Sitting and Watching in Lebanon

Druze fighting Druze south of Beirut, Sunnis fighting Alaouites in Tripoli, Shiites fighting Sunnis and Druze in West Beirut, and the Greek Orthodox bastard idiots of the Syrian National Party fighting Sunnis, and only a year ago, Palestinians fighting Palestinians and the Lebanese army...

For a 33d anniversary of the Lebanese War, I can only feel gleeful because for once, the Maronites are watching all their former "enemies" killing one another, while they remain wisely on the sidelines. For once the Lebanese "question" is what it has always been: Not a Maronite attempt at maintaining control or Maronite racism against Palestinians or any of that crap; What we are witnessing today is the struggle of Lebanon's Muslims with themselves to decide who the heck they really are: Arabs? Syrians? Muslims? Palestinians? Saudi Wahhabis? Iranian Shiites? anti-Israelis? anti-Syrians? anti-Americans? Communists? Socialists? Egyptians? etc... or are they simply Lebanese?

Their fellow Christians can only be gleeful today because since the 1970s they have been telling the Muslims to drop all the other attributes of their identity and existence and just be Lebanese. But they refused, and with their refusal came the collapse of the prosperous and peaceful Lebanon of the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s.

I urge Aoun, Geagea, Frangieh and Gemayel not to fall into the trap that outsiders from the US to Iran would like to see them fall into: Inter-Christian fighting. They should know by now that this has become a huge red line that they should not cross. Like the world watched them suffer and endure the killing and the mocking for the 30 years they tried to hold Lebanon together, against the betrayal of their friends and foes, they should now sit and watch the Lebanese Muslims go at each other's throat without interfering, in spite of the divide separating the Christians into loyalists and opposition.

Yes, I always knew that the time will come when the Muslims will be proven to have been wrong all along, and the Christians to have been right all along (See "The Shiite Turn" in http://lebanoniznogood.blogspot.com/2008/05/shiite-turn.html). I can draw a long list of "what ifs?" on how Lebanon could have been spared 40 years of agony, if only the Sunnis and the Druze in the 1970s and 1980s, then the Shiites in the 1990s and 2000s, listened to their fellow Christians and chose their country first instead of the PLO, instead of Syria, instead of Saudi Arabia, instead of Iran, and instead of anyone else in the world... If only they had understood those things back when Pierre Gemayel was lecturing them every day in the early 1970s, or back when Michel Aoun rallied them around Baabda in the late 1980s, the country would not be where it is today.

No amount of negative hatred to Syria or Israel can replace a positive and rational love for one's own country. The Lebanese must stop defining themselves by their opposition to outsiders and replace it by their allegiance to themselves and their country. They must go back to the basic premise: You country comes first, no matter who else in the world has weapons or has a good cause or has money.