Qifa Nabki | A Lebanese Political Blog

Well, I’m heading back to Cambridge tomorrow, after a wonderful year away. There will be spotty internet access for the next few days as we move into our new place, and shortly thereafter I’ll be back in the regular grind of dissertation research, conference papers, grant applications, and teaching.

What this means is that blogging will probably slow down for a while, which is a real shame because the money is so good. Alas, it’s not quite as good as being a graduate student in the humanities…

In the meantime, here is some reading:

1. Lebanese villagers apparently don’t like Hizbullah;
2. Lebanese villagers apparently like Snoop Dogg;
3. A television show along the lines of what I proposed in yesterday’s post is apparently already on LBC, but it stars children;
4. Michael Young does not believe that Bassil is the real obstacle to the cabinet formation;
5. Ms. Tee explains the three theories as to why there is no cabinet yet in Lebanon;
6. Laura Rozen gives us a peek at Obama’s long-awaited Mideast peace strategy (a so-called “Madrid Plus“)
7. The Syrian Socialist Nationalist Party (SSNP) reports fire in the party founder’s tree house. (Read the comments, they’re hilarious)

Someone send me an email when Lebanon has a government. Thanks!

Hendrik Hertzberg, writing in last week’s New Yorker, describes a fascinating new populist initiative called Repair California, which aims to solve that state’s governance problems (legislative gridlock, huge budget deficits, bureaucratic inefficiencies) through a citizen-sponsored constitutional convention. Here are the salient bits of the article:

“California, it turns out, is ungovernable. Its public schools, once the nation’s best, are now among the worst. Its transportation and water systems are deteriorating. Its prisons are so overcrowded that it has to turn tens of thousands of felons loose. And its legislature has spent most of the year in a farcical effort to pass the annual budget, leaving little or no time for other matters, such as—well, schools, transportation, water, and prisons. This is “normal”: the same thing has happened in eighteen of the past twenty-two years. But the addition of economic disaster to legislative paralysis may have brought California to a tipping point.”

One of California’s biggest problems, says Hertzberg, is that its legislature only controls about 7% of the state budget, assuming it can even muster the necessary two thirds majority to pass the budget in the first place. The state’s citizens have had enough, and change may be on the way:

“It started almost exactly one year ago, modestly enough, with an op-ed piece in the San Francisco Chronicle. Echoing Jefferson, the author, Jim Wunderman, wrote, “It is our duty to declare that our California government is not only broken, it has become destructive to our future. Therefore, are we not obligated to nullify our government and institute a new one?” He then called for a “citizens’ constitutional convention” to do the nullifying and the instituting… Wunderman’s op-ed manifesto engendered a broad response, and the response has engendered something like a movement.

That movement, called Repair California, is trying to put two initiatives on next year’s ballot. One would amend the California constitution to allow the voters to call a constitutional convention by initiative… The other would actually call the convention and specify its scope: governance, including the structure of the legislative and executive branches; elections, including the electoral system and the initiative process itself; the budget-making process; and the state’s revenue relationship with local government.

The genius of Repair California’s approach is twofold. First, it steers clear of “social issues”: no gay marriage, no abortion, no affirmative action. Second, the delegates would be chosen randomly from the adult population. (Appointed delegates, Repair California reasons, would be beholden to whoever appointed them; and if the delegates were elected, the elections would inevitably be low-turnout affairs dominated by money and the organized clout of special interests.) The convention itself would be an exercise in what is called “deliberative democracy.” The delegates would spend months studying the issues, consulting experts, debating among themselves, and forging a consensus. The result would be put to a vote of the people, yes or no, in November of 2012.”

Did anyone else get chills reading this? No? Well, neither did I, of course. That would be incredibly dorky. Ahem. But even if the hairs on the back of your neck didn’t rise out of sheer exhiliration, then surely the parallels between California’s governance problems and those of a certain country dear to all of our hearts jumped right out at you, didn’t they? Of course they did…

A Lebanese constitutional convention organized by citizens is certainly out of the question during our lifetimes, but I have an alternative proposal that is entirely more feasible: a reality TV show that applies the same principle of deliberative democracy by ordinary people to the Lebanese scene.

Some enterprising TV producer should create a weekly primetime reality show that tasks a group of ordinary Lebanese — men and women of different ages and regional/religious backgrounds — to “repair Lebanon”. Each hour-long episode would be dedicated to a single major issue — e.g. educational reform, health care, the electoral law, etc. — and would document the group’s efforts to come to consensus on the best way to “repair” the problem under consideration.

