Qifa Nabki | A Lebanese Political Blog

Is Prime Minister Hariri’s government about to be toppled? This is the main question on people’s minds in Lebanese policy circles, to gauge from various conversations I had in Washington DC this week.

Certainly, all signs in Beirut point to the brewings of a major clash over the government’s support for the U.N. Special Tribunal for Lebanon (STL). Last week, Hizbullah MP Nawwaf al-Mousawi warned that his party would deal with anyone who endorsed an indictment against members of the party as “tools of the US-Israeli invasion…[having] the same fate as the invader.” And yesterday, former minister (and Syrian megaphone) Wi’am Wahhab called on the Lebanese opposition “to resign from the cabinet and topple it as soon as possible.”

There’s no doubt that bringing down this government is perfectly doable, from a constitutional perspective. Thanks to the precedent of the Doha Agreement, the opposition holds one third of the seats in Hariri’s cabinet, and were all of its ministers to resign, it would only take one more defection to bring down the whole thing. That defection could come from one of the President’s minsters, or, more likely, from Jumblatt’s bloc.

However, the question is: what would this achieve? It would not impede the STL’s work, at least not in the short term. It would not halt the issuance of an indictment. And, most importantly, it would not undermine the legitimacy or credibility of the court, which is the main goal of the campaign against it.

Much more likely than an abrupt walk-out, in my opinion, is some kind of slow boil strategy, a wave of demonstrations organized by the opposition as a show of force and a display of public antipathy towards the “conspiracy” against the resistance. Hizbullah knows that it can’t prevent the STL from delivering an indictment: what it is trying to do is render that indictment politically meaningless by tarring the court as an Israeli tool.

Why, then, have we not seen any demonstrations yet? There seems to still be some hope that an agreement can be worked out that avoids a return to the paralysis of 2006-08. The question is: what room is there for negotiation? What the opposition wants from Hariri is very clear, and best summed up by Walid Jumblatt’s regular pronouncements on the subject:

The best way to establish justice in [former Premier Rafik] Hariri’s murder is through a united stance revealing the truth behind false witnesses and dismissing the use of the court by some states in an international game to serve their interests.

In other words, they want him to disavow the STL completely. Hariri has tried to meet the opposition halfway by admitting the existence of false witnesses who misled the investigation, but stopped short of saying that the court had no credibility. If we are to believe Nasrallah, Hariri has also offered to exonerate Hizbullah’s leadership by declaring those indicted members as “rogue elements”.

So far, Hizbullah has made it clear that it is not going to meet Hariri halfway, and so one wonders: why is he bothering to make these half-hearted concessions and send mixed signals about the STL? Is he still hoping that the “Syrian-Saudi agreement” will pressure Hizbullah to find some kind of face-saving solution for everyone involved? To judge from Walid al-Moallem’s comments in New York this week, this also looks unlikely.

If Hariri has a strategy beyond treading water until the indictments are released, its outlines have yet to emerge. What does he plan to do once the STL finally goes public? If arresting Hizbullah members is clearly out of the question (as everyone believes it is), won’t this failure to cooperate with the Tribunal put Lebanon in breach of the Chapter VII agreement that established it?

More on these matters later…

Postscript

Tomorrow, the Qifa Nabki blog turns two! I’d like to thank you all for making it an engaging space for discussion about Lebanese affairs. While I foresee a lighter posting schedule in the next few months due to my professional obligations, I hope to keep the conversation going. Stay tuned over the next couple of days for my interviews with Thanassis Cambanis (author of a new book about Hizbullah), Andrew Tabler (fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy), and some thoughts on a panel discussion with Ziad Baroud hosted by IFES and USIP.

Surveying the Lebanese political landscape today, one can’t help but be struck by the disparity in rhetorical competence between the two major political groupings. If there were a fantasy sports game based on Lebanese politics in which a player’s stock was tied to their charisma and oratorical abilities, how many March 14 figures would you pick for your team?

