Let’s stop kicking a dead horse

There was much celebration, even satisfied ululations, that Michel Aoun was defeated in several significant municipalities in Mount Lebanon, and will probably not be a factor in Beirut. The general’s bad choices have been a curse to us all over the years, but it’s really time to say “enough.” Aoun is no longer the real issue in Lebanon, and delighting in his defeats is equivalent to kicking a dead horse.

Having dispensed industrial quantities of ink denouncing Aoun, I’m perhaps not one to talk. However, over the years I have been struck by the extent to which the general has become a red herring – a false lead attracting the public’s (particularly in his case, the Christian public’s) attention away from what matters. And what matters today is that Syria and Hezbollah are reinforcing their already-tight control over a country that, five years ago, sought to regain its sovereignty.

Aoun has sanctioned this, covered this, even promoted this in his vindictive way, since rare are the Lebanese politicians who will not bring the temple down over everyone’s head out of spite for their domestic rivals. But the reality is that Aoun has offered his partisans diminishing marginal returns. His losses mean less and less.

The parliamentary elections last year showed how wrong things have gone for Aoun. That the general won in several constituencies thanks to the Shia vote in no way diminished his successes. However, it did highlight that Aoun had hemorrhaged Christian support, which in our sectarian system means something. We shouldn’t confuse parliamentary and municipal elections, given how the latter are based on family solidarities and animosities. Yet the results this past weekend tell us something deeper about Aoun’s shortcomings.

In one way or another, Aoun has been a part of the power structure for five years, and while he was not represented in the government that emerged from the 2005 elections, since then he has had access to other offices, support from Syria’s allies, and considerable funds. Many interpreted Aoun’s successive setbacks as the result of Christian rejection of his political choices. That’s part of it, even a major part; however, Aoun also lost ground because he failed to consolidate his gains in the system. This required commonplace patronage, and Aoun’s ministers have played the game like everyone else. But it also required another form of patronage, which Aoun never provided.

This other form of patronage was a viable, profitable project for the long term. When Aoun returned in 2005, quite a few people were willing to tie their fortunes to the general. There were officers in the army who had risen with Aoun during the 1980s, before his exile, politicians who had found no room in March 14 election lists in 2005, businessmen and professionals who liked Aoun and who awaited the day when his influence would bring about the state they desired, one in which they might be offered choice roles, as well as others.

In other words, aside from the general’s more amorphous base of support, there were not a few people who had attached their personal interests to Aoun’s. There was nothing improper here. Which politician does not attract the ambitious to his side? Indeed that is the essence of political power. Where Aoun went wrong, however, is that he systematically lost the valuable cards he had accumulated, and therefore frustrated those who had wagered on his achievement.

The general won a large share of the Christian vote in 2005, which should have set him on the path toward the presidency. Had Aoun remained neutral between March 8 and March 14, he would have been uncircumventable as president when Emile Lahoud’s extended term ended. Instead, he allied himself against the majority, which is just about the silliest thing one can do in a system where it is the parliamentary majority that elects the president.

This was a blow to the Aounist faithful, one they tried to absorb by insisting that they had no dislike for Michel Sleiman, who became president instead. Except that Aoun began relentlessly criticizing Sleiman, in fact seldom avoided an opportunity to do so, so that his claims to defend the authority of the Maronite presidency sounded terribly hollow; a hollowness that turned into an abyss when Aoun also continued criticizing the Maronite patriarch, Nasrallah Sfeir.

Then Aoun invested heavily in the parliamentary elections of 2009 – persuaded, I believe, that he would be able to use an opposition victory to leverage himself into the presidency, or at least become, in a circuitous way, the effective leader of the Christians. And yet the general came up short once again, as he was unable to win the opposition a majority – his larger bloc of parliamentarians now more a reminder of his thwarted endeavors than a source of satisfaction.

In the aftermath, the Aounists began fraying, as the general’s primary objective centered around ensuring that his son-in-law would inherit his movement. The older Aounists protested: they had not fought long and hard to hand the house keys over to Gebran Bassil. That’s where we are today, the Aounists neither here nor there, having lost all momentum, their leader essentially behaving like any other Lebanese leader in wanting to hand off to the son he never had.

Aoun has become a sideshow. We should give him the importance he merits, which is certainly not negligible, but not more than that. He lost in the municipal elections, but so what? Lebanon has lost a great deal more in the past six months, since the “reconciliation” with Syrian began and the country formally started adopting Hezbollah’s rhetoric. Don’t confuse the plot of the story with a footnote.