Qifa Nabki | A Lebanese Political Blog

Now that the formation of a new government is, ahem, just around the corner, I thought I’d attempt another crowdsourcing experiment, since the last one was so successful.

The theme? Coming up with the agenda for Lebanon’s next government. Feel free to make as many suggestions as you can regarding the most urgent areas that need government action/reform/lip service. The person who submits the largest number of suggestions will win an all-expenses-paid weekend trip to Hummus-Land.

Suggestions can be as ambitious and unrealistic as “eliminating the public debt”, “cracking down on environmental destruction,” or “passing a just and fair electoral law on a non-sectarian basis”… or as modest as “enforcing the seatbelt law.”

After we’ve amassed a sizable number of priorities, I’ll put up a poll where you’ll be able to vote for your top choices. The floor is open.

A few quick things:

1) The Safadi Foundation’s blog (which is good, you should read it) has a useful recap of yesterday’s House Foreign Affairs Middle East Central Asia Subcommittee’s hearing with Assistant Secretary for Near East Affairs, Jeffrey Feltman. Among the highlights, the following question from Chairman Gary Ackerman (who once coordinated with Michel Aoun to turn SALSRA from a dream into a reality… AIG, correct me if I’m wrong about that):

In the two areas we are trying to improve relations with Syria mainly bilateral relations and Middle East peace, are we going to be willing to pay in Lebanese coins?

You see, we’re not being paranoid. Politicians really do talk like that. Click the jump to read more.

2) Rob, of Arabic Media Shack fame, now has a new blog. Wasn’t it Cicero who said that you can take the man out of the blog, but you can’t teach him new tricks? Or something like that. Anyway, subscribe to his RSS feed, but not if you haven’t already subscribed to mine!

3) Listen to Philippe Skaff (president of Lebanon’s Green Party) and Ziad Baroud (Interior Minister/Superman) explain why Lebanon needs urgent billboard reform. (Hint: it has something to do with the panneau blocking the madame from walking along the trottoire with her poussette.)

Like farm animals before an earthquake, the Lebanese daily newspapers are beginning to shift anxiously ahead of what they now believe to be, yes… I think we can confirm… yes, uh huh, there’s absolutely no question this time… it’s gonna… it’s, it’s… oh my God… it’s happening!

THE GOVERNMENT IS COMING, THE GOVERNMENT IS COMING!

Or so they say.

Al-Akhbar predictably claims that America’s evil Vice-Regent (Jeffrey Feltman) has given the green light, while Naharnet predictably claims that Syria’s evil Vice-Regent (Bashar al-Assad) has given the green light. Michel Aoun, in the meantime, is insisting that the light remains decidedly orange.

I remember speaking to Joshua Landis a few months ago about the cabinet crisis, and he suggested to me that while Bashar would love to see Saad Hariri come over the mountains and make the humiliating visit to Damascus, Saudi Arabia and the U.S. had made it clear that no such gesture was in the cards. Meanwhile, as much as America and Saudi would love to see Saad stick it to Aoun and Hizbullah (by assembling a majority cabinet), that is clearly a red line for Syria.

Moral of the story: I personally don’t think that Lebanon’s problem is one evil foreign Vice-Regent but several of them, not to mention all the little local wannabe evil Vice-Regents.

Update (comment from Joshua Landis):

“The word on the street about the Syrians and Saudis is that they have agreed to tell their friends in Lebanon to fix things as they see fit, but that Syria and Saudi Arabia are not going to let their relationship be held hostage by paralysis in Lebanon… Interpret that as you wish.”

This just in from Naharnet: apparently the FBI has caught yet another pair of dangerous criminal masterminds who were allegedly trying to replace Iran as Hezbollah’s main military benefactor.

Patrick Nayyar, 45, an Indian citizen living illegally in the United States, and Conrad Mulholland, 43, were charged by federal prosecutors with agreeing to supply an FBI undercover agent with guns, ammunition, vehicles, bulletproof vests and night vision goggles…

They had already supplied a pistol, a pick-up truck and a box of ammunition to the FBI agent, whom they thought to be a Hizbullah member, the prosecutors said.

Are you guys as relieved as I am? I mean, if Hezbollah had gotten their hands on that PISTOL, who knows what they could have done with it?

TEL AVIV, Israel — Fresh on the heels of a successful Lebanese bid to win the Guinness World Record for the largest plate of hummus, the Israeli Ministry of Tourism has announced plans to steal back the record by launching a massive “hummus-themed luxury resort and spa” in the north of the country.

