Photo by (مروان طحطح)A lot of literature will be spilled on the media market during the following weeks concerning the latest developments and experiences in Lebanon, and I'm sure it will range between conspiracy theories, war mongering, fear instigation and religious orgies of sectarian hate.
The elements of fear and anger have had much time to be nurtured and mixed together with a chemist's precision to make the current Molotov cocktail which is just about to burn a lot of fingertips.
Pro-Hariri media outlets and mouthpieces have spent a considerable amount of time during the last year to portray a Shiite-Iranian threat under every bed and in the minds of their receivers using a bombardment of propagandist rhetorics and not-so-subtle insinuations that rallied their Sunni constituency and practically shunned away every possible Shiite rapprochement for a considerable amount of time; not to mention their continuous provocations by openly accusing (on groundless terms of course) Hezbollah of assassination attempts and surveillance operations all around the country.
Pro-Hezbollah outlets and media machines didn't help at all with its continuous spray of conflicting messages of asking for true partnership while demonising the other guy with traitorous rhetorics.
Sure, nobody doubts this quasi-farmland called country has a lot of problems, most of which are irreparable structural defects from its inception but whatever Hezbollah and Hariri bin Saud are trying to impose of the streets of Beirut is certainly neither controllable nor on the right track to form a certain viable consensus.
Pro-Hariri cabinet issued what can be a declaration of war on Hezbollah by labeling its landline network as a "breach of national sovereignty" totally disregarding that such claims are certainly a "breach of national unity". They also stressed that these landlines (which Hezbollah considers as part of its resistance and essential to protect its leaders from US-Israeli assassination attempts) will be removed. It's also quite useful to remember that this same cabinet was formed on the basis of "protecting the resistance of Hezbollah and giving it a full carte-blanche to perform any resistance effort to free both land and prisoners. I wonder if there's anything left of this manifesto as of yesterday and what's left of Hariri-cabinet's credibility and representation to try to enforce their authority over the whole chessboard, which explains their resort to the Mufti Kabbani's highly sectarian tone as a last refuge and line of defense.
On their part, Hezbollah jumped on the sectarian bandwagon and refused ( on sectarian grounds) the Hariri cabinet's decision to remove the airport's head of security after Joumblat's hallucinations and acid trips of lucid dreams that burned every possible bridge between Hariri and Hezbollah.
Both Hezbollah and Hariri are both to blame for the current civil strife, although Saad Hariri (along with whoever supports him from Washington to Riyadh) takes the biggest part of the blame after showing his party's real face of militiamen, party offices stacked with weapons and blunt subservience to regional masters which basically makes him worse than whatever his mouthpieces accuse Hezbollah and the opposition of being.
But for the time being, all the above is going to be old news.
As of yesterday, frontlines have been drawn all over Beirut, the Beirut International Airport is closed, Hezbollah (rightly IMO) calls for the government's dissolution and the formation of a new national unity government that should prepare for a new parliamentary elections while Hariri & Co. (wrongly IMO) refuse anything even remotely related to those demands and clings to power under the false rhetorics of "building a state" and "empowering the state's sovereignty".
Both Sayyed Hasan Nasrallah and Saad Hariri planned press conferences tonight.
Michel Aoun is very very silent, while Joumblat is carefully observing Rome consumating itself while a small smirk is hidden under his moustache, Geagea is obviously living in oblivion and Michel-consens-ational-Sleiman is helpless.
Stay tuned. Twister power-struggle games have just started.
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