My contention is that you’d pack your roster with March 8th politicos before finding room on the bench for people like Samir Geagea and Marwan Hamadeh.

Think about it. Whatever you may think of Nabih Berri, Michel Aoun, and Suleiman Frangieh — to say nothing of Hasan Nasrallah, the greatest orator of his generation — is there any doubt that they have a way of connecting with an audience that their opponents simply do not possess? In this respect, Walid Jumblatt’s desertion of the March 14th coalition after last year’s elections cost his former allies much more than their illusory majority in parliament:  it also deprived them of their most prominent and effective spokesperson.

This is a dimension of Lebanese political life that most analysts consistently neglect. It is understandable to do so, given the extent to which  political dynamics are dictated by factors like foreign sponsorship, money, and the meat grinder of the confessional system that seems to return the same faces to power, year after year.

On the other hand, if public opinion truly did not matter or feature in the calculations of Lebanese politicians, then why would Hasan Nasrallah bother taking to the podium so often, appealing to the logic and sensibilities of armchair generals across the country?  Why would Michel Aoun hold multiple press conferences a week, lambasting his rivals in increasingly incomprehensible, hypocritical, inconsistent, but apparently persuasive, tones?

After the events of the past week — which featured a bizarrely brazen assault on Saad al-Hariri’s authority in the form of Hizbullah’s airport entourage — I found myself wondering (as I often do): “What if the tables were turned?” What if Hariri or the Gemayels behaved in such a transparently belligerent way? Would Aoun or Frangieh or Berri just let it slide? Or would they make political hay of it for the next several months? What if one of Samir Geagea’s top lieutenants was accused of being an Israeli spy? Would Nawwaf al-Mousawi waste any time insinuating that the “disease” of collaboration had infected the entire party?

I don’t expect Saad al-Hariri to be a Sunni Nasrallah. He doesn’t have to be a great communicator to be an effective prime minister. His father was not particularly eloquent, but at least he had some kind of… presence. By contrast, the dominant feature of the younger Hariri’s premiership is a sustained absence. If he’s not in Saudi Arabia or Damascus, he’s in Sardinia. When he’s not responding to developments in Beirut through his spokespeople, he’s giving interviews to foreign newspapers. Hariri’s approach to solving problems at home is to cut deals abroad, while his opponents bring their fight directly into Lebanese living rooms.

It is increasingly clear that these opponents have largely succeeded in convincing a majority of the Lebanese public (through a mixture of persuasion and intimidation) that the Special Tribunal for Lebanon is bad news for the country. What will Hariri do when Hizbullah demands that the government formally renounce its support for the STL, on pain of a million-man march on the Prime Minister’s office, à la 2006? If he wasn’t able to order the ISF to arrest Jamil al-Sayyed at Beirut airport last week, where is he going to get the muscle and political cover to arrest indicted Hizbullah members, particularly in the face of a well-orchestrated campaign to incite public hostility towards the STL?

In such a scenario, one can only predict that Hariri will fall back upon his tried and true strategy: cultivating ambiguity through absence. But with the stakes so high, a hastily-planned trip to Riyadh won’t do the trick; it will take an absence of greater import. The young Hariri will have little choice but to resign, and one imagines that he may even feel relief when someone calls his bluff.

A week ago, Jamil al-Sayyed’s threats sounded like the rantings of Uncle Junior: unintelligible, inconsequential, and frankly a little embarrassing to the whole family. `Uqab Saqr (who seems to have become Saad al-Hariri’s unofficial spokesman) dismissed the ex-security chief as a mentally unbalanced has-been, and added that his threats do not reflect the positions of Damascus or Dahiyeh.

A week later, however, one is beginning to wonder if Uncle Junior hasn’t found a way to make himself useful after all. Defying the authorities to arrest him, he arrived in Beirut today and was warmly received by a Hizbullah escort. No immigration officers dared spoil the welcoming party.