“Hummus-Land” (pronounced khoo-moos-land) will feature an enormous lagoon filled with hummus in which holiday-goers “will be able to swim, take canoe rides, and rejuvenate their bodies through the healing antioxidizing power of puréed chickpeas.”

The lagoon will feature a meandering “lazy creek”, a wave pool, several cascading waterfalls, and even a shark reef — all filled with hummus.

An artist's rendering of a family enjoying the Hummus Land Lagoon.

“The total volume of hummus that is pumped through the park each day will exceed a million cubic meters,” said the executive director of the Hummus-Land project, Amos Cohen. “This will make the Lebanese 2,506 kilogram dish seem like a joke,” he said, snickering. “Our kiddie pool alone will have twenty times that much hummus in it.”

Mr. Cohen said that there were also plans to incorporate other “ancient Israeli dishes like zaatar, couscous, shawarma, and falafel” into the park’s attractions. One ride that is currently under development, Falafel Mountain, would send thrill-seekers on an eight-minute roller-coaster ride, tunneling inside a giant falafel the size of a football stadium.

“All the materials would be organic and edible, which are obviously not suitable for building,” admits Mr. Cohen. “But we are confident that a new breakthrough technology developed by an Israeli company will enable us to turn the falafel mix into a kind of durable cement,” he said, adding quickly, “It would still be edible, though.”

The project is sure to inflame Lebanese-Israeli tensions, not least because of the location of the site chosen for Hummus Land: the Shebaa Farms, a disputed twelve-mile strip on the border of the two countries.

“Israel is a crowded country,” said Mr. Cohen. “There is no room for a project on this scale. So why not make use of Shebaa? It’s not like we’re ever going to give it back to the Lebanese, the poor bastards.”

A spokesman for the Association of Lebanese Industrialists (which sponsored the Lebanese bid for the world record) could not reached for comment.

By Qifa Nabki

The crowdsourcing experiment that we ran here a few days ago was such a success that I’m trying to come up with other ways to leverage all of y’all’s ingenuity to solve other pressing problems. (You don’t do windows, do you?)

You can find the assembled “Lebanon Bibliography” by clicking the link in the page header titled “Bibliographies” (between “About” and “Conspiracies”), or simply by clicking here.

Note that many of your valuable suggestions haven’t yet made it into the bibliography, as I’d like to assemble a separate fiction/memoirs list, as well as a film list. We’ll have a dedicated call for suggestions in the next couple of weeks.

Thanks again for all of your help. Now, get reading!

For those of you in the area, the annual meeting of the Middle East Studies Association (MESA) is going to be held in Boston next month (Nov. 21-24, Boston Marriott Copley Place; click here for the website).

Perusing the program, I see at least three Lebanon-related panels and twenty-four Lebanon-related papers, and I will probably make an effort to drop in on a few. (You can find the fully searchable program for the conference here. Note that attendance and participation require membership, alas).

If any readers are planning on making it to MESA to give papers on themes relevant to the staff here at qifanabki.com, feel free to drop me a line in the comment section or via the contact form on the “About” page with the details (day/time) of your talk.

Haaretz correspondent Yoav Stern has written an interesting article for Syria Comment called “Syria’s Four Seas Strategy“. It’s worth a read, but if you’re too busy to click over, here’s the executive summary.

• Turkey’s cancellation of a joint air force exercise with Israel last week is just the latest nail in the coffin of the Turkish-Israeli diplomatic relationship, which many have been warning is headed for serious trouble.
• Syria is naturally thrilled about this turn of events and is trying to exploit it by cozying up to Turkey in every way it can.
• Stern says that the move towards Turkey is actually part of what Bashar al-Assad has been calling a Four Seas Strategy, a regional alliance between Turkey, Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Syria (i.e. the countries that lie at the shores of the Mediterranean, the Red Sea, the Black Sea, and the Persian Gulf).
• What Syria hopes to get out of this is increased infrastructure and investment opportunities, and a hedge against the isolating tactics of successive U.S. administrations.

If you’re Syria, the strategy is a no-brainer. But I’m wondering what Turkey gets out of this. I had dinner with a Turkish friend a couple of nights ago who suggested that the AK party is committing a major blunder by jeopardizing its relations with Israel in favor of Syria.

I personally wonder whether the current spat between Turkey and Israel amounts to much more than a slap on the wrist, rather than a fundamental shift in a long-standing foreign policy.

Thoughts?

PS: This article in al-Akhbar by Jean Aziz is worth reading. Unfortunately, he does not identify his sources beyond implying that they are Syrian and Saudi officials, but it’s an interesting illustration of the fundamental difference in worldview between the two sides of the Middle East’s mini Cold War.

