A storm breaks offshore from Beirut PHOTO: Akhater http://www.flickr.com/photos/akhater/

“Pray don’t talk to me about the weather, Mr. Worthing. Whenever people talk to me about the weather, I always feel quite certain that they mean something else. And that makes me so nervous.”
- Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest, Act 1

Firstly, apologies for a post about the weather – it is, as Wilde once quipped, “the last refuge of the unimaginative.”

But there can be no refuge for Lebanon’s hapless Minister of Transport and Public Works, who seems to blame everyone but himself for the country’s inability to deal with poor weather. It is the municipalities, Ghazi Aridi laments, who ought to deal with localized flooding and storm damage.

As schools and other public buildings are evacuated, power cuts more rampant than usual and roads turned unceremoniously into canals, Aridi has no one to blame but himself.

Minister of Transport and Public Works Ghazi Aridi

Firstly, is not the responsibility of individual municipalities to protect the safety of Lebanese citizens. That job falls to the ISF, under the tutelage of the ever-proactive Ziad Baroud. This is, ultimately, the primary concern during periods of adverse weather.

But Aridi’s idea of decentralized planning to deal with acts of nature misses the root cause of the problem: for too long Lebanon as been redeveloped in a manner that is haphazard and poorly coordinated.

Individual private sector firms build upon swaths of land, plastering porous soil in impermeable concrete. The reason why rainwater collects and destroys so rapidly in Lebanon is because most of the country is covered in tarmac.

Two weeks ago I was awoken by workers drilling through the asphalt on the street below to get to manhole and drain covers which had been thoughtless tarmaced over the last time the road was relayed. Annoying as this was, the incident epitomizes the make do and mend attitude of the public work’s ministry, unable to reign in local developmental malpractice.

A complete lack of centralized planning is the fault of central administration and the cause of so much damage whenever the heavens break above Beirut and other towns in Lebanon.

Aridi has repeatedly shown an inability to deal with a compartmentalized planning system. Unlike his diligent cohort in the fight against flooding, Aridi seems unwilling to shoulder responsibility.

Lebanon’s Minister of Public Works simply isn’t working.

Lebanese environmental activists carry a banner calling on Arab countries to take action against climate change, as Arab participants enter the venue of the annual conference of the Arab Forum for Environment and Development (AFED) in BEIRUT, November 19, 2009. The forum highlights the impact of climate change on Arab countries. REUTERS/ Mohamed Azakir

When Arab leaders arrived last week  in Beirut to discuss how to avert climate change, they did so – without exception – in elaborately large cars.

Attendees at the Arab Forum for Environment and Development (AFED) conference in Sin El Fil came with a swashbuckling desire to adapt to the proliferating damage being wrought by global warming. They came with high rhetoric and ambitious plans.

They also came with an hypocrisy which extended way beyond their deeply inappropriate transport.

Dr Rashed Bin Fahed, UAE environment and water minister, summed up the general mood of martyred victimhood which permeated every discussion at the entire conference.

“There is no doubt climate change today is a fact. It’s true that our region is not contributing to this. However, the threats of climate change to our region may be very dangerous,” he said.

What is true is that the MENA region contributes less than five percent of total global carbon emissions. Since we are on facts, however, it is also true that the Gulf alone exports more than 15 million barrels of oil every day to developed and developing countries alike.

To say that the Arab world is absolved from blame after providing carbon-guzzling countries with swaths of non-renewable energy - for stratospheric profits –  is preposterous. In the same way as you are responsible if you feed a morbidly obese person until their liver finally collapses, so the Arab region cannot claim total innocence on climate change.

It’s true that our region is not contributing to this.

The Arab world is especially vulnerable to climate change; a mere one degree increase in global temperatures – an absolute certainty, by all measurements – will affect 41,500 square miles of MENA land. Up to 15 percent of Qatar could disappear and global warming, if undinted, will wipe more than 12 percent off Egypt’s GDP due to desecration of the Nile Delta.

Hearing AFED’s recommendations today – which are to be taken to Copenhagen as part of the Hariri-headed Lebanese delegation – was encouraging. They called on Arab countries to start shouldering responsibility, rather than sit back and claim that since climate change isn’t their fault, they shouldn’t have to do anything to avert it.

What Copenhagen may or may not achieve shouldn’t prevent Arab countries from implementing cuts in emissions or considering global warming as a key part of future development policy. MENA countries should still seek to alter their ways, starting with a switch to greener forms of transport as is currently being trialled in Jordan.

