How long do you keep investing in failure? How much effort does one put into reviving a corpse? When can you, or when are you allowed to, try something different? The late Sudanese rebel leader John Garang used to say that the regime in Sudan was "too deformed to be reformed."
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In a region full of rotten, dysfunctional regimes, tiny Lebanon has become a cautionary tale of world-class implosion and corruption. The World Bank described it as "likely to rank in the top 10, possibly top three, most severe crisis episodes globally since the mid-nineteenth century." This situation has been unraveling before our eyes for almost two years, seemingly in slow motion for outside observers, yet unbearably so for the Lebanese who are suffering from so much cruelty and privation.
While the international community – although really only France and the United States – has tried to cajole the Lebanese ruling elite, the same people that caused this crisis in the first place, into taking urgent steps to allow the West to help, that elite is resistant. They have other priorities, such as remaining in power, dividing up the dwindling spoils, and maneuvering for future positions.
One question of particular concern is who will be Lebanon's president after the doddering Michel Aoun exits the scene. Will it be another Hezbollah collaborator or another agent of Damascus? Aoun, the country's current head of state, is a perfect metaphor for the elite's political moment: oblivious, complacent, and alternating between cunning and senility.
With its distinctive history and mix of sects, Lebanon is, of course, unique. This disaster is also unique. Many states have had their economies implode and dealt with corruption and rotten elites, but in Lebanon, this is all transpiring with the country under the indirect rule of an Iranian terrorist group that has infiltrated that same rotten elite and its institutions.
Hezbollah is technically a Lebanese organization. Its members are Lebanese citizens, but it functions as an extension of the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. It is an occupation force whose occupiers are local citizens, akin to the old days when imperial powers would raise local subaltern forces to police their colonies for them.
Despite the seemingly insurmountable odds against systemic change in Lebanon, there are dreamers who articulate a different path. Civil society and good governance groups associated with the 2019 uprising, battered and weakened, continue to survive. Lebanon's Maronite Catholic Patriarch has pushed for Lebanon to remain neutral and disentangle itself from regional conflicts. War with Israel is the reason for Hezbollah existing as an armed force, of course.
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Some of these dreamers have gone even further, questioning the nature of the state itself and calling for a federal Lebanon divided into four geographical "cantons" built around the country's four main religious sects: Sunni, Shi'ite, Christian, and Druze.
The concept Lebanese bank executive Iyad Boustany has proposed embodies qualities such as "subsidiarity, self-rule, and localism and is particularly attractive, not just for Lebanon but elsewhere.
Subsidiarity, that principle that social and political decisions are best dealt with at the smallest, most local level, with its echoes of Pope Leo XIII, De Tocqueville, Belloc, and Chesterton, seems much more urgent in a world where, despite the tantalizing promise of social media, real power seems more centralized than ever. Lebanon has its predatory elite, and increasingly it looks like similar elites, combining political, cultural, and economic power in the same permanent class, are emerging elsewhere.
Boustany sees a federal system as the last, best hope for Lebanon's embattled and dwindling Christian population. He recently wrote that without radical change, "Lebanon's Christians will soon be no more. Their civilization will slowly end. Not in a highly publicized massacre, not in a heroic last stand. History will not remember a fatal date nor glorious name: no May 29th, 1453, no Constantine Palaeologus… and yet the lights of Hagia Sophia will go out. Slowly drained [and] exhausted by time and demography and wrapped in the shame of a corrupt system, like watching a train wreck in slow motion, our civilization will soon exit history."
A federated Lebanon does not seem to be "either a sham or a cure-all" but rather one of those reformist, hypothetical ideas that will never get very far because those in power – particularly Hezbollah, but also its enablers, including from the Lebanese Christian community – will never willingly give up any bit of the power, current or potential, that they hold. Such an idea moves from the fantastical to the merely improbable if Lebanon's decline continues, with what remains of a rickety state collapsing and armed men putting up barricades to protect their districts and neighborhoods from looters.
The default outcome of such a scenario could be cantons or federalism, or simply chaos. Obviously, collapse and disintegration of that sort could be prevented by a well-armed – with mostly American assistance – Lebanese Armed Forces, assuming the LAF itself does not collapse at the service of whatever fig leaf of authority remains. And that authority is likely to be a partner of Hezbollah. It seems that Lebanon must sink deeper before it has even a remote chance to rise, and nothing is guaranteed.
Lebanon's predicament is relatively unique, although Iran is working to repeat the Hezbollah model elsewhere, chiefly in Iraq, where it is attempting to rule indirectly through corrupt parties and empowered and embedded local death squads. Other elements in the Lebanese catastrophe are not so unique and have accelerated over time: the loss of control over borders and supposedly sovereign institutions, a permanent predatory ruling class, the collapse of the currency and economic system/hyperinflation, the constant degradation of both the built and natural environment, and an emphasis on sub-group identity and loyalty over that of the nation.
Lebanon seems more broken than ever and with even less chance for a realistic positive outcome a year after the Beirut Port explosion.
At this point, one can only hope that one day the Lebanese dreamers – federalists, proponents of neutrality, those students winning university elections against the ruling parties, brave journalists – have a realistic chance of coming up with something more human and dignified and that in its clumsiness and lack of vision, a superficial and extremely distracted West does not empower the latest glib and facile iteration of the entrenched status quo in Lebanon's Year Zero.
Reprinted with permission from JNS.org.