Given that these would be ordinary people from various professional backgrounds, the producers would have to bring in experts to “testify” before the group on what they regard to be the ideal solution for the problem at hand. The group would take all of these testimonies under consideration and deliberate together en route to making a final decision, which they would present at the end of each episode.

I imagine it being filmed in a kind of “guerilla style”: raw, unglossy, close to the action, as members of the group hit the streets to research the issues, meeting with politicians, business leaders, activist groups, and ordinary beleaguered citizens like themselves. It would also be interesting to watch the inevitable personality conflicts between group members bubble up through the arduous task of reaching consensus, which the producers could showcase through one-on-one interviews and lots of captured “candid” fights and arguments. (People at home love that stuff).

A variation on this theme could pit several groups against each other in a kind of weekly competition to come up with the best solution. At the end of each episode, viewers at home could vote for their choice via SMS, à la American Idol.

Now, I can already hear many of you snickering at how incredibly geeky this idea sounds, but trust me when I tell you that it would be a smash hit. After all, political talk shows are among the highest-rated TV programs in the country. If Lebanese all around the world can sit through several hours of Kalam al-Nass, al-Haq Yuqal, Nuqta Fasleh, Naharkon Sa`eed, Fakker Martein, Bi-kull Jar’a, and al-Fasad each week (not to mention the interminable weekly press conferences of their various leaders), then surely they could make room for an entertaining show about real people addressing real problems.

So what do you say? Any producers out there?

So apparently there was an entirely inconsequential election in Afghanistan yesterday. Helena Cobban’s got a roundup of the story, and Registan has been great all week.

My only contribution to the coverage is a plea for abbreviational evenhandedness. As long as people are too lazy to say or write “Afghanistan and Pakistan,” lumping them together under the vaguely intergalactic-sounding acronym “Afpak”,  I propose that we do the same to refer to the two principal nations behind the war effort.

“Amuk” has a nice ring to it, wouldn’t you say?

Dear readers: It has come to our attention that an article that we ran yesterday entitled “Hamas Courts Obama By Decapitating al-Qaida Salafists, Boils Heads in Oil” is riven with factual errors. It seems that the notorious deep fried heads and goats incident was a fabrication concocted by an unknown party (some blame Israel, others, Fatah, while some have even suggested that it was a false flag operation launched by PETA).  We have, therefore, decided to pull the piece with our deepest apologies to all concerned, human and caprine.

Read the entire Qnion series here.

Can someone explain Michel Aoun to me? No need for responses from the M14ers who read this blog: I know what you think of him. I’d like to hear from the FPMers.

How to explain Aoun’s latest behavior, from turning down Hariri’s lunch invitation, to insisting on Gebran Bassil’s re-appointment as Telecommunications Minister (when he had once denounced the practice of allowing unsuccessful candidates for parliament to become ministers), to suddenly announcing that he wants the Interior Ministry (a post set aside for one of the President’s ministers, probably the highly popular Ziad Baroud), to refusing to refer to Hariri as PM-designate…

I’ll venture an explanation myself. Aoun can get away with these tactics because there is no clear-cut set of protocols according to which the cabinet formation must take place. It’s a free-for-all. Anybody is fully justified in making whatever demands they feel like, and there is no universally-accepted standard by which to measure the merit of those demands. (By the way, I am formally submitting my demand for the Ministry of Social Affairs. I feel I’m entitled to it, and I dare you to prove me wrong. Go on, try it.)

Consensual democracy in Lebanon is like trying to herd a bunch of teenagers with ADHD into a little rowboat and persuading them all to put their oars away so that the river’s natural current will coax them gently down the stream. All it takes is a single one of those kids to dip his oar into the water, and the rowboat veers towards the rocks.

None of this is surprising; we’ve seen this kerfuffle loom time and again. But what never ceases to amaze me is how people continue to take these leaders seriously. I’m not being cynical here; I really would like an FPMer to come forward and explain it to me.

Take this clip as an example. Here’s a rough transcript:

“Let’s now turn to a matter that has become, in my opinion, a personal one. And it was intended to be personal, for them to say to the people: “It’s because of the General’s son-in-law that the government hasn’t been formed yet.” Well, may the government not be formed just because of the General’s son-in-law, then, if that’s how they want it!”

Does anyone really buy this stuff? It’s like saying: “How dare you accuse me of peeing in your pool! Just for that, I’m going to pee in your pool!” How amazingly lame. And yet, despite its lameness, people believe him!