This would demonstrate genuine willingness to fight climate change, to say nothing of eliminating ironic entrances to future environmental forums.

But

Let me make this clear. I am no denouncer of Ziad Baroud. Lebanon’s hugely popular Interior Minister, who received widespread acclaim from his handling of the June 7 election, is a man I appreciate greatly. His apparent ability to see past the sectarian rivalry – in which many senior politicians seem hopelessly mired – is as refreshing as it is admirable. Baroud’s maxim of “security is a red line,” over which partisanship must never tread, is welcome.

From an administrative point of view, his tenure on the Internal Security Forces has been successful. As an order-keeping unit they are rightly respected, regardless of the heavy-handed tactics individuals within the ISF sometimes employ.

But the Interior Ministry’s decision to ban the use of motorcycles outside of daylight hours in the wake of the clash in Ain al-Remmeneh that left one man dead and four others seriously injured is a reaction straight from the knee-jerk category.

True, there are almost daily reports from the suburbs of Lebanon’s big cities of residents being terrorized by gangs of thugs atop scooters. Two-wheeled vehicles are perfect – so the argument goes - for people seeking to harm or intimidate others as they can make speedy getaways through Beirut and Tripoli’s labyrinthine alleyways.

But banning all motorcycles is unnecessarily heavy-handed and may yet prove counterproductive to its acclaimed goal of reducing security breaches.

Security is a red line.

There is first the issue of a lack of differentiation. As a logical premise, a considerable percentage of criminals ride motorbikes or scooters. But the “bad people are people, bad people ride motorcycles, therefore all people who ride motorcycles are bad” reduction is obviously wrong. A great deal of law-abiding citizens are being punished for the misdemeanors of a few.

Next is the fact that people who do bad things on motorbikes don’t do it because they ride on two wheels. They do it because they are bad people. If someone has a score to settle or a bone to pick, they are unlikely to be deterred if they can’t ride their scooter. A murderer doesn’t become absolved if you take away his ride – he just becomes a slower murderer.

There are a few exemptions from the ban; bakers and press for example (lucky me). But in many cases carrying a bag of flour between your seat won’t make you safe from prosecution, as many bikes are unregistered. Even if, like me, you have all documents present and correct, you still face regular interrogation from soldiers holding guns asking gruffly for your papers. This is a deeply unpleasant experience even if all it does is make you five minutes late for work.

 Unforeseen side-effects from the IM’s bitter medicine are likely to emerge. Many people rely on their bikes to get to work or visit family members. The ban won’t just make this harder to do, it is likely to deteriorate Beirut’s already derisory traffic situation further, as scooters and bikes are narrow; cars and minibuses are not.

There is another, less comfortable association with targeting motorbike and scooter owners. I have been stigmatized for owning a scooter, with people telling me, quite openly that “only poor people and zooz (Lebanese chavs) ride them.” Baroud’s decision to ban their use raises the doubtless-unintended prospect of the Ministry targeting a particular socioeconomic group. Less well-off people will find it harder to get to work or travel around the city to do what they need to do. (Generally but by no means definitively) richer car-owners will continue unscathed. There is no proof that this was the IM’s intention, but the suggestion is nonetheless uncomfortable. 

Of course, Baroud faced a barrage of political pressure to be seen to be doing something following outrage over Ain al-Remmeneh from senior governmental figures. But a blanket ban on two-wheels is misjudged.

Suited for cluster-bomb clearing in Tibnin, Lebanon

One of the most enjoyable things about being a reporter in Lebanon is the access it affords.

You want to speak to the Interior Minister? Sure, here’s his mobile and home phone number. You need a quote from the Head of the Internal Security Forces? Go ahead, he’ll call you after lunch and tell you, in perfect English, what it is you’re after.

Last week, I wanted to speak with UNIFIL troops in the south of the country, and file a dispatch from Tibnin on how the cluster-bomb clearing operation is going three years after the Summer War of 2006.

After a few phonecalls and correspondence with a charmingly eccentric Italian UN General, I was on the way to the south, a few kilometers from Israel, a state against which Lebanon is still officially at war.

Then the red tape catches up with you. You want to go south of Sidon in a professional capacity? Go ahead, but you need the Army’s permission and this takes 15 days. I know you want to go this week, but there is nothing I can do, there’s a procedure to follow, after all.

