Zebran Basij: Purposeless Scheming

DO YOU REALLY WANT THIS FACE FOR PRESIDENT?

Zebran Basij has no plans for the country. His only objective is to become president, like his father-in-law Michel Aoun did, without any idea of what he wanted to do with the presidency. It turned out, unfortunately, that Aoun, prompted by Zebran, wanted revenge, take the country back to the 1980s and 1990s, and somehow cleanse the stains of his many defeats by doing a tit-for-tat to the Sunnis.

For some reason, Aoun and Basij, like most Lebanese politicians, are professional politicians in the dirtiest sense of the word. Intrigue, backstabbing, maneuvering, scheming, blocking, deception.... without any foundation in ideology or ideal. For decades, we thought that Aoun had big ideas about moving Lebanon forward, not backward. But then Zebran Basij entered the stage and turned what could have been a hopeful renaissance (out of the country's stinking feudal tribal sectarian cesspool) into a vulgar act of revenge in which he displayed the same thuggish conduct as his enemies. Basij in fact turned the person Michel Aoun into a political family farm just like the Hariri, Jumblatt, Frangiyeh, Gemayel, Karami etc. farms.

No one knows what, if any, vision Zebran has for Lebanon or for the Christians whom he claims to want to protect. His is a mindset of a minoritarian victim whose only outlook is to further shrivel and wallow in the victim rat hole. 

His latest act of cheap pedestrian politics was to try and drive a wedge between his two Shiite allies who are like Siamese brothers. With Hezbollah having chosen their candidate for the presidency in the person of Sleiman Frangiyeh, another feudal tribal warlord allied with Syria's Bashar Assad, Basij feels slighted since he, not Frangiyeh, crawled at the feet of Hassan Nasrallah and signed his Memorandum of Surrender between Aoun's Free Patriotic Movement and Hezbollah. As a mediocre politician without any vision, he thought that an alliance with the Shiites could help him in his revenge against the Sunnis. He got the Shiites to back Aoun for the presidency, at the price of paralyzing parliament (by killing the quorum) for 2.5 years. What a miserable petty strike of imbecility.

Aoun became president, but since he owed his self-labeled "strong" presidency to Hezbollah, he was ineffectual and weak and could not confront the Iranian militia. Instead, pricked by everyone else for this utterly stupid alliance, Aoun and Basij found themselves at odds with Hezbollah's Siamese twin, the Amal movement of Nabih Berri. For all those years, Berri and Nasrallah, screwed Aoun at every bend in the road. They owned him, and he couldn't risk losing them. Isolated as they have become from the other Christians, from the Sunnis and the Druze, Aoun and Basij again began scheming to force a wedge between Amal and Hezbollah. Last week, Basij met his hated ally Berri in secret, after securing the meeting thanks to Berri's daughter who is, nepotism oblige, the Lebanese ambassador in Qatar.

The meeting with Berri did not go well. Basij wanted Berri to intercede with Hezbollah to change its preference for Frangiyeh and adopt him instead as a candidate for the presidency. He also went to Paris where most French politicians refused to meet with him, and where he hoped the French would intercede with the Americans to lift their corruption-related sanctions imposed on him. And that did not go well either.

Berri bluntly told Basij: You have a memorandum of understanding with your ally Hezbollah. Why are you asking me to mediate between two allies? Go talk to Hezbollah.

The French told Basij: We cannot lobby the US Treasury Department to lift sanctions because its decisions are technical, not political. 

In other words, Basij has no friends left because of his abrasive second-rate discourse against anyone that disagrees with him. He is left with one friend, Hezbollah, who has opted for Sleiman Frangiyeh as a candidate for president. And that is making Basij really hurt, he who has bent over backward and burned his bridges with everyone else to provide the Iranian militia with a Christian fig leaf.

I've said it before: Lebanese politics lacks higher order thinking. Politics in this country is not about leading with a lofty goal of improving the lives of people or uniting the disparate elements of the country behind such a lofty goal; it is more about how to prick a rival, how to backstab a friend, how to make money with backroom deals, how to insult, how to rally your followers by scaring them into hating everyone else, etc. 

Again, Zebran Basij has no plans for the country. If he becomes president, the Lebanese people know that his only modus operandi would be more of the pathetic low-level moronic revenge by blocking any step forward on issues that really matter, just like his "strong" father-in-law did. By denying any success to non-Christian segments of Lebanese society, Aoun and Basij are behaving like the filthy republicans of the US: Block, stall, stir up anger, etc... for the sole reason of denying Obama or Biden any success. In such cases, the only victims of this vulgar way of governing are the people of the country. Aoun came in as a self-labeled "strong" president. Indeed, he displayed strength by obstructing everything and everyone that came his way. By the time he left office, the whole country was obstructed to the point of a calamitous collapse and disintegration of all its institutions. Aoun led the country into becoming the most failed country on earth for a century. Zebran Basij, as the engineer  of Aoun's political career after Aoun's return from exile in 2005, is likely to do the same and further decimate Lebanon to the point of extinction. Maybe that is their ultimate goal: The dismantling of the Greater Lebanon mutant-hybrid so that Christians can separate themselves from the Muslims. But wouldn't it be more courageous and statesman-like to openly declare their objective?

Without Michel Aoun's residual aura in his watermark, Basij will likely keep flailing about to remain relevant. He knows that his only salvation can come from only one specific near-suicidal act: Divorce Hezbollah. And fast.