1. Home
2. Lebanon
3. The Regalian Function and the Poor Exercise of Power

The new government of Lebanon was welcomed as symptomatic of a new era. Nonetheless, its shortcomings are obvious, and its inaugural performance is not a good omen. The political subtext is plainly contradictory, and its steering committee doesn’t seem to realize that its multiple inconsistencies are self-defeating. Surfing on the false idea of technocratic neutrality and non-partisanship, its ideological discrepancies and regalian exercise of power betray its blatant partisanship and the inability of the cabinet to operate as an integrated body with clearly stated policy objectives. Otherwise, the glaring differences between the experts and the politicians seem to distort the democratic decision process and the concentration of power within a coterie of power holders with an obvious political agenda.

The latest political troubles are quite ominous and revelatory of the numerous ideological and political incompatibilities and imbalances. The cabinet formation scheme has utterly failed to create an integrated platform whereby technicality and political expediency are complementary. To boot, the implicit political assumption is explicitly dismissive of the strategic and political facts generated by the Israeli counteroffensive and its manifold consequences. The ideological blinders do not acknowledge these facts, and policymaking mutates into political exorcism and denial of reality. The lackluster implementation of the truce stipulations and the childish blame externalization dictate the political agenda and account largely for the inability to draft a coherent statement and deal with the vagaries of Shiite fascism.

This cabinet should realize that it cannot navigate its course amidst political inconsistencies and ideological blinders, and be swayed by the sabotaging politics of Hezbollah and the instrumentation of Iranian power politics. The political silence of the current coalition displays its structural weaknesses and political inadequacies. Leaving the unleashing insecurity in the hands of poorly framed security measures and the flimsy structured military interventions is a hazardous decision that may expose the troops to the inconsistencies of the executive power. Finally, the implementation of the international resolutions cannot be confined to mere operational issues and dismiss the larger political picture.

Lebanon is not able to steer its political trajectory through tactical tinkering, mendacity and political meandering anymore. It has to make an explicit political statement on the urgency of a negotiated peace treaty with the State of Israel, lest it engage the final stage of a self-generated process of political destruction initiated sixty years ago. Lebanon has no more chance to survive unless it addresses the issue of peace with Israel as an axial point in policy formulation. I wonder whether the Salam cabinet is willing to modify its ideological script, amend its policy plans and distance itself from Palestinian militancy and Iranian power politics, which destroyed Lebanon and jointly challenged the negotiated peace scenarios, despite their strategic differences.

The hackneyed topics of ontological enmity with Israel were recycled by the current executive power, which was a repeated exercise in political futility, political irresponsibility and inability to imagine an alternative course to the destructive cycles of violence that have plagued this country over the last decades, let alone their lack of audacity and ideological subservience to the dull and murderous ideology of absolutized enmity and essentialized hatred. Lebanon is the last hostage of Iranian power politics and has no opportunity to escape the damnation of the Shiite totalitarian panopticon unless Iran is defeated, its tattered Islamic narrative ultimately buried and remaining proxies annihilated.

The ideological delirium exhibited by the Hezbollah cohorts is the outcome of a long-standing indoctrination and a hardwired string of networks operating on a continuum of terrorism and organized criminality that accounts for the sturdy knots that bind this primitive horde huddled around its totemic figures and operational nexuses. Lebanon has no other alternative but to reckon with the salient strategic and political issues and start acting as a coherent and sovereign national actor; otherwise, its disintegration will come full circle, and the loopholes will be hard to find. Any executive in Lebanon has to come to terms with the new realities on the ground, outgrow the infantilization driven by stunted political growth and face the reality of peacemaking elicited by the Abrahamic accords and their revolutionary ideological and political inflections.