From the southern town of Jezzine, Gebran Bassil attacked Hezbollah’s ultimatum of either Sleiman Frangieh as president or chaos (reminiscent of US envoy Richard Murphy’s 1988 “either Mikhail Daher or chaos” ultimatum to Aoun himself), leaving no doubt that Bassil’s relationship with the Iranian terror organization has taken its final downturn towards open enmity. The ill-conceived 2006 Mar Mikhail Memorandum of Understanding between the Christian Free Patriotic Movement party of Michel Aoun and Gebran Bassil, and the Shiite Muslim fundamentalist Iranian militia Hezbollah, is finally for all practical purposes a cold corpse decaying in the open fetid air of Beirut.
Those who pretend to be surprised by this turn of events are either hypocrites or idiots. When, in 2006, the MOU was signed, many hailed it as a pioneering breakthrough and a model for other Lebanese parties to follow in engaging each other in trans-sectarian alliances. Yet, even the dumbest of pundits and analysts should have assessed the fundamentals of Lebanese politics and come to the conclusion that such an alliance was doomed to fail. For more than 15 years (1988-2005) prior to the MOU, Aoun was an avowed enemy of Syria, Iran, Hezbollah, and the so-called “resistance” axis. Then in 2006, Aoun (and Bassil behind him) signed the MOU and reversed their entire ideology and became the best friends of Syria, Iran and Hezbollah.
The surprise at such a reversal is now obvious in hindsight. The MOU basically was an agreement to push Aoun into the presidential palace in exchange for the FPM becoming a Christian fig leaf to protect the otherwise hated Muslim fundamentalists of Hezbollah and give them legitimacy in Lebanese politics. Hezbollah delivered by paralyzing the country for 2.5 years and forcing Aoun into the presidency, while the FPM delivered by defending the unlawful and destructive activities of Hezbollah. Even after these activities led to the present collapse of the state and its institutions, the demolition of the country’s economy, and the killing of the Greater Lebanon entity after 100 years of its existence, Gebran Bassil is still desperately attached to the MOU, naively thinking that Hezbollah should make him president in the footsteps of his father-in-law Michel Aoun. What a fool.
The responsibility for the debacle lies squarely with Aoun and Bassil. As political leaders, their task is to foresee the future repercussions of their policies and actions. How on earth could Aoun and Bassil have thought back in 2006 that their alliance with Hezbollah was somehow a positive thing for the country as a whole? In fact, they didn’t believe an ounce of it, but they marketed it with big slogans. They knew this was an act of treason against their beliefs and the country, but they persisted in it for petty personal gains and dragging behind them all the idiotic members of their FPM who, like most Lebanese, blindly follow their leaders, build a psychotic cult culture around them, and idolize them, regardless of what the leaders do or say. Lebanon, in many ways, remains a primitive country, despite all the shiny “modern” objects its people display.
Bassil is now hypocritically letting the Lebanese – his Christian followers in particular – know that he is changing course but without admitting any mistake and responsibility in the choices he made. Like the prodigal son, he is returning to the pre-2006 anti-Hezbollah postures of Michel Aoun. But he is doing so like a snake, stealthily, hoping no one would notice the metamorphosis. For instance, he is now rejecting Hezbollah’s warmongering against Israel and claiming that the interests of the country come first. When his Christian rivals used to call for a “Lebanon first” policy to shield the country against destructive wars with Israel, Bassil and Aoun would defend Hezbollah’s warmongering and humiliate the Lebanese Army by declaring it incapable. When Hezbollah ally Bashar Assad of Syria dispatched some twenty fake ISIS Jihadis to the Lebanese-Syrian border to scare off the Lebanese and its Christians, Bassil and Aoun applauded a heroic Hezbollah as it rushed to “defend” Lebanon’s Christians, defeat the Jihadis and send them off back to Syria in air-conditioned busses. The Lebanese Army was left with the menial task of cleaning up after the battle.
Lebanon’s Christians should no longer be fools to their traditional leaders. They should hold them accountable for all the calamities they have inflicted on them over the past 50 years. Rabid power-hungry leaders like Bassil, who come to the political stage, not because of merit, not because of credentials, but only because they are the sons or sons-in-law of a family patriarch, should be rejected. Before winning in any parliamentary election, Bassil was forcibly made a minister in government and a leader of the FPM for the single reason that he (presumably) still shares a bed with one of Aoun’s daughters. I will not make a judgment on all the corruption suspicions, which the US Treasury seems to have picked upon by placing Bassil under sanctions, because no one has yet made any evidence public. Stupidity, greed for power, entitlement to political positions, treachery,… all are sufficient indicators of a bad leader who should be rejected.
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