15 days turned rapidly into 2 as our terrier of a receptionist battered through this pointless beauracracy, yet I still found myself sitting in a stifling mobile in the LAF’s Sidon barracks. Calls in Arabic, made with not the slightest tinge of urgency. Paperwork. Sighs and queue-jumping. Eventually I get passed a hand-written slip, containing precisely three digits and a signature cast in childish scrawl. Next time, I will forge the pass myself.

Once in Tibnin, I get greeted by Lt Monnoyer and a half-hour health and safety blurb. We patrol an area of sparse shrubland, the earth parched from the baking sun which beats relentless down as the mine clearers get to work.

In the last 72 hours of the 2006 war, Israel dropped more than a million cluster bomb M42 submunitions, so that – according to many Lebanese – they could continue killing for the next 30 years. Hundreds have been killed or maimed by these de facto landmines (an estimated 40 percent of the bomblets didn’t explode upon contact with the ground).

I speak later with someone from Lebanon’s Mines Advisory Group. She tells me that the Israelis, knowing that a ceasefire was imminent, deliberately dropped weapons on Lebanon that were well past their use-by date.

We’ve found bomb casings with ‘use by 1978′ on them. They knew what they were doing.

The day I file my dispatch, there is news of two Syrian farmers who are obliterated the moment they step on a cluster bomb particle. These deaths will keep being reported, with a seemingly inescapable sense of ennui. This is a scandal. But people have grown used to this and the general malaise and lack of funding which now engulfs Lebanon’s landmine clearing operations.

Back in Beirut, I report on a prison break, involving a Fatah al-Islam inmate being held on terrorism charges. Want to speak to the head of the Army? Here’s his direct line.

Everyone has their idea of a good dog.

Be it lumbering and covered in damp grass or small, fluffy and crammed into a handbag, there is a dog for every kind of person. My ideal dog (since you asked) is a sedate Labrador situated at the foot of my armchair, the kind who doesn’t require endless attention and doesn’t mind when you break wind and blame it on him.

There are many dogs in Lebanon, and not many people find them ideal. Some can be found loitering round the grimier backstreets of East Beirut, their owners fled from war or hardship. Others form packs in the southern villages surrounding Nabatieh. They are fed on raw meet and terrorize the locals, high on protein and the taste of blood.

Last week, a prominent Shiite cleric issued a fatwa authorizing the killing of stray dogs after receiving a letter from Nabatieh residents, enraged over a series of recent dog attacks.

“The rule is to protect animals and preserve their lives,” said Sheikh Sayyed Mohammad Hussein Fadlallah in the statement. “But if their behavior represents a danger for the lives of people … as is the case with stray or fierce dogs, then killing them is authorized.”

I called animal rights groups for their response to these comments, fully expecting outrage. But, partly out of pragmatism and partly out of the fact that Fadlallah is one Shiekh you don’t mess with in Lebanon, their answers were measured.

Yes, stray dogs are a nuisance, even a danger when vulnerable people are set upon by them. But shooting them isn’t a good way of alleiviating the problem, especially when they are usually angry at being beaten and starved in the first place.

And so I found myself, too early this morning and with a thoroughly-installed hangover, clambering up a dirt path in the Metn to visit a home for stray dogs.

I won’t lie: climbing through the metal gate was scary. About 50 dogs, some very big, some missing eyes and legs, immediately descended upon me, gnashing teeth and barking as if I was dressed as a meat-drenched postman.

Most of the strays there have been abused; some have had their eyes shots out, others deliberately run over.

In the corner, under a blue tarpaulin canopy sits Andora, a lustrous, toffee-coloured Staffordshire terrier, perched haughtily on a broken foam sofa. She turns over to reveal a livid red gash in her side. She’s been fighting. The shelter will do what they can for her, as they feed, water and walk every dog, every day.

BETA, who runs the shelter for about 200 stray dogs, has a tough task. It is two-pronged.

First, they are trying to find a way to neuter as many of Lebanon’s estimated 35,000 strays as they can. Second, they are looking to educate the Lebanese about ethical animal treatment.

It’s difficult to say which will be trickier. As I’m leaving a farmer in an improbably large sombrero comes sauntering down the track. The dogs, evidently displeased at the intrusion, bark ferociously but at a cautious distance. The man, bucktoothed and ignorant, picks up a stone and hurls it at the nearest animal, a Dalmatian cross. It misses, but only just.

Carol, a volunteer at BETA, screams something in Arabic with far greater vemon than even the biggest dog’s bark. The man looks, shrugs his shoulders and throws another stone.

