A victory on the path to oblivion
By Michael Young
Daily Star staff
Tuesday, August 07, 2007
So, Michel Aoun's candidate won. If the general knew any better, he would
realize that Camille Khoury's victory doomed any chance he had of becoming
president of Lebanon. That's because Aoun went into the election seeking to
fulfill three aims, all of which have fallen through.
Aoun's first objective was to score a victory that would compel Hizbullah to
endorse him as president, something the party had carefully avoided doing. His
second was to show that he remained the most powerful Maronite politician
around. And Aoun's third goal was to come across as the unavoidable president by
proving himself a figure of national import. Yet so narrow was Khoury's triumph
that Hizbullah can continue to waffle on Aoun. So severe was Aoun's rejection by
Maronites that the general can no longer really claim to speak for his own
community. And so polarizing was his decision to enter the by-election, so sour
his rhetoric against his Christian rivals, but also the Sunni and Druze
communities, that no one can seriously describe Aoun as a unifier, which is what
the Lebanese are looking for in any new leader.
The Syrian leadership is pleased with the results. Aoun neither won nor lost;
Gemayel didn't win; the Christians are more divided than ever; Hizbullah's
margin of maneuver on the presidency is as wide as before; the balance in
Parliament is unchanged; the option of holding by-elections as a weapon against
political assassination was proven to be as profitable for the opposition as for
the majority; and we may all be heading in the direction of a Syrian gambit on
the presidency, where we will either have to embrace Syria's candidate or accept
a political void.
As the Syrians watch the United States and Iran negotiating, as they survey the
progress in the Hariri tribunal (despite recent efforts by some states, under
the stewardship of Arab League Secretary General Amr Moussa, to delay its
formation), they are caught in a race for time. The Syrians threaten Lebanon
with a vacuum, but a vacuum might be to Damascus' disadvantage. It won't stop
the tribunal and the American-Iranian dialogue from going forward. What the
Syrian regime needs above all is not so much a vacuum in Beirut, but a president
and government it can manipulate in order to shape events in the coming months,
before the tribunal is formed and before the regional situation possibly shifts
to Syria's disadvantage. That's why there are some March 14 figures who prefer
to hold off on a presidential election for the time being.
Aoun failed to grasp that the Metn by-election was always intended to undermine
his presidential bid. The general was not going to come out of the battle
looking better than he did in 2005. Now he looks much worse. He took the seat of
a murdered man in the name of declaring the by-election illegitimate; he branded
his campaign a fight against the traditional political families, when far better
men than Aoun have failed to eliminate such families, let alone one like the
Gemayels that is popular among Christians; and Aoun won on the basis of an
Armenian vote which, though thoroughly legitimate, was the result of the
parochial calculations of the Tashnag party rather than any yearning to make
Aoun president.
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Tashnag committed what could become a historic mistake. The party may have
partly been playing hardball with Saad Hariri, in order to get the Armenians two
seats back in Beirut in the 2009 elections. But what their support for Khoury
effectively did was trash two principles the Armenians always adhered to in the
past: siding with the Lebanese state, whatever the cost; and maintaining good
relations with a majority of Christians. Now Tashnag finds itself on the side of
the Syrian-backed opposition, propping up a man who will surely never be
president, and doing so against the current of Christian public opinion in the
Metn. On top of that, the party has turned Amin Gemayel into an angry enemy. All
for what? To get the unknown Camille Khoury into Parliament, in an election
process whose legitimacy Aoun didn't even recognize?
And what of Aoun himself? The general's aura is now bright only to those still
part of his obtuse cult. Take away the calculating Armenians, the naturalized
Lebanese bussed in from Syria to vote for Hassan Nasrallah (before realizing
that he wasn't a candidate), and the pro-Syrian parties in the Metn, and what
you have left is a situation where only about a third of Metn voters see their
salvation in the general. That's not negligible, but it's also far from the
numbers that make one a valid political messiah.
As the election confirmed once more, Aoun is a casualty of his deepest hatreds.
The man is built on a scaffolding of resentment. Ultimately it was his
humiliation at the hands of the Gemayels, the fact that he was not allowed to
present his condolences to the family after Pierre Gemayel's assassination, that
seemed to motivate him to push Khoury into the race. Aoun is someone who feels
as threatened by the dead as by the living. He could never forgive Rafik Hariri
for having been so spectacularly killed, when all Aoun could show for himself
was a sprint to the French Embassy on October 13, 1990; he could never bring
himself to say anything nice about Gebran Tueni when it was Gebran's turn to be
eliminated; and throughout the Metn campaign, Aoun's contempt for how Pierre's
death was being used against him provoked thinly-veiled contempt for the victim
himself.
Wave a red rag at Aoun and he will charge. Place that rag at the edge of an
abyss, and the general will go over the side. Aoun won his Metn seat but he's
well on his way down. His parliamentary bloc still allows him to be kingmaker,
never king. But Aoun wants to be king, only king. So Lebanon will continue to
pay for his vindictive, destructive egotism until those opposed to Lebanon's
independence toss him away, his work done.
Michael Young is opinion editor of THE DAILY STAR.