Update: Every now and then, someone leaves a comment that addresses the topic in a way that is far more informed and incisive than the original post. I try to make a habit of bringing those comments up to the main page. See below for one from J of Chalcedon, who knows the political economy of the Eastern Mediterranean better than a Kipchak slave sultan:

Sorry to come to this late. It’s quite important, but doesn’t bear directly on Lebanon. Leitmotif for QN’s future efforts?

The Turkish stake in this is both obvious, and more nuanced than readily assumed. The obvious: First, Syria is a howlingly obvious emerging market. Turkey’s largest mobile service provider wanted, and would likely have received, a concession to enter the Syrian market. American pressure to demur has generally been understood to be decisive in preventing such a deal, which in my opinion may yet happen.

More importantly, why wouldn’t a government whose raison d’etre is market-friendliness embrace a neighbor which might want to buy plastic buckets that don’t have holes in them? A strong retail business that originated in AK party ties, the hard-discount retailer BIM, has already set up shop in Morocco. The point is not that this government embodies a “Neo-Ottoman” policy as its way in the world. BIM is, last time I check, about 49 percent floated and not simply a surrogate for politics by way of commerce. But why wouldn’t people who like the idea of regional influence with vague historic connotations encourage the radical idea of selling Arabs groceries and the odd school supply through a vertically integrated chain of producers?

Less apparent is the presumptive Turkish reading of the regional situation. Do they think that Obama may stare down this Israeli government, and cause it to fall? Either way, commit to an unwieldy pariah ally, when your stock in trade is relations with all? There’s no doubt that the AKP mandarins have no real fondness for Zionism, but they’re also keen not to be overtaken on the (pious/isolationist/chauvisnist) right in holding this Israeli government at arm’s length. Who ever won an election shaking hands Benjamin Netanyahu?

In short: there’s nothing to lose by being nice to Syria – they’ll never be on the hook for the real burden of a Syrian-Israeli deal, namely paying to relocate Golan settlers. And they couldn’t possibly provide Syria’s real demand in that equation, which is a Libyan-style grand bargain, or at least a guarantee of non-intervention. So why over-interpret the matter?

My two cents. The grand regional/civilizational  interpretations re Turkey and the “”West” are mostly silly, in my view. Their EU accession process may be doomed for other reasons, including the EU’s constitutional crisis prior to the last round of expansion. (Ghassan Karam,, they’re not negotiating the “if” of membership – it’s supposed to be the modalities of when at this point, which makes makes Romania and Bulgaria a complete snub.) Today’s foreign policy is entirely mercenary, or rational, if that’s better, as yesterday’s. These guys are just better than their predecessors at not spitting in their own faces for no good reason.

The past twenty-four hours have been bewildering, even by Lebanese standards, for all of the mixed signals coming out of Beirut about the cabinet formation. Yesterday, there were widespread reports of “optimism” and a “positive atmosphere” regarding the talks. Today, however, all this exuberance has evaporated in the wake of what The Daily Star is calling a “bombshell” (yawn) from Michel Aoun:

Government formation suffered a heavy setback Wednesday as demands made by Free Patriotic Movement (FPM) leader MP Michel Aoun pulled the rug from beneath earlier progress.

Deliberations over the cabinet formation appear as if they would have to be resumed from scratch as Aoun, in a defiant tone, demanded that his party be granted six portfolios and be allowed to maintain the five ministries – including the Telecommunications Ministry – being handled by his Reform and Change bloc in the current caretaker cabinet.

Naturally, March 14 officials (and even a few ex-March 14 officials) have expressed “shock at Aoun’ s stance given the relatively optimistic mood.”

I love these kinds of statements from Lebanese politicians. They belong to what I’ve come to think of as the meteorological school of political commentary. Politics, in other words, is like the weather. You can’t control it; you just have to hope for the best, taking advantage of the sunny days and riding out the rainy ones.

Some mornings, I wake up to read that everyone is feeling great about the “positive atmosphere”, and that this bodes well for the prospects of forming a government. On other mornings, I open the newspaper to find that this positive atmosphere has been replaced by a “negative mood”, and that all progress towards the goal has been erased.

You can almost hear the frustration in the M14 pols’ voices when they complain about Aoun’s behavior: “Why did you have to go and spoil a perfectly sunny day with this cloudburst?”

What’s the lowly citizen to do but put on their parka and go out into the drizzle, whistling a hopeful tune to distract themselves from the unfortunate turn of events?

Grey skies are gonna clear up…