So is al-Sayyed speaking for Syria and Hizbullah or not? At the very least, it looks increasingly like they are not willing to drop the “false witness” file anytime soon. This is their only real mechanism to de-legitimize the Tribunal if indeed indictments are issued against members of Hizbullah.

The big news in Lebanese politics these days is Prime Minister Saad al-Hariri’s exoneration of Syria in the matter of his father’s assassination. Here’s the relevant section of last week’s interview in Al-Sharq al-Awsat:

وقال الحريري: «فتحت صفحة جديدة في العلاقة مع سورية منذ تأليف الحكومة». وتابع: «يجب على المرء أن يكون واقعيا في هذه العلاقة لبنائها على أسس متينة، كما عليه أن يقيم السنوات الماضية، حتى لا تتكرر الأخطاء السابقة. ومن هنا، نحن أجرينا تقييمنا لأخطاء حصلت من قبلنا مع سورية، مست بالشعب السوري، وبالعلاقة بين البلدين. علينا دائما أن ننظر إلى مصلحة الشعبين والدولتين وعلاقتهما، ونحن في مكان ما ارتكبنا أخطاء؛ ففي مرحلة ما اتهمنا سورية باغتيال الرئيس الشهيد، وهذا كان اتهاما سياسيا».

وعن موقفه من قضية «شهود الزور»، قال الحريري: «حكي الكثير عن موضوع شهود الزور. هناك أشخاص ضللوا التحقيق، وهؤلاء ألحقوا الأذى بسورية ولبنان.. وشهود الزور هؤلاء، خربوا العلاقة بين البلدين وسيسوا الاغتيال». وعن محكمة الحريري، قال: «لا أريد أن أتكلم كثيرا عن المحكمة، لكني سأقول فقط إن للمحكمة مسارها الذي لا علاقة له باتهامات سياسية كانت متسرعة».

[Rough translation: We made mistakes that had a detrimental effect upon our relationship with Syria. We have to always take into consideration the interests of both countries and both peoples. We accused Syria of assassinating Rafiq al-Hariri, and this was a political accusation. There were people who misled the investigation, and these false witnesses were the ones who ruined the relationship between Syria and Lebanon and politicized the assassination. The Tribunal has its own course that has nothing to do with hastily-made political accusations.]

As I’ve been arguing for the past few months, the Saudis (and perhaps also the Americans) are no longer interested in using the STL as a weapon against Syria. Hariri’s latest statement simply formalized what has long been an unspoken fait accompli.

Only two questions remain:

1) How will Hariri, the Saudis, and their Western allies deal with the Special Tribunal for Lebanon if/when it releases a damning indictment against Hizbullah?

2) What effect will the coup against the STL (by its own supporters no less) have upon Lebanon’s standing in the international community?

On the first question, it seems to me that the outlines of a final deal are beginning to come into view. Hariri has exonerated Syria, and has more or less already exonerated Hizbullah’s leadership (if we are to believe Nasrallah). With these two potential targets safeguarded, there are only a few ways for Hariri to defuse the STL:

(a) Blame the crime on “undisciplined members” of Hizbullah.

(b) End cooperation between the STL and the Lebanese government by blaming the “false witnesses” for misleading the investigation.

(c) Denounce the STL altogether and set up a Lebanese commission to formally authorize Nasrallah’s “evidence” against Israel.

None of these options is very satisfactory. As Hariri said himself, the STL has a life of its own, and those who imagine that he will be able to simply denounce it and move on with business as usual are fooling themselves.

What he seems to be doing is continuing his policy of containment: portraying himself as a friend of Damascus and Dahiyeh while waiting for the STL to deliver its results. At that point, he’ll rush to Assad and Nasrallah’s defense, but the damage will be done. It won’t be what some had once hoped for — regime change in Damascus, disarmament for Hizbullah — but it won’t be nothing.

Finally, apologies for being off the radar for a few weeks. I’m finishing my doctorate this year (inshallah), and preparing to apply for academic jobs. I imagine that posting will be fairly light throughout this semester.