Gebran Bassil travels a lot, particularly in the outlying regions of the country – the North and the Bekaa – where his popular base is limited.
For each trip, the army is forced to deploy 3,000 soldiers – that’s right, 3,000 soldiers – to ensure his security. One can imagine the prodigious cost of this protection. The problem is that the Free Patriotic Movement (FPM) boss’s new hobbyhorse is Syrian refugees. But this is just one tool in his ongoing campaign against the army that protects him and, above all, against its commander-in-chief, Joseph Aoun, with the sole aim of discrediting his “presidential eligibility.” In short, 3,000 soldiers are mobilized every time to hear the politician (Bassil) criticize them. Incidentally, during President Michel Aoun’s six years in office, what did Bassil do to spare the country from the Syrian migrant crisis?
Perhaps it would be a good idea for the leader of the FPM to take up “tele-criticism” on Zoom or elsewhere, and thus pursue his purely political smear campaign, while avoiding the mobilization of 3,000 soldiers for each oratorical salvo.
