From General to General: Lebanon in Perpetual Crisis
Joseph Hitti
December 3, 2007

Syria came dragging its feet to Annapolis for the hefty prize of, yet again, interfering in Lebanon’s internal affairs. Unfortunately, and in spite of repeated assurances by this Bush administration that - unlike the Bush father administration in the early 1990s – it will not sell out Lebanon to Syria as an enticement for the latter to join the Palestinian-Israeli peace process, it appears the US has shifted gears in its position and has rewarded the Baathist regime of Bashar Assad by authorizing the “anti-Syrian” March 14 traditionalist coalition in Beirut to acquiesce to pro-Syrian General Michel Suleiman as a candidate for the Presidency of the Republic, a post which has been vacant since Parliament failed to elect a new President late last week.

In a surprising turnabout, the stalwart hodge-podge coalition of corrupt big-money traditionalists and former warlords who for months had repeatedly rejected any constitutional amendment and were categorically against a military man in the seat, recanted the very next day following the conclusion of the Annapolis conference and said it was now willing to amend the constitution in order to elect Army Commander Michel Suleiman. In a statement issued yesterday, the coalition stated: “[The Coalition] has revised its principled position vis-à-vis an amendment to the constitution, in order to bring about a solution that stops the exacerbation of the crisis, puts an end to the plot for toppling the State and its institutions, and leads to filling the constitutional vacuum in the post of the Presidency of the Republic…”

After the March 14 coalition celebrated the end of the term of General Emile Lahoud, Syria’s top Lebanese dog for nine years, it is now rushing to elect General Michel Suleiman, another one of Syria’s big Lebanese dogs, as the up and coming new President of Lebanon. Michel Suleiman made his career cavorting to the Syrians and dismantling his own army in order to support Hezbollah. He was appointed Army Commander by Lahoud himself in the same wave of Syrian occupation-approved appointments that brought the men (many of whom are now in prison on suspicion of involvement in the Rafik Hariri assassination) into their positions of power: Brig. Gen. Jamil al-Sayyid at the helm of the General Security Directorate (today in prison), Brig. Samir al-Khadem, a naturalized Syrian who was born in Bashar Assad's hometown, as Commander of the Navy, Colonel Maher Toufayli, who previously worked closely with Hezbollah as head of Military Intelligence in south Lebanon, as Deputy Director General of State Security, and the Colonel Raymond Azar as Director of Military Intelligence (today in prison) [From: Gary Gambill, Middle East Intelligence Bulletin, Vol.3, No. 11, 2001].

Michel Suleiman’s leadership of the Army was everything that the Syrians wanted: The Army was deliberately and systematically undermined, in both its morale and its readiness, consistently with the Syrian policy of weakening the Army while elevating Hezbollah as the ultimate defender of Lebanon against the “Zionist occupation”. Throughout the years of the Syrian occupation, the Shebaa charade and Hezbollah’s resistance farce in the south, Hassan Nasrallah repeatedly told the Lebanese people “the Army was incapable of defending the country”, and not once did Michel Suleiman object to this insult to his own institution. In fact, for all those years and to this day, the salary of every soldier in Michel Suleiman’s Lebanese Army is subject to a compulsory 10% deduction which goes to funding the “resistance” activities of Hezbollah. The justification is that since the Army is incapable of defending the country, and Hezbollah is making up for the Army’s deficiency and impotence, it makes sense to punish every Lebanese soldier by taking his money and giving it to the Iranian lackey Hassan Nasrallah.

To add insult to injury, Suleiman’s Lebanese and Maronite identities are themselves under suspicion: His grandparents are rumored to have been members of the Syrian Alawi tribe of the Assads of Syria before emigrating to Lebanon and becoming Maronite Christians. Through his own marriage, he seems to have retained those Syrian ties since he married into a Syrian family with very close political connections with the Assads: Michel Suleiman’s brother-in-law is Gebran Khouriyyeh, none else but the official spokesman of the late Syrian dictator Hafez Assad.

When the Syrian Army was withdrawing from Lebanon in 2005, under intense pressure from the Lebanese people and the international community, Michel Suleiman, like Walid Jumblatt (today an anti-Syrian pillar of the March 14 coalition), lauded the role of the Syrian Army in Lebanon for 30 years of occupation, crediting it with rebuilding the army, maintaining peace among the country's 17 sects and ending the 1975-90 civil war. He bid farewell to his Syrian “brothers in arms’ with these words: "Together we shall always remain brothers in arms in the face of the Israeli enemy.” [From: International Herald Tribune, After 29 years, Syria leaves Lebanon, April 26, 2005].

At the height of the Nahr El-Bared battles earlier this past summer, Suleiman defended Syria against accusations that it created and sponsored Fatah Al-Islam – in stark opposition to the positions of the March 14 coalition – saying instead that Fatah Al-Islam is an Al-Qaeda branch operating in Lebanon.

And so today, the March 14 coalition, and very likely Hezbollah and its ally Michel Aoun, will again in the tradition of treacherous Lebanese politics collude to protect their own positions, abide by the dictates of outsiders, and betray their own people by yet again raping the constitution and electing someone who should not be elected. Michel Suleiman is a former Syrian crony, a military man who has run the Lebanese army as a militarily-emasculated intelligence unit of the Syrian Mukhabaraat Services, and who stands to become the next President of Lebanon. No one seems to notice that all those Generals who have attempted to “save” Lebanon looked promising under their brass the first 6 months, only to turn into one big disappointment every time: General Fouad Shihab (and his successor Charles Helou) who ran the country under a heavy-handed “Second Bureau” not unlike the East German Stasi and whose “reign” ended in 1972 with the only democratic presidential election Lebanon ever had. General Emile Boustani who signed the 1969 Cairo Accord ceding sovereignty of the Lebanese south to Yasser Arafat’s PLO, General Aoun who liberated the presidential palace into the hands of Syria, and General Lahoud who was the Syrian dictator’s point man for the many long years of the occupation from 1990 to 2005 and then some. And now, we are told, the “compromise” or “consensus” President is another Syrian pro-Consul military man, General Michel Suleiman?

There will be much rejoicing at the election of a President, not because the right man was elected, and not because the will of the Lebanese people has been met. There will be rejoicing because a crisis – out of hundreds that the country has seen under the aegis of the corrupt Lebanese political establishment – has been averted for a while. Two years down the line, the problems of Hezbollah’s weapons, Iran’s and Syria’s influences, the Palestinian refugee camps, the non-identification of Lebanon’s Moslem communities with a simple Lebanese national identity divorced from Islam or Pan-Arab nationalism, will still be around to cause a new crisis and a new paralysis of government, primarily because of the flaws of the Taef Agreement which has sown the seeds for bigger future problems than at any time in the past. The fate of Lebanon and the Lebanese people, it seems, is to live from crisis to crisis, in perpetual dependency on the feudal lords, the warlords, the religious institutions, the traditionalist families of Ottoman occupation vintage, and the new oily and shiny big money whales from the Arab hinterland, and never to see the real fundamental problems of Lebanon’s gangrenous political body addressed.