شارل الياس شرتوني: الحروب الأهلية الإقليمية وتفكك لبنان
The Regional Civil Wars and the Unraveling of Lebanon
Charles Elias Chartouni/November 02/2021
The tumult elicited by the inopportune statement of the information minister is reflective of the revived political tensions between the mutating Sunnite-Shiite power rivalries throughout the larger Middle East, their impact on tattered State textures, bankrupted national scripts and shredded civil concord. The current wave of Iranian imperialism is vocal about the politics of destabilization, the gradual destruction of the interstate geopolitical order born after WWI, and the reconfiguration of Islamic politics as a platform for political and military interventionism. Lebanon’s actual conflicts are unlikely to be understood if we fail to come to terms with these inner dynamics and their incidence on regional and topical conflicts.The Lebanese operational theater has evolved into a proxy terrain instrumentalized by the protagonists of Islamic civil wars. The policy of deliberate aggression followed by Hezbollah and its auxiliaries has elicited major geopolitical realignments pitting the leading Sunnite power brokers in the Middle East against the progressive inroads of the Iranian imperial policy, resuscitated the imperial ambitions of neo-ottoman islamism, and energized the totalitarian proclivities of Sunnite radicalism.
Lebanese institutions have mutated into simulacrums and political life is a playground for competing regional power politics, and Lebanese society is witnessing its meteoric disintegration under the sway of long hauled systemic crises questioning the country’s viability and ability to deal with their different issues in due time. The politics of procrastination, deliberate sabotaging and the dismissal of an immediate and orderly reformist transition, unveil the intentions of Hezbollah, and its determination to oversee the destruction of the Lebanese polity and pursuit of its project of geopolitical recomposition. We are in no position to understand the ongoing political dynamics unless we connect them to the priorities of the Iranian imperial policy. The idle maneuvering of the newly formed cabinet, the rapid dissipation of its enframing consensuses, its erratic public policy agenda and inability to project itself as a coherent institutional entity, betrays its structural brittleness and inability to define and enforce a policy line all along. The jockeying of the prime minister, his moral ineptitude and incapacity to operate as an independent actor testify to the advanced decay of Lebanese Statehood and the hollowness of its institutional infrastructure. One wonders what’s next and whether the ongoing political plot is worth rescuing, or we are wasting whatever little time is left on reviving a deadlocked political horizon, whereas time has come to consider alternative strategic scenarios with no further delay and idle
