Lebanon and Dubai
By: Joseph Hitti
March 12, 2007

In the March 11, 2007 issue of the Lebanese Al-Anwar daily, Nadira Al-Said mourns the decline of the tourism sector in Lebanon and its meteoric rise in Dubai, as exemplified by the attendance of a 215-strong delegation from Dubai – and none from Lebanon – to the Tourism Expo in Berlin which opened its doors this past March 7. Ms. Al-Said doesn’t know whether to cry, mourn, suffer the pain or have pity for Lebanon, while congratulating the ruler of Dubai for his wise custody of his State. Since her tears do not address the underlying reasons behind Lebanon’s decline into the backwater junkyard of the Arab World, while the Gulf States and the North African countries are moving fast into the 21st century, here is my take on those reasons:

1 - Lebanon has been in a “fight and resist” mindset since the early 1970s. Thanks to the Lebanese Sunni leadership and its support of the PLO during the 1960s and 1970s, and now thanks to the Shiite leadership under the mantle of Amal and Hezbollah, Lebanon’s economic sectors (banking, tourism and services) have all but evaporated, and the Lebanese people have become the village idiots of the Middle East because they want to liberate Palestine more than the Palestinians do, and at any cost, including the burning and the devastation of Lebanon and over the burned carcass of Lebanon.
Meanwhile, Dubai doesn’t give a hoot about “resisting or fighting” Israel. Instead, its people and government have for decades embarked on a “develop and invest” program, putting their own interests ahead of anything else and, unlike the Lebanese, without any divine inspiration.

2 – Lebanon, in the words of its asinine Prime Minister, says it will be the last Arab country to sign a peace treaty with Israel. Or, in the words of Lebanon’s “Nouveau Prophet” Hassan Nasrallah who has been talking to God “mubasharatan”, the Lebanese should not even recognize Israel and they should burn Lebanon in order to rescue Jerusalem from the hands of the diabolical “Zionist entity”. What this means is that Lebanon – out of a suicidal ultra-Arab or ultra-Islamic nationalist motivation – will wait until all the problems of the Arab world are resolved, and in deference to its Arab “brothers” and to the worldwide Islamic Umma, before beginning to take care of its own people and its own problems.
Meanwhile, Dubai and other sister Gulf Emirates have been allowing Israelis to open “Trade Offices” in their countries, and only recently, Dubai itself announced that it has contracted an Israeli company to build a camel milk processing plant [See: http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1170359790389&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull]. Similarly, Morocco and Tunisia have had cozy and open cultural exchanges with Israel, to say nothing about Egypt and Jordan with their full fledged embassies in Tel-Aviv and their own “civilized” approach to the Middle East problem.

3 - The Lebanese, thanks to Hezbollah, Amal, the Communist Party, the Baath Party, the Syrian National Party (which operates only from Lebanon, since it is banned in Syria itself!!) and other “nouveau Christian Leftists” of the Free Patriotic Movement, are viciously anti-American and anti-Western, even as all these people elbow each other to pay $15,000 a year (6 times the minimum wage) to send their children to the American University of Beirut, and blame the entire world for Lebanon’s problems and refuse the help of the United Nations and the international community to settle Lebanon’s festering problems.
Meanwhile, Dubai has opened its doors to the world, East and West, and welcomes anyone who wants to invest and do business. Major western universities are operating in the Gulf these days, with top notch hospitals and research centers. The engineers and architects of Dubai are dreaming big dreams with skyscrapers in the sea and ski slopes in the desert. The people of Dubai have no inferiority complexes about who they are, and they are not constantly trying to outsmart the world – just working with it. Dubai, under all the glitter, is truly investing in its future. All the Emirates know that their oil will one day be depleted, and they are all working together – under joint economic custodianship as with the Gulf Cooperation Council – to invest the wealth they have today for the future when oil runs out. The Lebanese, on the other hand, continue to destroy their own environment – the lifeline of their defunct tourism industry. Corrupt Lebanese businessmen with political ties to the political elites (who are “resisting” Israel) continue to build their resorts smack on the shoreline, depriving the impoverished Lebanese people of access to their own natural resources. Simply put, the Lebanese are up to their eyeballs in their own shit because of the doing of their own corrupt political leadership that wants to make money (for themselves only) at the same time as it drums up for war and resistance against Israel, the West, and God knows who else. When the Lebanese people complain about this state of affairs, the politicians tell them it is the fault of America, the fault of Israel and its occupation of the Shebaa Farms, the fault of the Palestinian refugees who want to settle permanently in Lebanon, the fault of the Saudis who are paying for all these insidious plots, etc.. that we can’t fix all the chronic problems of Lebanon. And when election time comes up, the Lebanese re-elect those same sectarian, tribal and family Mafiosi leaders back to power.

