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3. Questionable Transition 

Lebanon is still dealing with the imponderables and equivocations of a very tentative peace process. The drama lies at the very heart of the transition process and the absence of a consensual approach to the problems besetting it. Initially, the ongoing actors have failed to acknowledge the nature of the transformative process and its strategic subtexts. They have been dealing with the political events that have succeeded the destruction of Hezbollah as if they were induced by unknown factors, and as if the Israeli counteroffensive was not correlated to the problems of a dysfunctional polity.

For over six decades, Lebanon has been dealing with endemic crises of national legitimacy, curtailed sovereignty and pliability to regional power politics, which hobbled its institutional life and eroded its normative consensuses. Political conflicts were expressive of major political culture differences and the inability to unite around fundamental civic and political values, and their impact on political life.

The actual political dynamic owes to the radical geostrategic transformations introduced by the Israeli counteroffensive and its incidence on the regional and domestic political dynamics. The defeat of Hezbollah and the unraveling of the operational platforms of the Iranian imperial strategy epitomized by the motto of the “integrated military platforms” usher in a new political era and question the predicates of the regional political order. The failure to acknowledge the basic military and political facts, the sturdy ideological blindfolders and the residual strategic ballasts accounts for the inability to engage the new dynamics and cope with their challenges.

Aside from the fact that Hezbollah's political soteriology is a major hurdle to the normalization of political life and the likelihood of a negotiated conflict resolution, political actors are still hobbled by ideological prejudices, imperial shackles and the zero-sum game approximation of conflicts. Therefore, diplomacy has no role to play, and political mediations are relegated to the periphery of conflict management.

The irredentism of Hezbollah is due to a perduring state of denial, incapacity to deal with the realities of military defeat and the outright rejection of diplomacy at a time when it can hardly afford the costs of destructive obstructionism. Otherwise, Lebanon is still instrumentalized by the Iranian regime as a platform for future subversion and sabotaging politics. As long as the Shiite political scene is still wired to the illusions of a victorious Iranian imperialism, the delusions of a military recovery and adamant about retrieving its unraveling political domination, one can hardly wager on the normalization of the political scene and mood within the Shiite community and at the Lebanese level.

Ideological ravings are hardly tractable and are made worse when they are wedded to defeated political whims and lost political, financial, economic and social privileges. As long as the Shiites fail to forswear their deliriums, adjust to reality and set in order their behavior, Lebanon will have a hard time putting to rights its political priorities and dealing with its intricacies.

The late presidential election came on the heels of the renewed military and political dynamics, and so did the formation of the new government after three years of debilitating stalemate and brazen instrumentation of state institutions by Shiite power politics that shattered the very notion of constitutional statehood, territorial sovereignty and basic civility. Unfortunately, the new executive failed to come to terms with the mandates of the new context, forsake the ideological lenses and prepare itself for substantial political and strategic realignments.

The conventional political rifts that featured in Lebanese contemporary history resurfaced, and the issues of national sovereignty and compromised political autonomy came once again to the forefront. The executive power is cleaved ideologically and politically; President Joseph Aoun is self-inhibiting, and Prime Minister Nawaf Salam's calculations are based on sectarian power politics calculations (Sunnite and Sunnite-Shiite), ideological biases and a skewed ground plan premised on the repudiation of reality and the marginalization of the Christian political platform.

These facts are far from promoting the politics of democratic accommodation and helping Lebanon overcome its lack of gravity. The purported neutrality of the government is hardly defensible since the ideological and political proclivities are ostensible while aligning with Hezbollah and validating its political and military extraterritoriality and the military sanctuarization of the Palestinian camps. To boot, the refusal to consider the issues of constitutional reengineering, and the question of federalism, the fairness of electoral laws and the role of the central authority in furthering the oligarchic drifts of power exercised in Lebanon.

The clashing mandates of a mongrelized cabinet are unlikely to be sustained over time. A new era cannot overlook the imperatives of peacemaking with Israel and consensual political, economic and social reforms. The well-entrenched oligarchies and the actual cabinet are overtly undermining the chances of a negotiated peace treaty with Israel and the enactment of financial reforms, for they all have a stake in the monumental robbery and the enduring state of instability. 

We should add to the internal picture the overall reverberations of a destabilized Syria, the hazards of colliding regional power politics and their incidence on the very formation of Lebanese political dynamics. The enforcement of the international security mandates is essential if the country is to overcome the pitfalls of colliding power politics, regional instability and the issues of culture war and dysfunctional consociational democracy.