Lebanon’s Year Zero

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Title : Lebanon’s Year Zero
Link : Lebanon’s Year Zero

(JNS) How long do you keep investing in failure? How much effort does one put into reviving a corpse? When can you, or when are you allowed to, try something different? The late Sudanese rebel leader John Garang used to say that the regime in Sudan was “too deformed to be reformed” (he made a deal with that regime though, for the sake of peace, and tragically died before seeing the consequences).

In a region full of rotten, dysfunctional regimes, tiny Lebanon has become a cautionary tale of world-class implosion and corruption. The World Bank described it as “likely to rank in the top 10, possibly top 3, most severe crisis episodes globally since the mid-nineteenth century.” And this situation has been unraveling before our eyes for almost two years, seemingly in slow motion for outside observers, and unbearable for Lebanese, suffering from so much cruelty and privation.

And while the international community - really France and the United States -has tried to cajole the Lebanese ruling elite, the same people that caused this crisis in the first place, into taking urgent steps to allow the West to help, that elite is resistant. They have other priorities, such as remaining in power, dividing up the dwindling spoils and maneuvering for future positions.

In particular, there is the question of who will be Lebanon’s president after the doddering Michel Aoun leaves the scene. Will it be another Hezbollah collaborator, or a return to another agent of Damascus? Aoun, the country’s current head of state, is a perfect metaphor for the elite’s political moment - oblivious, complacent, alternating between cunning and senility.

With its distinctive history and mix of sects, Lebanon is, of course, unique. The disaster is also unique. Many states have had imploded economies, corruption and rotten elites, but in Lebanon these are all happening with the context of the country being ruled indirectly by an Iranian terrorist group through that rotten elite and its institutions.

Hezbollah is technically a Lebanese organization, its members are Lebanese citizens, but in any real sense it functions as an extension of the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). It is an occupation force whose occupiers are local citizens, akin to the old days when imperial powers would raise local subaltern forces to police their colonies for them. READ MORE