For information on how to donate to BETA, visit: http://www.betalebanon.org/

It was 10.13am when the jets flew past. Roaring over the port in east Beirut, they banked high in the air and drifted off over the glittering Mediterranean.

My first reaction was probably shared by most people up at that time. Jetplanes? Who owns them in this region? Nervous looks were exchanged and the Daily Star splashed the next day with a story detailing “intensive” Israeli flyovers.

At the same time, reports from the south suggested that four merkava tanks had been mobilized near the contested occupied Kfar Shuba region, further heightening tensions next to the Blue Line. At the same time, LAF commander Qahwaji ordered his troops to remain on the highest level of alert and to be ready to combat Israeli aggression.

A dislocated quiet descended in Beirut. People here live with a constant unease; a shallow buried sense of imminent peripeteia.

Things began to sound more foreboding. A freight lorry unloading its metal container sounded, momentarily, like an explosion. Fireworks, the mainstay of the Beirut soundtrack, had people thinking harder than usual.

But things had been missed. The National reported that people had begun to flee Beirut.

The jets, it emerged, were MIGs from the long-dormant Lebanese Air Force. Why didn’t anyone tell us? They did but, incredibly, the press release was missed by all Lebanese media, possibly too preoccupied with what war machines were flexing their muscles across its southern border to take note of what was happening at home.

An army spokesperson said, a little sheepishly, after the incident:

“It is no problem, the pilot is training. We warned all the newspapers and television stations yesterday in a press release.”

Whoops.

Still, the increased activity near the UNIFIL-administered Blue Line, stemming from an explosion at a Hizbullah arms cache last month near the southern village of Khirbet Silim, is cause for near-universal concern.

(It has since emerged that Hizbullah number two Naeem Qassam admitted that the group had stored weapons there, but denied they had breached resolution 1701 claiming the munitions were “old” and “normal”. That’s fine then.)

A week after the incident at Khirbet Silim, more than 100 protesters confronted a UNIFIL-lead investigative team, hurling rocks and injuring 14 peacekeeping troops. The protest sparked a flurry of articles questioning the efficacy of resolution 1701 and conjecture on whether or not Hizbullah, with its solid southern support base, had turned their back on UNIFIL.

To further confuse matters, Al Qaeda in Lebanon, the Brigade of Abdullah Azzam, released a video claiming responsiblity for rockets fired at Israel from south Lebanon. In doing so, they slammed Hizbullah leader Hassan Nasrallah for being a “big imposter” in his support for “crusader” UNIFIL forces.

If all this suggests a ratcheting up of antipathy around the Blue Line, it’s virtually impossible to tell what’s actually happening down there. Misinformation abounds; one only needs to leaf through the Lebanese dailys to hear several conflicting reports.

What is clear (as it can be, in the Beirut smog) is that something is going on down there, be it zionist cows, observation posts, protests or tank mobilisation.

Not according to UNIFIL.In an exclusive interview with its deputy spokesperson, I was informed that there has been no deterioration in Blue Line security.

Herein lies the problem. UNIFIL has a mandate to administer and demarcate a de facto border, but can only work in conjunction with authorities from one side of it. The other side, so it seems, can do more or less as they please and UNIFIL, although trying to win hearts and minds of Lebanese soldiers and civilians alike, must maintain a diplomatic silence.

Speak to people and they’ll tell you something hasn’t happened when it has. Read the papers and they’ll tell you something has happened when it hasn’t. Who you listen to won’t change the situation, just how you feel about it.

We’ve been in Haifa Hospital for precisely seven minutes before the power cuts out.

I know this because the clock on the wall by the reception booth sits proudly in between a picture of Yasser Arafat and a plastic sign showing a Kalashnikov rifle crossed through with livid red strokes. No guns. Not in here, at least.

“Electricity is one of our biggest problems,” says Dr Alim al-Ahmed. “You’ve lived in Beirut, you know the problems we have. Here, those problems are ten times worse.”

In the next 30 minutes the power goes out a further six times. Each time the two head surgeons, sitting languidly in their air-conditioned office, stop their paperwork for the briefest of moments, and resume with eyes squinted.

With me on the leather sofa is Dr Suzie Millar, Head of A&E at INOVA Fairfax Hospital in Washington. She was prepared for the power cuts and has brought provisions. She rummages in her backpack and pulls out two headlamps.

As the Palestinian surgeons play with the lights, shining yellow beams onto the back of their hands, I ask Dr Millar what they will use them for.