4 - From the cesspool of their “resistance” and mafia style big political families, the Lebanese continue to display the arrogance of a mythical superiority that is way beyond what they have to offer the world. They think, like the “martyr” Rafik Hariri used to think, that by refurbishing a few buildings downtown and speaking a couple of languages, they can become the Hong Kong of the Middle East. What the Lebanese don’t seem to understand is that decent government, lack of corruption, paying taxes, a respect for their fellow Lebanese, doing away with (or at least reining in) the big family mafias, and before all else, humility, are the foundations of long term sustainable economic prosperity. No one knows what it will take to get the Lebanese to look their problems in the face . The arrogance of the Lebanese makes them blame everyone else for all their ailments, and rarely do they take any responsibility for their own predicament. They blame Syria for its occupation, and they blame Israel for stealing their waters, and they even take the argument into the lunacy of a conspiracy theory that says that Israel is out to destroy Lebanon because the Israelis are afraid the Lebanese are the only ones who are superior and advanced enough among the otherwise inferior Arabs to compete against Israel. Never mind that Lebanon today, 17 years after the end of the “civil war” in 1990, still rations electricity, has no potable drinking water, and so on and forth.

The following are some ideas that Lebanon and its people may want to consider before they can only begin to hope to catch up with Dubai’s giant strides to modernization and economic prosperity:

- Shut down Hezbollah, send Nasrallah back to his dusty mosque and disarm the Palestinians and all other non legitimate armed forces.
- Drop the notion of “liberation by resistance” and adopt the policy of “Lebanon-First”, like many other Arab countries have done. Negotiate a peace treaty with Israel to resolve the puny, meaningless and artificially-created border disputes that have cost so many lives. Why can Jordan and Egypt do it and not Lebanon? Why do the Lebanese suffer from this inferiority complex towards the Arabs? Who says Lebanon has to pay the ultimate price of “liberating Palestine”? Why is Amr Moussa, the Egyptian envoy, acceptable to the Lebanese as a mediator of their own disputes over Israel, when his country has an embassy in Tel-Aviv? Why do the Lebanese talk to Egyptians and Jordanians who “are dealing with the enemy”, while many Lebanese languish as refugees in Israel as they cannot go home lest Hezbollah and the Lebanese government tries them for “treason”? Next time Amr Moussa is in Beirut, he should be arrested at the airport because his passport has Israeli visas stamped on them.
- Democratize the environment and make Lebanon’s beaches and mountain reserves open to the people of Lebanon and to the tourists of the world, and not as it is today the exclusive domain of the corrupt elite that owns virtually the entire ocean front of the country.
- Pay taxes to their government so that their government does not have to go begging for aid and so it can pay for badly needed services.
- Elect decent professional technocrats as representatives to government (and not the sons and grandsons of tribes and feudal families to whom they blindly pledge allegiance) who in turn will:
o Institutionalize human rights in every aspect of Lebanese government and administration.
o Guarantee equal access to economic and political opportunity.
o Guarantee clean running water without rationing.
o Fix the roads, with street lights and a functioning road traffic system.
o Begin transforming the country’s infrastructure to become “ordinary citizen-friendly” with a reliable public transportation system for the entire country, sidewalks, bike paths, pedestrian crossings, lane markers on the roads and streets.
o Provide electricity without rationing
o Have an operating telecommunications (telephone and Internet grid) up to today’s standards.
o Give the Lebanese Diaspora serious means to integrate the Lebanese economy – investment opportunities, the right to vote, accountability, etc.
- Have true freedom and democracy, not the disguised tribal-religious oligarchy that keeps them enslaved in antiquated and archaic traditions out of synch with the modern world.

Only by adopting a forward-looking, “Lebanon First”, policy that looks first and foremost at Lebanon’s interests and at improving the daily lives of the Lebanese people, before any other consideration or interest – Arab, Islamic, Palestinian, Iranian, or Syrian nationalism… - will Lebanon hope – I repeat, hope – to regain a sliver of the glory it once had. Absorbed as they are by burning their country to the ground to liberate Palestine, and pushing into emigration the last few brains they have, the Lebanese right now stand on the verge on turning their country into a tree-less desert mountain that has nothing to offer the world except arrogance, religious fanaticism and a few dilapidated ruins. Those are not tourist attractions.