I can’t help but feel sometimes that if Saad Hariri had 10% of the rhetorical abilities of Nasrallah or Ghazi al-Aridi, he would have put an end to these shenanigans a month ago. Instead, all he can seem to manage are these tepid can’t-we-all-just-get-along press conferences, which hardly inspire confidence in the future. The Big Queso of Qoreitem needs to poop or get off the pot already.

Here’s al-Aridi explaining what we all know, namely that you can’t make the rules up as you go along.

Some noteworthy articles to check out:

Ben Gilbert has a very good piece in Executive magazine on prostitution in Lebanon. The poor guy risked his life braving the super nightclubs of Maameltein to bring us this exposé, so be sure to check it out.  (download PDF – 2.1 megabytes)

Lawrence Pintak and Yosri Fouda have a very strange article in the Columbia Journalism Review (“Blogging in the Middle East: Not Necessarily Journalistic“) that makes the most back-assward argument I’ve read in a while. They start off by stating, uncontroversially, that bloggers are not journalists, yet somehow end up concluding that “if journalist rights groups throw in their lot with [bloggers and political activists masquerading as real journalists], it will be hard to make a case that jailed Iranian and Arab journalists shouldn’t be tried right alongside “cyberdissidents” advocating revolution…” As if Middle Eastern regimes really needed an excuse to imprison anybody!

After you’re done reading Pintak and Fouda, read the rebuttal to their piece, also in CJR. Makes much more sense.

Finally, the map above somehow puts things into perspective. I don’t know what those things are or what perspective the map provides, but it just does. (h/t Ben Ryan)

BEIRUT, Lebanon — Lebanese MP and leader of the Free Patriotic Movement, General Michel Aoun, rejected Prime Minister-designate Saad al-Hariri’s invitation to discuss the stalled cabinet formation over lunch.

A dispute over the candidacy of Aoun’s son-in-law Gebran Bassil for the position of Telecommunications Minister is widely believed to be the main obstacle to the birth of a new Lebanese government. In a press conference at Aoun’s residence in Rabieh, the fiery general rejected Hariri’s “arrogant” conditions regarding the lunch date.

“Who does he think he is? He invites me for lunch without providing any more information? Am I supposed to just accept his invitation blindly?” Aoun asked a group of newspaper reporters.

Aoun dismissed suggestions that the lunch proposal was intended to reach an acceptable compromise, saying  “Before we accept any invitation, we need to have all the information ahead of time so that we can study it carefully. We were not born yesterday, you know,” said Aoun.

When asked by an al-Akhbar journalist about what kind of information he was looking for, Aoun replied, “The choice of restaurant, for starters! Hello? What if I don’t particularly like the restaurant that he chooses? Why does he get to decide where we’re eating? Plus, why does it have to be lunch? Maybe I don’t eat lunch. Maybe I only eat breakfast and dinner. Or brunch! Maybe I only eat brunch. Did the MP-designate ever think of that?”

When reminded that al-Hariri was actually the Prime Minister-designate, Aoun responded: “No, I prefer to call him MP-designate. He’s not the Prime Minister-designate until after the government is formed. It’s just plain arrogance to call yourself the Prime Minister-designate just because you’ve been designated Prime Minister. I mean, ha ha, what a laugh.”

Asked if he had any preferences for lunch venues, Aoun said that he’d prefer not to give away any sensitive information at this juncture, but that he would respond to the other camp’s proposals, “once they stop beating around the bush.”

“I’m not trying to be difficult,” said Aoun. “I will study any real proposal with the attention it deserves — whether it’s sushi, or Italian, Chinese, whatever. But I’m simply not going to rush into things with no guarantees ahead of time. It wouldn’t be fair to the people who voted for me and my party.”

Saad Hariri’s press office would not comment on the General’s remarks.

By Qifa Nabki

Due to considerations of length and format, my article about Lebanese bicameralism for The National was limited to making the simple case that establishing a senate would be better than not establishing a senate. As we’ve seen from the ensuing discussion, many different objections to this argument can and should be raised. What I’d like to do, therefore, is to have a short series of posts – interspersed with updates on the cabinet formation which is just hurtling along at breakneck speed – on different aspects of the problem, and open them up for discussion.

Here are the main objections, as I see them:

1. A legislative body dedicated to protecting confessional interests only serves to entrench confessionalism.
2. Replacing the current parliament with a non-confessional, one-man-one-vote system will allow some groups to dominate the government in an undemocratic fashion.
3. A senate empowered to be anything more than a weak or purely symbolic body will maintain the legislative gridlock that paralyzes the current system.

