Opinion: General Confusion
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If you were interested in Tony Badran’s recent piss take on Michel Aoun, the Maronite former general who is now Hezbollah’s biggest pal in Lebanon, Megan K. Stack has a new profile of the general that’s worth reading. Aoun wins on points by painting his opponents as collaborators, an argument that seems to make sense until you examine what it actually means. An example:
‘Hariri and his group were pro-Syrian. And they took advantage of that and made fortunes from the resources of the country,’ Aoun said. ‘So what’s going on now is that these people collaborated so much with Syria that they have to show some hate, some extremism, in speaking of Syria.’
Saad Hariri didn’t make fortunes in Lebanon. His late father, Rafiq al-Hariri, did that. In the process he rebuilt downtown Beirut and the Beirut airport, brought billions in investment into the country, and vastly increased the wealth of a nation that was a ruin when Aoun left it in 1990. For his troubles he was murdered on Valentine’s Day last year.
During the period of Lebanon’s reconstruction, Aoun was living behind a gate on an estate in France, apparently cursing the non-exiles who stayed and had to work within the empire of his enemies. That could be painted as a form of collaboration, if only Aoun had actually been fighting to get the Syrians out all those years. Instead he returned to Lebanon only when the rebellion against Hariri’s probable assassins made it possible to do so. For Aoun to portray the opposition as the ‘remainders of political feudalism’ while the bodies of opposition journalists and polititcians are piling up is grotesque. Unfortunately, beating up on the corpses of Hariri and the other victims plays well with underachieving sad sacks who look to a great Leader to fix up their lives; and Lebanon’s got plenty of those.