Here's writing at you, Michel Aoun

Here's writing at you, Michel Aoun

By Michael Young


After watching how easily an open letter penned by my colleague Issa Goraieb in L'Orient-Le Jour could elicit a response from a harried Emile Lahoud, I thought I'd try my luck with you, Michel Aoun. General, can you see me? I'm over here, lower than Rabieh, but still high enough to confirm that you're not yet at Baabda, where I know you're dying to relocate.

In hearing you on Marcel Ghanem's show last week, I realized that you had slashed your price for securing the presidency. You are now actively peddling a lie about the death of Rafik Hariri, pointing out that since a year of investigations had not reached a conclusion as to the perpetrators, we must now accept that the Syrian regime might not have been responsible. Perhaps "fundamentalists" were behind the crime, you speculated.

Your math was typically off, since the investigation only began last summer, and you disregarded that three United Nations reports mentioned Syrian involvement. No falsehood was, evidently, too odious once you heard that Syria's conditions for supporting a new president (a condition transmitted to the Qataris) were that he or she not be hostile to Damascus, and not implicate senior Syrians in Hariri's death. If I had to wager, that one phrase all but sank your chances of being elected. No one in the majority will back someone so transparently willing to bury the truth about Hariri.

Tell me, is it true that last week you notified those gathered in the national dialogue conference that unless you were elected president you would consider Parliament illegal? True or not, such a threat would be in character. It's precisely what you did at the time of Taif, when you dispatched parliamentarians to Saudi Arabia and then declared them outcasts once they signed an accord you found unsatisfactory. Now you're trying to use your many strikingly decent supporters (whom you are destined to once more disappoint) to heave yourself into the presidency.

You're probably the most dominant Christian politician today. That's the price we must pay for 15 years of the community's marginalization. Christians want a tough guy, and think you're him. But when you affirm your popularity, when you ask that a referendum be organized to prove this, are you serious? Do you really want Lebanon to be run by referendums and opinion polls? Has it not occurred to you that the political structure of this country was designed to avoid the dangers of majoritarianism and their impact on sectarian relations? Applying your logic, if a majority were one day to insist that a President Aoun had to step down before the end of his term because he had lost public confidence, would you oblige?

You wouldn't, and you would be justified in doing so. The final word is the Constitution. But I suspect you'll just ignore how Taif weakened the presidency. You dream of becoming a super-president who could use his ties with the army and the security services to impose his will - much like Lahoud, in fact worse (matching the preferred presidential profile drawn up by Hassan Nasrallah at the dialogue conference). You would buttress this by relying on your reinvigorated co-religionists, but also on Hizbullah and the Shiites. Taif is an abstraction to you, a thin membrane standing between you and what you imagine to be your historical right to lead the country - which you tried to enact, so catastrophically, between 1988 and 1990. And in resurrecting a strong Maronite presidency you will bring your community into conflict with all the others, as you did back then.

Speaking of history, allow a mild protest. With all your talk of referendums and the like, you do fancy yourself a new Charles de Gaulle, don't you? Actually, your leniency toward the Syrians shows you to be an aspiring Petain. The Syrians wreak havoc, and you faithfully repeat that they have left Lebanon, knowing full well that they retain substantial sway over key sectors of the state. The thing is this: You want to inherit what they set up to turn against your adversaries. If anyone approximated de Gaulle during these past years, by the way, it was Sfeir, and you now realize how little he wants you. He didn't defend Taif against you almost two decades ago, he didn't risk his life all these years under Syria's protectorate, he didn't patiently reconstitute the Maronite community after your megalomania had shattered it; he didn't do all this, and more, to offer you a green light to Baabda, you who were most responsible for his travails.

I heard that you tried to get a one-on-one meeting with Pope Benedict XVI last December. You reportedly were looking for ecclesiastical icing on your presidential cake, but the Vatican didn't oblige. You spent a week in Rome vainly awaiting an audience, then returned to present tardy condolences to the Tueni family for Gebran's assassination. The church has a long memory. It remembered what you did to Sfeir, and to the Maronites.

General, the most difficult thing to swallow is your about-face on Syria. We always knew Rafik Hariri's memory abraded your ego, and that you look on his son as your main challenger for national authority. You're also vindictive, and to prove it you recently described the March 14 coalition as "the October 13" coalition - the date of your 1990 getaway from Baabda. (By the way, didn't Suleiman Franjieh, Michel Murr, Talal Arslan and many of your new comrades celebrate on that day?) Even as you sneer at March 14, you forget who implemented your expulsion, and whose warplanes bombed you right into the French Embassy. The Syrian regime may be innocent of Hariri's death, you say, but during the exile in France you, and more outstandingly your followers at home, knew the absolute control it exerted over all matters Lebanese. Why the sudden amnesia?

Is the presidency worth your embracing a counterfeit version of history? Isn't your willingness to be deceitful on Syria a sign that you're a man of no principles, a demagogue who will play the mob only to reach the top? Do you think the Syrians will let you live if you defy them? Ask Elias Murr. They aren't worth your refusal to say or do a spontaneously compassionate thing after the murders of Samir Kassir, George Hawi, and Gebran Tueni; not to mention after the remains of a dozen or so soldiers - soldiers who died fighting for you - were found buried in Yarzeh months ago. Did they not deserve better from the Free Patriotic Movement? Or did avoiding embarrassing Syria and Emile Lahoud weigh too heavily on your calculating mind?

So general, you again hold Lebanon hostage. You want to become president, and, like the first time around, you have no qualms about imposing yourself on an unwilling system. You don't want to push Lahoud too hard because you fear a hasty departure might allow the parliamentary majority to bring in someone other than you; but you don't want to push too softly either, because if Lahoud loiters for another year and a half your chances of succeeding him may diminish.

The system cannot take more instability, and be assured that if you come to power against the better judgment of the parliamentary majority and the patriarch, volatility is a dead certainty. I recognize that Christians like you, but our system is not a popularity contest; we need a president who can unite the Lebanese, and you're not that person. You've repeatedly proven this since your return last year. Even on the one thing that has brought most Lebanese together - condemnation of Syria's role in the Hariri assassination - you've displayed disquieting divisiveness, in fact selfish frivolity.

That's why you should accept a new president who is consensual - why not someone with whom you are comfortable? The patriarch won't endorse you, but he also doesn't relish backing someone against you. Afterward, you can examine ways of influencing a new administration. It may not be what you've been preparing for, but the power of modesty is absolute. And since your eyes widen whenever you hear the words "absolute" and "power" mentioned together, I throw this out as a modest proposal.

Michael Young is opinion editor of THE DAILY STAR.