he signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with Hezbollah. Aoun thus made a 180-degree turn in everything he had stood for more than two decades. Having previously expressed neutral or mildly sympathetic stances towards it, he now labeled Israel "the enemy". His hostility to Syria morphed into an alliance with the Assad regime and its proxies.
Many who had followed Aoun's trajectory from 1984 when he was Army Chief were stunned by the reversal of his politics. His alliance with his erstwhile enemies was not merely a tactical move, as some hoped, it was an ideological turnabout. He used to call Hezbollah a terrorist organization, now it became a resistance. Prior to his metamorphosis, Aoun repeatedly denounced as a lie Hezbollah's argument of the occupation of the Shebaa Farms by Israel in the south. Now it was a legitimate argument. From Army Chief who battled Syria's occupation for several years, Aoun began denouncing the Army as incapable of defending the country and proclaiming that Hezbollah must be protected and encouraged in waging its never-ending war in the south.
This is where Gebran Bassil comes in. In retrospect, Bassil was the sponsor of the MOU with Hezbollah and he convinced Aoun to undergo a makeover of his political personality. The reason? Bassil wanted Aoun to become president, and given the hostility Aoun generated in everyone else on the Lebanese political scene, he calculated that hitching Aoun's caboose to the Syrian-Iranian-Hezbollah train would enable him to overcome the opposition to his accession to the presidency.
And indeed, for more than two years, Hezbollah blocked the presidential election in parliament until the opposition gave in and elected Aoun (31 October 2016) president of Lebanon, ending a 29-month vacuum in the presidency. Aoun served like a perfect puppet of the Syrians and Hezbollah, and his term ended without him achieving anything worthwhile for the country. To the contrary, the country ricocheted from one crisis after another during the Aoun administration. Incidentally, Hezbollah is doing the same thing now: it is blocking the election of a president because it wants only one man at the helm, another Christian puppet by the name of Sleiman Frangiyeh. It appears that Aoun and Bassil's ambitions did not go beyond acceding to the presidency; they had no other projects for the country except revenge for what was done to Aoun in 1990. Their method of operation was to block, object, put obstacles, never cooperate, never compromise.... As a Christian party, Aoun and Bassil's FPM party becamme the Christian fig leaf that prevented Hezbollah's isolation and enabled its unlawful plunder of state institutions, which led to the current ruin of the country.
The truth is never far from the lies. As an old, weak and senile Aoun finished his term in 2022, Bassil became the star at the helm of the FPM. As Hezbollah continued to dismantle the state and hijack its decisions, Bassil's popularity among his Christian base began to crumble. Hezbollah never ceased assassinating opponents (politicians, journalists etc.); it even staged an armed attack against the Christian neighborhood of Ayn Remmaneh. To this day, Hezbollah's puppet ministers and judges block the work of the independent investigator in charge of the Beirut Port explosion file, which many suspect was Hezbollah's doing by storing tons of ammonium nitrate there, a highly hazardous susbtance that is used to make bombs and other explosive devices.
Given this situation, Bassil began feeling the heat of his alliance with Hezbollah, and thus initiated another political metamorphosis. He started criticizing Hezbollah and threatened to modify the MOU by amending it. Needless to say, none of the MOU's provisions were ever implemented. Like a master pupeteer, Hezbollah's boss Nasrallah managed the impetuous Bassil as a parent would a child, scolding him but never dumping him altogether. In other words, the two sides became separated but not divorced. With many Christians having abandoned him and Aoun, Bassil invented an explanation for his original sin of signing the MOU in the first place: He is now arguing that the MOU was successful in "resisting Israel" (the bullshit pretext for which Hezbollah does not need help from Bassil's MOU anyway), but failed in "building state institutions and implementing the rule of law", in an indirect critique of Hezbollah.
But back when Bassil pushed Aoun into signing the MOU with Hezbollah in 2006, shouldn't they have foreseen that a state cannot share power with a terror organization beholden to a foreign country? Were Aoun and Bassil so naive not to see that Hezbollah will never hand over its weapons to the Lebanese State and Army, and will continue warmongering as long as Tehran tells it to? Even today, some of Bassil's FPM goons - I believe it is Michel Aoun's nephew Alain Aoun - keep saying that there will be no solution to Lebanon's many crises until there is a regional solution to the Palestine problem. Whether out of a lack of integrity (knowing that one is making a deal with the devil) or lack of political acumen (naively believing Hezbollah's good intentions), Bassil and Aoun erred big time, and I believed it is their lack of integrity and idiotic greed for power that made them sign the MOU. Having criticized Rafik Hariri for decades for studily believing he could rebuild the country under the Syrian occcupation bootsm, they themselves perhaps naively thought they could rebuild the country and fight corruption in it while Hezbollah was ravaging the very roots of the country. Bassil and Aoun covered for Hezbollah for close to 20 years, allowing it to grow and threaten the very existence of Lebanon in general and of its Christians in particular. Many of those who initially held Aoun's resistance to the Arab-Syrian-American onslaught against Lebanon's Christians to be genuine, including yours truly, separated from Aoun almost immediately after he signed his MOU with Hezbollah.
Bassil nowadays goes on television proclaiming his differences with Hezbollah. He's got sanctions imposed on him by the Americans and he is trying to kiss ass to the Americans so they lift the sanctions off him. With Hezbollah placing the country on the edge of the abyss with a potential war with Israel that will be a lot worse than the war in Gaza, Bassil is desperately trying to demarcate himself from his violent and flammable ally. He knows his MOU with Hezbollah has failed in every aspect except that it allowed his father-in-law to become president; a puppet, ineffective and do-nothing president but a president nonetheless. What an achievement!
In Lebanon, politicians are never made to account for their decisions and actions. Many in the Lebanese political pantheon are war criminals who voted themselves an amnesty at the end of the 1975-1990 war. Bassil continues in this tradition by slithering himself from the snake pit in which he shoved himself and the country to score pathetic political ambitions. He believes he can never be held accountable for his disastrous decision to ally himself with a toxic radioactive Hezbollah.
Can he wash the Hezbollah stink off his back? Shouldn't he apologize to the Lebanese people for making a strategic mistake? Shouldn't he at least offer to resign from his leadership position (obtained in typical Lebanese crony politics when Aoun banned elections within the FPM and demanded that Bassil becomes his "heir") because the policies he chose during the past 20 decades have been an utter failure that have contributed to the collapse of the state? He keeps repeating his Fascist pretense to want to save Lebanon's Christians when in fact he has placed them in the path of a deadly Muslim juggernaut.
Shame on Bassil for not having the courage to admit his errors and do the decent thing: Get out of our life. In fact, Geagea should also get out of our life for he too played the switcheroo game for many years: Anti-Syrian, then pro-Syrian, then anti-Syrian again..... These so-called Christian leaders continue to fail their people, yet they are never held accountable by their herd of brainless followers who keep voting them back to power, and they do not have the decency to move aside. Instead of banding together into one united front - like the Lebanese Front of the 1975 war - to fight what may perhaps be the last battle to keep the Christian Lebanese community a "free" community in the Near East, they bicker and hurl insults at one another. Not even the Maronite Patriarch has been able to get them together, proving that his supposed divinely-blessed and venerable position is as ineffective and outdated as theirs.
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