“They’ll use these for operating when the power cuts out,” she says, as if exasperated by the prospect.

And what did she use them for back in the US?

“These?” she asks, incredulously. “Maybe going camping.”

After being walked around the three story Hospital in the heart of Bourj al-Barajneh, I realise that Dr Millar’s comments were not disparaging. The hospital has 6 doctors and 30 beds for the estimated 60,000 Palestinian refugees living in Lebanon.

It is funded entirely by the PLO, somewhat changed from its recent history, and Ahmad, from the Palestine State Embassy, explains to me how it handles any hospital’s most difficult operation, finance.

“If a woman comes to us and needs attention, we know she cannot afford it. The cost of a bed is 125,000 lira ($75) and that’s without drugs or treatment.

“We will ask her what she has, make some inquiries and we will get her the money.”

She will be helped because she is a Palestinian. The same treatment doesn’t apply outside the camps.

(As this point, it seems fair to say that the word ‘camp’ is highly misleading. These ‘camps’ are made of concrete buildings, with electricity generators, running water, balconies and airy courtyards, wrought iron door knockers and leather furniture. The muddy streets are flanked with restaurants, garages, internet cafes and a splendid mosque, crescented minaret looming imperiously over the concrete walls marking the ‘camp’ boundary. Some Palestinians have lived in these settlements for more than 40 years, three generations sharing a living space. The word ‘camp’ is used in Lebanon to emphasize the transient nature of the accommodation. But these people are not going away.)

In fact, they’re increasing. I speak with Dr Ichlas, Head of the Maternity Unit at Haifa. She tells me she and her two midwives delivery about 50 babies a month.

A month? That’s an impossibly small number for 60,000 inhabitants. This is their only hospital.

Dr Ichlas tells me that although UNWRA runs maternity clinics for consultations, antenatal care etc., upto 30 percent of Palestinian births are done at home. As we leave the unit, I walk past a tiny, jaundiced baby stretched out as if it is sunbathing under a UV light.

Although it can’t be more than two days old, its delicate ears are pieced with aquamarine studs. The nurse, coming to check on the girl, strikes up a Marlboro Light before readjusting the light.

These are first-world doctors, working in third-world conditions, in a country with first-world facilities.

We pass along a ward with brightly painted walls, each room filled with a patient and apparently half their extending family. There is an old man in his white, slightly sullied underwear with a drip in arm and cigarette in mouth.

Dr Millar, despite being evidently appalled by the place’s sanitation, has nothing but admiration for Haifa’s physicians.

“These people are working without even the most basic of equipment. They don’t even had a CAT scan and, for trauma surgeons, that is unbelievable.

“In the States, anyone with anything suspect gets sent upstairs [for a CAT scan]. Here, they have no idea what’s happened until they open them up.”

In a trauma surgery theatre, there is a brand-new ventilator sitting forlorn in the corner, it’s packaging still draped loosely over its monitor. I ask Dr Alim why they don’t use it.

“Unfortunately, no one can use it.”

It’s a story that applies to an entire race. As Palestinians these doctors are barred from working anywhere in Lebanon, other than at Haifa. All of them have trained in Russia or Libya, easily as well-trained as western doctors. That they are superb physicians is unacknowledged by circumstance. They work with what little they have, saving lives when they can, but more often watching patients die because they lack access to facilities a mile way that would see them saved.

“These are first-world doctors, working in third-world conditions, in a country with first-world facilities,” says Dr Millar.

As we leave the hospital, there’s a man hunched over outside the maternity ward. A nurse in baby pink scrubs walks out with a beaming smile. The man – big as a bear, strong and ruddy – crumples into tears of joy.

This morning I visited Haifa hospital in the Palestinian camp Bourj al-Barajneh, South Beirut.

This hospital, funded almost exclusively by the PLO, has 3 emergency rooms, one ventilator and 30 beds for the estimated 60,000 Palestinians residing in Lebanon.

Here are some of the pictures I managed to hurriedly take.

Three trauma surgeons after operating on a young man's abdomen

The maternity clinic with stirrups et al

A young Palestinian recovering from heatstroke

Maternity unit in Haifa Hospital

When Terry Anderson is talking to you, you stop and listen.

This is the man who was for a period of time the most famous journalist on the planet.

Anderson had been the AP’s Beirut bureau chief for two years when he was kidnapped by armed militias after a morning tennis game in Ain Al-Mreisseh, west Beirut on 16 March 1985.

