Session after session, the Lebanese dialogue becomes meaningless and the leaders of the sects and parties turn towards the Presidential Palace in a bid to renew – on a non-periodic basis- the truce consolidated by the Doha Agreement two years ago. What was endorsed in the first [dialogue] sessions in 2006, including the agreement reached on supporting the Special Tribunal for Lebanon, is now questioned and reviewed, although the mistakes which the investigation commission is today accused of were committed before the participants in the dialogue supported it at the time. After the clashes that took place inside the bases of the “General Command” and the domestic reactions that emerged, it was revealed that removing the Palestinian arms outside the camps - which the dialogue parties unanimously agreed on removing in a rare occurrence –is no longer a “consensual” demand. As far as the defense strategy is concerned, which the Dialogue Committee has been trying to formulate since it resumed its work after the election of President Michel Suleiman, it is engulfed by threats since the positions of the participants in the committee have developed since four years until today, to the extent that if the issue of Hezbollah's weapons is brought up for discussion, the dialogue is threatened and the representatives [of parties] threaten to boycott the sessions. Therefore, it was acknowledged that the issue of the resistance's arms is not for discussion for reasons that would require a lengthy explanation. The general impression is that the committee's work is frozen and that it is unable to achieve any step toward adopting new resolutions [or adding any issues] to its previous and announced agenda, nor it is capable of implementing the decisions it had endorsed. This impression, for its part, signals a certain “development” at the level of the Lebanese people's relations with each other and their relations with their official political institution. This development (which is not positive in the long term) could be that the Lebanese who are represented in the Dialogue Committee have not only discarded the project of building a modern state that deserves its name, but also any attempt to reestablish a fruitful dialogue among them to address serious issues that need solutions. The state is a mirage project in Lebanon today, and only those who have lost contact with the current reality and with the local and regional balances of powers seek to achieve it, or those who have run out of slogans except for the ones they discover when they look into old books. The management of the relations among the Lebanese is contingent upon the results of the Arab situation on one hand, and the storm that Israel threatens to launch in the region on the other. Until one of the two is achieved, the Lebanese keep themselves busy with enhancing their positions in the face of one another and in preparation for receiving what the external forces impose on them at the same time. No domestic side is capable of seeking to change the system of sectarian quotas, nor to promote a secular democratic regime that opposes sectarianism. After all, some of those who are making a “clamor” regarding the reforms, whether in the issue of the municipal electoral law or the administrative corruption, only aim at obscuring their underlying desire to turn against the Taef Agreement which proved, thanks to the past previous years, to be the only guarantee for the current cease-fire. The ability of the “reformists” to strongly demand the amendment of the electoral law in order to keep pace with the requirements of establishing the state and at the same time insist on refusing to discuss the presence of an “army” that is equivalent to the official army is surprising. In any case, and among the rare lessons which the Lebanese should have learnt from their civil war, there is an important lesson which calls on them to keep all the chances of dialogue, discussions, and meetings, alive, in the hope that [they will bear fruits].
