A Bit of Fear and Trepidation

One of the most important challenges that Lebanon is facing after the parliamentary elections that ended with the victory of the March 14 coalition, is for its political leadership – all of its components, and its elite, and with them the warring sects and tribes – to find a transitional formula for coexistence with the shifting regional and international conditions, which are taking on new movement and creating facts upon which future events will be built.

The new dynamism is not limited to various policy orientations of the administration of US President Barack Obama in the Middle East, to regain American leadership there. Nor is it linked to this administration’s dispute with the ruling group in Israel. It does not stop at the rampaging Israeli extremism, which portends military confrontations under the leadership of Benjamin Netanyahu and Avigdor Lieberman. And, it does not end at the ramifications of western policies, led by Obama, on Iran and its presidential election, which has created a movement with an impact on Iran’s future negotiating stance, and not at the western and Arab opening to Damascus.

This new dynamism in the region renders its states all vacillating between a victory for the policy trend of negotiation and comprehensive settlement, and the prospect of destructive military confrontations. The fear of alternative wars instead of authentic ones, to reduce the huge damage involved if adventurers like Netanyahu resort to them, springs from the fact that the Jewish state might resort to a war against Lebanon and Hezbollah, as Iran’s arm in the region, instead of Iran itself, in light of the constant Israeli incitement against Tehran as the currently biggest danger to the Jewish state.

If the victory by the March 14 coalition in the elections reduced the possibility of turning Lebanon into a bargaining chip, held by Iran and Syria (if the opposition had won) and if the trend toward negotiation and settlement becomes more likely, then this win will not eliminate the possibility of Israel engaging in another military adventure against Lebanon, even though it could grant a bit of time to strengthen its regional and international position, in order to avoid the worst case scenario. This can be considered Lebanese coexistence with the two possibilities with less damage. However, this coexistence requires domestic agreement in order to manage it, based first of all on dismantling the political and psychological mobilization and high alert.

If some parties have pointed this out, prior to the elections and after the results were announced, they called for accord and an equal relationship with Syria, as the head of the Future Movement, Saad Hariri, said. They have also called for changing priorities, as the head of the Progressive Socialist Party, Walid Jumblatt, has said, and for a national unity government that does not distinguish between the March 14 and March 8 coalitions in which “the cards are shuffled,” as Speaker Nabih Berri has said. But there are parties that continue to use the language of mobilization, since prior to the elections, and appear to be unable to adapt to the need to re-shuffle the domestic deck, as a result of the regional-international situation.

The latest speech by Hezbollah’s secretary general, Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, warned that dismantling the mobilization by Lebanon’s strongest party and the only armed group with a regional agenda, was very difficult to swallow. Hezbollah’s need to remain at the utmost level of mobilization led it to accept the election results, without adapting to them, and prompted its leadership to widen its battles, to cover the Maronite patriarch, Cardinal Nasrallah Sfeir, and bring out the feelings of sectarian and religious injustice, as if this is the only sect or religion that feels this injustice. This will incite this feeling among others, reproducing the mobilization in a vicious circle.

There might be a responsibility on Speaker Berri, and MPs al-Hariri and Jumblatt (when the two meet with Sayyed Nasrallah to kick off their dialogue with him) for reassuring him with the aim of pushing him to modify his language, in view of the need for the party’s participation in managing the period of coexistence with regional and international political formulas that once again put Lebanon in the middle of the game of nations, or the eye of the storm. However, there is a certain portion of responsibility on Hezbollah. Sayyed Nasrallah made his listeners happy the other day when he said he was preparing for an opposition victory over the majority because “it is a big responsibility, which concerns keeping one’s promises,” after his previous address held that the opposition, if it won, could govern a country 100 times bigger than Lebanon.

Lebanon, and with it Hezbollah, face post-election possibilities that also deserve fear and trepidation.