The man they all love to hate
By: Joseph Hitti
Edgartown, Massachusetts -USA

We have said it many times, and everyone knows that Michel Aoun has a much longer way to go than his enemies to qualify for the “pro-Syrian” label they love to tag him with these days. As hard as they say he is trying, he could never beat his opponents of the March 14 Movement in the pro-Syrian Olympiads of Lebanon, for they have scored the highest records ever in the category of poodling, cavorting, and whoring to Syria for decades.

It has truly become disgusting to read the insipid commentaries in the press – the latest being Michael Young’s of the Daily Star – about Aoun’s alleged cardinal sin of being “pro-Syrian”, which is a qualifier they assign to him and not one he chooses for himself. They support their argument with grandiose conspiracy theories about purported secret promises that Aoun allegedly made to the Syrian regime not to criticize it in exchange for his return to Lebanon last May, or about secret visits made to Damascus or to Aoun’s residence in exile in Paris to concoct insidious and “unpatriotic” deals, and other such thriller-worthy stories that the Lebanese press, far from its claims to objectivity, loves to cite as “reliable information”.

The defamation and slander of the man’s character have reached such a crescendo as to make us wonder about the true motives behind this campaign. They have gone so far as to suggest that the hundreds of thousands of Lebanese people who rallied around Aoun’s beleaguered government in Baabda in 1988 and 1989 were bussed in “Syrian-style” from the schools and their factories to make a fake show of a patriotism that did not really exist in the hearts of the Lebanese people. Like blood hounds who smell blood and can no longer hear their own barking, their enraged delirium makes them say one moment that Aoun did support Taef, only to turn around a moment later and say that he opposed it. Worse yet, they have developed a convoluted conspiracy theory that wants the Lebanese people to believe that Aoun has always been a Syrian agent, long before he came to power in 1988, and that his “War of liberation” was in fact a decoy he planted to give the Syrians the pretext to invade the last free zone and complete their takeover of Lebanon.

The blood hounds, it seems, must have picked up a scent, a dangerous one, for the barking and the howling can’t seem to subside. What is it that Aoun did – or perhaps may do – to them to incite such guttural violence out of these people? For the sake of argument, I tell myself, I will suspend my judgment for a while and agree with his detractors that Aoun is a Syrian agent who planned in the mid-1980s to seize power, pretend to fight the Syrian occupier against the Hariris, the Jumblatts, the Berris, the Gemayels, the Geageas and basically everyone else at the time, only to deliver the country in the hands of the Assad regime, go into exile for 15 years – still pretending to be anti-Syrian as a means to establish trust with the Lebanese people – and then take off his gloves upon his return to the country and declare himself the ultimate pro-Syrian Lebanese politician vying for the presidency of Lebanon.

Assuming all this to be true, and adding the diagnosis of Aoun’s “megalomaniacal” tendencies into the mix, what choices therefore are these March 14 Movement pundits offering the Lebanese people?

1 – One alternative: Aoun wins his wager. He becomes President – a strong one by their own admission (although I personally use “strong” without a judgment value attached) because he is a man of no compromises – and an ally of Syria to boot. What is he likely to do from that supposedly “pro-Syrian” platform of power? Hard to tell. What can he do that they themselves, for the past three decades, did not do with their incestuous alliances with the sisterly Syria? Fact is, Aoun never said such things as Lebanon and Syria are one people in two states, or that Syria and Lebanon share one fate and one path, or any of the Arab nationalist inanities of his enemies. He never said that Lebanon is the shield behind which Syria should hide in fighting Israel. Everyone else in the March 14 Movement said or endorsed those statements for years. As recently as this past Fall, as he eulogized Ghazi Kanaan, Walid Jumblatt was still praising the Arab and Syrian identity of Lebanon. Not today. Everything that Aoun has said and written about his political program seems absolutely irrelevant to the pro-Syrian or anti-Syrian duality or to any stale and tired Arab nationalist ideologies that many in the March 14 Movement espoused for years and continue to do so to this day.

Aoun’s discourse speaks of such plans as opening the dirty files of the war years, taking to justice all those who pilfered money from the treasury, reforming the Lebanese system, cleaning up corruption, fixing the economy, fighting the three feudalisms: Family feudalism, money feudalism, and religious feudalism. In other words, Aoun’s program may expose and bring to light and justice all the actions that the figures of the March 14 Movement did under the Syrian umbrella for decades. It will answer questions as to why many of them became rich while the rest of us were impoverished and pushed into emigration. No wonder then that today they cry foul at the mere suggestion of Aoun as a President. He wants a change in the fundamentals of the Lebanese political system that have proven nothing short of disastrous over the decades. Of course, this is what he says he wants to do. Nothing certifies that he will succeed, but at least the man deserves a chance to try and he can only be judged on the basis of the present and the past, and not on the future.