He spent six years and nine months being held as a hostage by a group answering to the name Islamic Jihad. Often beaten and maltreated, he won the unwanted title of the longest-held Western captive in Lebanon’s 15-year civil war.

Anderson was in Beirut on Monday to talk about press freedom, a two word phrase, the facets and sum of which he knows plenty about.

Speaking earnestly, thoughtfully holding my gaze from beneath spectacles as thick as your thumb, Anderson said how important it was for a journalist to believe in what he was doing.

It’s a job that might get you killed, he said, so you damn well better see its necessity.

The question and answer session ended. Anderson, jokingly complaining of being offered too much acrid black coffee, addressed the room in general and me in particular. What followed was a serious of journalistic epithets, each concentrating the bible of reporting advice Anderson has collected during 25 years in the profession into truisms spanning a few lines.

Print these off and tape them to your notepad:

Finding and telling the truth is a good all by itself, even if that’s all you can do.

When the truth is one sided, so is the story.

Journalism has always been more than a job. It is a mission.

Anderson’s response to an IDF general who asked him why he wrote bad things about the Israelis:

Sir, if you stop doing bad things, I’ll stop writing them.

And my personal favourite, sound advice indeed…

All the best journalists I know have a sense of indignation to them. They want to reach out, take you by the shoulder and say: ‘Look at this. This is important. You have to know this.’ They feel this demand to find the truth and to get you to listen to it.

Fireworks in Lebanon mean one thing: politics.

I watched the brilliant blue and gold explosions light up the Beirut skyline last night in silence, before the huge pops of thunder reached us on the roof of a Hamra hotel. Celebratory gunfire – that scourge of the town – ripped through the flat, close air.

Hariri had won, the pyrotechnics told us so.

Not that this was unexpected. Hariri is the Future Movement leader and head of the Lebanon First Bloc, the largest in the newly-elected parliament. As the son of the murdered ex-Prime Minister, Rafik Hariri, he inheritied his father’s title along with his wealth.

His heading the parliament became a virtual certainty after the nomination of Amal Movement Leader Nabhi Berri as Speaker on Thursday – an appointment that was itself spectacularly predictable.

The composition of the new parliament seems to be characterized by continuity. Certainly the election of the new cabinet should yield few surprises.

Hariri has called for unity, indicating he is open for talks with all parties. What may seem at first glance as magnanimous is borne out of simple necessity. Hariri needs consensus.

Placation of opposition parties, Hizbullah among them, is necessary for what Hariri called a parliament “that can achieve, one that is free of obstacles and paralysis.”

Hizbullah, in the previous administration, won the power to veto parliamentary moves. Hariri has indicated that this will no longer be the case, and many hope that this may pave the way to a more cohesive, national unity government.

This seems unlikely. The removal of Hizbullah’s veto power will have to lead to the group being represented in a different way in the new parliament. What form this representation takes, is likely to be long in deciding.

Many parties are still engaging in rhetoric that seems to belie their claimed desires for increased cross-bloc dialogue and a move towards a system of ‘fairer’ proportional representation.

Phalange bloc MP Sami Gemayel said his party believed Hariri’s principles “intersect with the March 14 coalition national stands.”

Change and Reform bloc leader Michel Aoun said that they refrained from assigning any PM candidate.

The Lebanese parliament is still split by age-old confessional differences, and an inclusive dialogue is unlikely to sufficiently address the gulf in demands between the country’s leaders, some of whom are ex-militia leaders. Others are merely in politics through dynastic familial ties.

One twitterer, Samer Karam, summed it up fairly well this morning:

Of the 128 seats in the new Lebanese Parliament: 10 are Billionaires, 25 Millionaires, and 10 ex-Militiamen – Confessionalism or Capitalism?

True, but it doesn’t go far enough into the cronyism that is rife throughout Lebanese politics. Hariri, son of an ex-PM, has been criticised for being too politically inexperienced. The allegation is like handing out speeding fines at the Indy 500.

Inexperience may be a good thing, for experience in Lebanon inevitably leads to murky pasts. Experience means that you did some things you really shouldn’t have. Here experience could well implicate you in a war-crime.

If the fresh-faced Hariri is serious about his overtures of inclusive dialogue and a debate that transcends confessional afilliations, then his inexperience may play on his side. He knows he has to placate many of the country’s political heavyweights  in order to get Lebanon moving forward.

Hariri’s task verges on Sisyphean. At least he seems to recognize that he can’t push the ball up a hill all by himself.