Broken game in a booby-trapped country

What would Hezbollah do without explosives, missiles, drones, and dollars coming from Iran? What will the state do, which decided on March 2 to ban his military and security activities, if it does not confiscate a shipment of explosives belonging to him on the Dahr al-Baydar road? What remains of the “party” or of it, if it loses the slogan of “resistance” to Israel as a cover for its broader mission than confronting the Israeli threat and the occupation, which is to make Lebanon one of the operating fields for the Iranian regional project led by the Revolutionary Guard? What remains of the state, if it backs down in the face of the “party’s” challenge to it and considers itself above it and its weapons more important than its decisions, which it sees as invalid, as if it did not support the demand to retract them?

The situation is more dangerous than any answers to these questions. The country is on a circular path with a lot of movement, chaos, and noise, without the ability to move forward a single step.

What applies to his situation is the famous French proverb, “Two dreams in one bed,” and what is more likely to be two beds: one Arab and Western, the other Iranian.

The dream of acting on the basis that the new republic, which brought about tremendous transformations after the Gaza, Lebanon and Iran wars and the collapse of the Assad regime, gave Lebanon an opportunity to approach the “end of history.” The history of regional and international conflicts on its land, and the beginning of work to build the project of a national state, a state of citizenship that finds itself for the first time able to establish state-to-state relations with Syria and to end the state of hostility with Israel, after decades of domination, occupation and humiliation. And the dream of returning within the “Axis of Resistance” to the beginning of history and “correcting” the injustice that occurred and building the Iranian regional project within the framework of the Guardianship of the Jurist on the path to “emergence” and ruling the world. In both cases, it is a game corrupted by factors from within and without, regardless of the intensity of the “sound and violence” according to the title of William Faulkner’s famous novel. It is not possible to return to the beginning of history, no matter how great the weapons are in the service of the unseen, and in the face of greater weapons. There is nothing in the whole world, let alone in Lebanon, which is haunted by history, called the finality of history. What we have is a clash of projects that disrupt each other. What is before us and around us is more of the same in the region of “sultanate” regimes, no matter how many forms and names they have.

But a broken game is not a static state. The events that are shaking Beirut and the rest of the capitals in the region do not calm the weak or have mercy on the weak or those who imagine themselves strong. The open window of opportunity grows smaller as the area of ​​danger grows. What is more dangerous is the officials’ bet on international friends in America, Europe, and the Arab brothers to work on our behalf to repel the danger and keep the opportunity sustainable, and Hezbollah’s bet on the American and Israeli threat to keep Lebanon and the region captive to the Iranian opportunity. So what if the “party’s” review of the wrong decision to launch support wars against Gaza and Iran ended in its mistaken conviction that it was on the right side of history despite the disasters that befell it, the incubating environment, and the country? What if, after the review, the state took the correct decision to withdraw weapons and ban military and security activities, outside of the exclusivity of weapons in its hands, then hesitation, complexity of calculations, and fears led it to the wrong position of keeping the decision on paper?

There is no need to discover explosives by chance or based on information to realize that we are in a booby-trapped country that makes it difficult to use minesweepers. It is a national, security, political and sectarian bomb. Trapped by other people's projects and struggles for dominance. It was booby-trapped by violating the constitution, which has become a hundred years old.

What distances us, not only from construction, but also from what Joseph Schumpeter called “creative destruction.”