2 – The other alternative – Aoun loses his wager, and the self-declared “anti-Syrian” camp (who was pro-Syrian up to February 2005) manages to sideline Aoun and elect – to use Michael Young’s own admonition to Aoun – a “consensus” president. A consensus president in Lebanese political parlance is the kind of presidents Lebanon began having when the Arabs started interfering in Lebanese politics, circa after Camille Chamoun and Fouad Shehab. Lebanese consensus presidents are genetically-engineered Maronite men with different parts of their anatomies belonging to different political, national, and ideological creeds, stitched together like a Frankenstein monster except that the mad scientist forgot the part of their anatomy that defines a man. Politically, they are watered down political dwarfs who are invariably ineffectual at cleaning up corruption – when they are not part and parcel of it – or at making decisions that are exclusively in the interest of Lebanon. They failed to quell the Palestinian hijacking of Lebanese sovereignty. They failed to quell the domestic militias that followed. They signed agreements that sold Lebanon’s sovereignty to the Arabs. Our consensus presidents, like Charles Helou and Elias Sarkis, like Amine Gemayel and Elias Hrawi, not to mention Emile Lahoud squatting today in Baabda, were by and large political castrati who could never make the right decision for their country, who never had the guts to stand for principle, but who were always eager to sell their own people for a cut of the loot and sign agreements only to remain in power and transfer such power to their progeny. This is why we had a 30-year long war that does not seem to end, even after the Syrian occupation has ended, with half a dozen UN resolutions to support us, and several so million-strong demonstrations.

The people in the March 14 Movement and their apologists in the press – the Michael Youngs and other nouveaux vanguards of Lebanese intelligentsia – are simply afraid of change. They are the members or followers of the elite, the feudal families, the money whales, and the religious establishments that have been running the country – and driving it to the ground – forever it seems. The results speak for themselves. They are the journalists who developed fantastic theories during the years of the Syrian occupation to justify and explain the occupation, or worse yet, who never said a word out of fear. Out of cowardice. Out of intellectual jaundice. They are the ones who imposed on themselves a so-called “self-censorship” during the occupation in deference to the Syrian occupier. They are the ones who ignored the plight of the detainees in Syria’s jails, the kidnappings and the murders, and the dungeons of the Syrian Intelligence. They are the ones who opposed the anti-Syrian occupation demonstrations by the students of Aoun’s Free Patriotic Movement. They are the ones who developed obtuse theories to justify Hezbollah’s hijacking of the country’s sovereignty in the south and appease the Syrians. They simply decided to shut up because they had interests to protect: The family newspaper, the family business, the connections with the ruling regime in Damascus and the profitable channels. They are reluctant to shed that corrupt power and the paybacks they amassed on the dole of billionaire politicians who whored themselves to Syria and Saudi Arabia, thinking they could rebuild a country under the boots of the Syrian regime.

They fear a Aoun who will put on trial their dirty deals, expose their decades-long collaboration with Syria with all the corruption and the silence that came with it. This is the real reason why they are all banding together against him. They are indeed smelling blood: Their own. They know their hides will be skinned in the free market of justice, people’s rights and decent governance. They know that Aoun is the intruder on their 30-year old orgy of beautiful people who had no reason to flee the occupation because they slept with it. They know that the party will be over if Aoun is president, and that is what terrifies them and drives them to foam at the mouth at the mere thought of Aoun in power.

The Lebanese people are not dupes, but they are survivors. Their instincts are correct, but they learned to hide them when their lives were under duress. They continue to vote against reason for the Zaims: Gemayels, Berris, Hariris, Jumblatts, Chamouns and all the other petty warlords and money lords because they fear them, because they have not learned to hold their politicians accountable. This is the mentality of survivors, of former hostages and slaves. The Lebanese people should realize that their only salvation is with a strong president who has a program, and not an emasculated consensus puppet that the March 14 Movement will prop up for years as a president only to perpetuate the corruption, bad governance and impotence of all the consensus presidents since the 1960s.

The real question is not who is pro-Syrian and who is anti-Syrian. This duality is outdated and irrelevant. From the outside, the image of Lebanese politics defining itself in reference to its former occupying foreign country is absurd, asinine and a further testimony to the inability of the Lebanese people to be themselves. The real question is who is going to lift the country out of the swamps of feudalism and the anachronisms of religion and confessionalism? The real question for me, an ordinary Lebanese, is when will I have my rights to vote abroad, when will children born to Lebanese mothers have the same right to Lebanese citizenship as children born to Lebanese fathers? When will the “anti-Syrian” Lebanese government speak up against Syria’s continued detention of hundreds of innocent Lebanese citizens in its jails? When will the “anti-Syrian” government arrest a single suspect in the string of assassinations and bombings that have racked the country? When will ordinary Lebanese have access to the administration and political power simply on the basis of merit, and not on the basis of their father’s chromosomes? When will the Lebanese people have governments that serve them, and not the other way around? Is it really fair and smart that Saad Hariri inherit the post of Prime Minister of Lebanon because his father had money and was a friend of Syria and Saudi Arabia? Is it really fair and smart that Amine Gemayel – the infamous Monsieur 5 % – still has claims to political leadership because of his father, and in spite of his own abject failure as President? Is it really fair and smart that a chameleon like Walid Jumblatt, who changes his political opinions faster than he changes his underwear, be leading the Druze simply because he is his father’s son? How can we justify to the world that Lebanon is a democracy when power is inherited in the most tribal and backwards manner? What claims do we have to be a modern society when we allow unelected men dressed in robes and fancy hats – patriarchs and muftis, bishops and imams, sheikhs and priests – make fatal decisions on our behalf and have a say in who the next president should be?

The March 14 Movement represents the residue of an old order that is chocking in its own vomit. The Lebanese people ought to deal them the coup de grace and relinquish them to the dustbins of history where they belong. Let any other strong presidential candidates run and compete with Aoun for the office, and let them prove themselves in the electoral battlefield. But please, spare the country yet another consensus president.

Dr. Joseph Hitti
*Joseph Hitti, President of New England Americans for Lebanon
*Political Commentator
*Active Lebanese Lobbyist in the USA
E.mail joehittimass@yahoo.com