General Aoun vs. Cardinal Sfeir, Continued: Thinking about the Lebanese Elections

Remember my posting last month about the feuding between General Michel Aoun and Maronite Patriarch Boutros Cardinal Sfeir in Lebanon? It's still simmering along; the Bishop of Jbeil (Byblos) gave a sermon saying critics of the Cardinal could be excommunicated, and now General Aoun says they must be talking about somebody else, he's a good Maronite himself and follows the rules.

The Lebanese Parliamentary elections are nearing (June 7, though there are still some urging they be held over several days instead of just one), and I suspect that I'll be posting more on Lebanon as we get closer. The Aoun-Sfeir feud strikes many in the West as strange since they remember when Aoun was isolated and fighting Syria almost alone, and can't understand why he's now allied with Syria and Hizbullah.

But I think one clue for thinking about Lebanon is to remember that the country works best when all parties work together to achieve some kind of consensus: the National Pact of 1943, the Ta'if Accords of 1989 . . . and works least well when things divide along a binary government versus opposition model. What works in the US or Western Europe is not the best model for Lebanon, where it tends to create a zero-sum, if you win I lose, confrontational politics that tends to degenerate into conflict. There is a natural, knee-jerk tendency in the US to want to exclude certain parties (particularly Hizbullah and other surrogates of Syria) from the Lebanese government, but in fact a polarized government-vs.-opposition model failed in 1958 and again rather specatacularly from 1975 to 1991. It has been polarizing again since the Hariri assassination. That, I think, may be a point to keep in mind as the elections approach, the rhetoric escalates, and a new US Administration tries to find its footing in the confused mosaic of Lebanon.