The Whole World is Botching

You have an opportunity to ensure that Lebanon remains democratic and free. So far, you’re screwing it up.

There are two scenarios: a Lebanon bolstered by the strongest international allies to rid itself of criminal corruption, or a Lebanon overrun by its proxy influencers.

No one pays attention to Lebanon. Sure, there are NGO’s howling at the moon for relief in the midst of 300,000 displaced, 6,000 wounded and nearly 200 dead from the August 4th explosion. This doesn’t even factor in a half-million displaced migrant domestic workers, collapsed communities, and billions in damage and losses.

Everything around us is a ticking time bomb of human catastrophe. The worst has not begun. We have yet to run out of bread, and people can sleep in the streets at least until October when the rains come, and the cold.

Yeah, it gets cold here.

After thirty years of climbing the rope to ring the bell, a time period marked with political actors greasing the rope or trying to pull our pants down, we could see the last two or three knots. It’s not a perfect republic, but the Lebanese took it in stride and built wonderful social pillars supporting the arts, medicine, science, and environmental and cultural preservation. Human rights have wavered between so-so and horrendous, but people still liked to fashion that we had free speech and equality what with all the talk shows on television.

In the twenty-first century, it’s been easy to blame outliers for Lebanon’s woes. In 2006, Israel bombed the country back to 1990. Then, starting around 2011, the onslaught of the Syrian Civil War and the subsequent dumping of two million refugees into a Lebanon already gasping for resources gave us another reason to point fingers at an external threat to our well-being.

On October 17, 2019, we found out that politicians at the highest echelons had been greasing the rope all along. We got blitzed with an existential truth: we’d been climbing the rope without any pants at all, and, as it turns out, the rope itself was a phantom. Eighty-five billion dollars was unaccounted for. The nation was revealed to be in total financial ruin.

And still, with the stubbornness of a lumbering bull, the Lebanese organized themselves, protested en masse, sang and chanted slogans, all in the belief that the public could make a difference. President Aoun remained entrenched, and though public anger swelled, people still had Sunday lunch with family and swapped funny memes on Instagram.

On the morning of August 5th, I woke up to an image of Beirut flattened. My friend had captioned the photo “The End.” I pictured that rope and all the blood and claw marks on it from decades of a nation just trying to realize itself. Then I saw Lebanon lying dead on the polished pine of a gym floor. Game over.

Why you need to pay attention to Lebanon

At the very least, you are likely nodding in agreement that Lebanon was born to undo itself, and you may even feel a smidgen of satisfaction that nothing could have been done to avert the economic collapse and of course the spread of COVID-19. We’re all dealing with getting a good bashing from 2020. Why does the world need to pay attention to a country whose only exports are blond hash, vacation property and the vegetable crops its own people need to eat?

So, here’s the thing, if Lebanon fails, the western world will face a catastrophe in the shape of proxy invaders. Lebanon might be small, but it is a stronghold of western values. Against all odds, it has held off hard-line Islamism from seeping into doctrine and, as far as I know, only pornography is censored - that and talking trash about the president. Even before the bombing of Beirut, our supreme leader laid his cowardice bare and let us know that he was sick of being ridiculed. “From now on,” came the decree, “Thou shalt not make fun of or deride the president.”

Almost immediately afterward, Twitter was sparked with inquiries as to whether or not we could still tell the ex-Foreign Minister Gebran Bassil to go fuck himself during street protests. We were satisfied this was still safe ground.

It’s time to get serious

Right now we’re riding the wave of sympathy and love from every nation on Earth, even Israel and Iran. With all of these love letters, you’d think the Lebanese would feel all warm and gooey inside. To the contrary, we fear we are all alone.

Sure you can send aid and donate toward relief efforts, but if western powers do not get serious, and I mean get serious right now, Lebanon will slide to the will of Iran or Syria, and America and Europe will lose the tiny country that had a huge gravitational pull toward a western sense of commerce, science, education, art, freedom of expression and yes, even civil rights, which granted were slightly short of abysmal, but groups to fight against that record were gaining traction somewhere near the bottom of that rope.

If Iran or Syria begin to exact (more of) an agenda on Lebanon, Israel will get super pissed off. I’m sure you can write the rest of the story.

Believe me, even in the midst of 20% of Lebanon’s population being wounded and homeless, these amazing people are hustling with every shred of energy they have. They wake up and put on dignity because everything else is gone. Do we need aid? You bet we do, but more importantly, we need sustained involvement.

Right now, there is nothing. Crickets. People trudge through silent, smashed neighborhoods. They sweep up glass, lead and asbestos with no protection. They dig body parts out of the rubble. Closer to the destroyed grain silos, the smell of decomp is rising. There is a 210-meter wide crater in the Port of Beirut. I’m sure the metaphor is not lost on you.

Here’s what you can do

You have a specific, actionable task before you, a way to bolster the Lebanese republic and show the world that you won’t just sit back and watch Lebanon become Iran-on-the-Mediterranean or Greater Syria.

Call/email your elected officials and recite or cut/paste this sentence:

“Lebanon is at grave risk of losing its sovereignty to hardline proxy operators if (your nation) doesn’t step in to demand the removal of the current regime (including Hezbollah) from office. (Your nation) must engage with the United Nations in a concerted effort to ensure Lebanon’s future as a democratic republic. This work is critical at a time of catastrophic vulnerability for Lebanon. We must keep a democratic republic at the eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea or the sociopolitical balance of the Middle East will fall apart.”

2. Urge others to do the same.

3. Do it again.

I know you’re browsing social media and seeing the harrowing destruction over here, but then it’s super easy to get distracted by work and how the buildings around you are all still standing, and then hours go by, and then days. Now we are fast approaching months.

Even though everyone here knows that we took an Israeli hit, we still put the blame where it belongs — on thirty years of internal corruption and cronyism, the kind that looked the other way when Hezbollah ordered a cargo ship full of ammonium nitrate and stored it in Hangar 12 at the Port of Beirut in 2013.

It has been twenty-five days since the destruction of Beirut. The perpetrators who gutted Lebanon are still sitting in its highest offices. They are sitting there and pounding on podiums, shouting to the television cameras that they demand justice. It’s embarrassing.

The people have once again taken to the streets, not so much out of spirit this time - the impetus is more like bare-fisted fury. Aoun has responded by sicking the military onto the citizenry. Soldiers in riot gear spray rubber bullets and canisters of tear gas into crowds of people carrying Lebanese flags.

You have a specific, actionable task before you, a way to bolster the Lebanese republic and show the world that you won’t just sit back and watch Lebanon become Iran-on-the-Mediterranean or Greater Syria.

You have an opportunity to help us rid this nation of diseased corruption, secure a critical tie between East and West and ensure that Lebanon remains democratic and free. So far, you’re screwing it up, and with each passing moment, this opportunity wanes. With each moment, Aoun and Nasrallah are digging in deeper, and it’s hard to try people at the Hague when they still hold the reins of power and sleep in the presidential palace.

Most of the eastern coast of the Mediterranean Sea is comprised of Israel and Syria. Lebanon is sandwiched between two troublesome neighbors. Syria still operates under the delusion that Lebanon should be Syria, and Israel has gobs of super-power money and a hair trigger against Hezbollah. That hair-trigger destroyed the nation on August 4, 2020 at around dinner time.