Suleiman can learn a lot from Lahoud”s mistakes

Lebanon is not even close to being out of the woods, but the emergence of General Michel Suleiman as the favorite for the presidency – vacated a week ago today by Emile Lahoud – has given the country a fighting chance to avoid, well, fighting. It is very rare for even an asterisk democracy like Lebanon to reach a point at which any form of “military rule” – real or perceived – is preferable to purely civilian leadership.

 

The constitutional amendment that allowed Lahoud, for instance, to go directly from commander of the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF) to president of the republic in 1998 proved in retrospect to have been an egregious error. Despite his reputation as someone who had reunified a military splintered along sectarian lines, and his early attempts at promoting coexistence among Christians and Muslims, Lahoud proved to be a highly divisive figure.

 

Part of this was due to his misguided belief that a civilian government could be made to function more effectively by having it operate like a military organization. Early and often, this led to heated disputes with then-Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, a supremely self-confident politician who was never likely to be happy taking orders from someone with no experience in governance and no direct mandate from the Lebanese people.

 

When a bitter Hariri left office in 1999 to be replaced by one of his predecessors, the thoroughly decent but just as thoroughly exhausted Salim al-Hoss, matters got even worse. Without a strong personality to check his own, Lahoud soon imposed a formula in which civilian officials were essentially “overseen” by some his former colleagues in the LAF. Well-intentioned or not, these officers proved for the most part to be just as ill-equipped as the president in terms of both the making of policy and the endless wrangling that typically precedes its implementation in Lebanon. The effect of their lack of qualifications was made even worse, however, because they were that much closer to the processes of state. The general guidelines set out by a president can leave plenty of “wiggle room” for both elected officials and career bureaucrats. The same cannot be said, though, of the overweening “guidance” to which Hoss and his ministers were subjected.

 

The result was a period of pronounced inactivity that made Hariri”s victory in the 2000 elections virtually inevitable – and the highly public nature of his disagreements with Lahoud guaranteed that his ensuing return to the premiership would be viewed as a devastating blow to Lahoud”s credibility and prestige. This, in turn, condemned Lebanon to a lengthy period of “cohabitation” in which the president and the prime minister would almost constantly be at odds over issues great and small.

 

My own impression is that Lahoud”s single greatest mistake was in trying too forcefully to restore some of the authority of the presidency which the Taif Accord had stripped away as part of the flawed but necessary bargain that ended the 1975-1990 Civil War.  One can assume that his military background made him unaware of – or at least not sufficiently familiar with – the difficulties that such a campaign would entail. Frustrated, like many other Lebanese, with the persistent shortcomings of the country”s fractious and fragmented political class, he was convinced that the drag inflicted by its foibles could be mitigated by a stronger presidency – and that the Syrian regime which then held sway over Lebanese politics would back his muscle-flexing. This Damascus did, culminating in its decisive support for the extension of Lahoud”s term in September 2004 and Hariri”s resultant resignation in October of the same year.
 

Had the experiment ended there, Lahoud”s ambition would have been fulfilled. It did not. Only after Hariri”s assassination in February 2005 did it become clear just how hollow and fragile Lahoud”s “victory” had been. Once internal Lebanese protests and overwhelming international pressure forced the Syrians to withdraw their military forces from Lebanon, Lahoud”s Achilles” heel – the lack of a domestic constituency that Hariri has so adroitly exploited in 2000 – left him increasingly isolated and irrelevant. His project to revitalize the presidency had backfired with spectacular effect.

 

Happily, Suleiman”s prospects appear to be immeasurably better. Granted, he would come to office with the same lack of direct voter support that Lahoud did, but he would stand to enjoy massive benefits from the desire of so many Lebanese to escape the atmosphere of crisis that has prevailed for much of the time since the Hariri hit – and the widespread feeling that only a genuinely objective president can contain and defuse tensions. The power struggle between the ruling March 14 coalition and the March 8 opposition has left much of the populace desperate for a national leader whose appeal transcends both traditional and more recent sectarian divides, and Suleiman is widely regarded as exactly that. While no Lebanese private citizens will cast ballots for or against him, therefore, he will not need a last-minute campaign of poster-pasting to manufacture the illusion of popular support. On the contrary, even before the belated consensus that seems to have emerged, Suleiman had already captured the imagination of many Lebanese as an alternative acceptable to feuding politicians, and even as a “savior” figure for a population that has existed in a pressure-cooker for nearly three years.

 

Due credit for the situation that has allowed Suleiman to become the front-runner must be accorded to Lahoud. His final statement as president – falling just short of declaring a state of emergency – was characterized by many of his critics as a limp attempt to have the last laugh on his opponents. By design or not, however, it opened a window of opportunity for March 14 and the nation at large to test Suleiman”s mettle and intentions. He passed that test, but not with anything like the “flying colors” that would have endeared him to one side and alienated him from the other. Instead, the subtlety of his reaction indicated that he might just be a civilian president whose only import from military life might be a sense of duty – not to one party or another, but to his country.