In this post, I’d like to begin with the first objection. As Joe M. wrote in the previous discussion:

“I still don’t understand why you think adding an additional legislative body would be more effective at protecting minority rights than a simple law that explicitly protects minorities in “the realm of religious affairs: personal status laws, marriage, citizenship, etc…” Something in the realm of the American “bill of rights” for the protection of minority rights in Lebanon could accomplish your goals without the addition of a new legislative chamber…”

I feel that a critical part of this discussion — which is often simply taken for granted — is the question of what “confessional interests” need to be protected in the first place. Therefore, by way of approaching this objection, I would challenge readers to answer the following four questions.

1. What are “confessional interests” anyway?
2. How does the current system provide an effective and necessary check against inter-sect domination?
3. Are “confessional interests” just a smokescreen used by political parties that have built up identities as protectors of sectarian communities?
4. Is there a better way of protecting the rights of minority communities without introducing a bicameral system?

Moses stares down from the frontispiece of the U.S. Senate.

One of the best ways of approaching these questions is to imagine that Lebanon scrapped its political system altogether, and moved to hold elections using a new electoral law with the following features: no confessional quotas in a unicameral parliament (i.e. one chamber, not two); districts with an equal number of registered voters; a system of proportional representation or a mixed proportional-majoritarian system (like in the Boutros draft law); no requirements governing the confessional background of the key executive posts (President, Prime Minister, deputy Prime Minister, Speaker, deputy Speaker).

On top of this, let’s imagine that there were various constitutional reforms passed to give the legislative branch increased oversight over the Council of Ministers, and to compel the enactment of legislation in a timely fashion so that the government wouldn’t remain bogged down in gridlock all the time. In short, we’re talking about a non-confessional unicameral system with a variety of procedural reforms aimed at improving legislative efficacy and electoral law transparency/fairness.

How, if at all, would such a system threaten the rights of confessional communities? The floor is yours.

I’ve written an article for The Review, calling for the creation of a bicameral legislature in Lebanon. Some of you may remember a post from a while ago announcing the launch of an optimistic initiative called the Lebanese Campaign for a Senate. Well, this piece attempts to make the case in a more cogent fashion.

Here’s are the first few paragraphs of the article. Read the rest over at The National, and then come on back here to leave comments.

Two Houses, Many Mansions

Two months ago, with the world peering over its shoulder, Lebanon held parliamentary elections. Perhaps more significant than the surprising result – which saw the Western-backed March 14 coalition hold onto power – was the outpouring of enthusiasm for the election itself. Voter turnout reached record highs, and thousands of Lebanese expatriates returned home to cast their ballots, many of them taking advantage of airline tickets paid for by deep-pocketed political parties. The first truly competitive election held in decades, it was portrayed by all sides as the gateway to a new era (indeed, some claimed, a “Third Republic”) where the chronic dysfunctions of the post-war period – from corruption and mismanagement to sectarian violence and institutional immobilism – would be swept away under a bold new mandate.

Today, nearly 10 weeks after the last vote was counted, hopes of a fresh start have fizzled as Lebanon finds itself mired again in circumstances conspicuously reminiscent of the pre-election status quo. Prime Minister-designate Saad Hariri has faced one obstacle after another on his way to forming a national unity government, all the while fighting a rear-guard action against the splintering of his own parliamentary bloc.

While sluggish deliberations and brittle coalition governments plague many parliamentary democracies, Lebanon’s repeated bouts of state paralysis are symptomatic of deeper problems. The experience of the past four years, since the end of the Pax Syriana and the false stability it imposed, has made it all too clear that the basic principle of Lebanese democracy – consensual decision-making by confessional elites – is inadequate to the task of managing the country. The state functions primarily as a tool in the hands of a corrupt cartel of sectarian leaders, a space to compete over parochial interests at the expense of the national welfare.

The inevitable injustices engendered by this system have helped to maintain feelings of disillusionment and revanchism among Lebanese citizens, who have little recourse but to turn, ironically, to the patronage machines of their confessional leaders for the basic services that the government is unable to provide. In this way, a vicious cycle is set in motion, entrenching the original source of the system’s frailty and empowering the elites to continue to govern in their own interests. (keep reading)

Taking a cue from Bruno, former U.S. National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft thinks we need to find a way to talk to hummus. Watch this clip to hear all about how hummus won’t want to be left out of the peace process.

Interviewer Landrum Bolling looks positively ravenous just listening to him (especially at 6:00 when he actually licks his lips).

Whatever happens, I just think it’s important that hummus not be able to acquire BLT’s.