Prior to the parliamentary consultations that were held to exclude him from the prime minister's office, caretaker Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri made a speech on 20 January. In this speech, he said the objective behind causing the failure of Turkish-Qatari mediation that was underway at the time involved removing him from the national political equation and announcing his “political assassination.” At the time, it appeared to be an exaggeration, and some saw it as a way of garnering political and popular support; political leaders rejected Hariri's conclusion and considered it erroneous, since no one in Lebanon can “cancel out someone else.” In fact, logic says that political leadership such as that of the Hariri family, in Lebanon, cannot be ended or eliminated. Moreover, it is difficult to weaken this leadership since it derives from a broad base of supporters, and the martyrdom of Rafik Hariri, which consecrated this leadership, while its ramifications of Hariri's assassination continue to play out on the Lebanese scene, with its extensions to foreign parties. However, the way that things have played out over the last two months require us to return to this conclusion, whether the goal of eliminating Hariri and his leadership was an exaggeration or not. The most important reason for reviewing this notion is the total “denial” by the March 8 camp, particularly Hezbollah and Damascus, to a number of events and developments. This camp insists on denying the magnitude of the public support that Hariri and his allies were able to secure at their rally on March 13 in downtown Beirut. They dealt with this support in their affiliated media by mocking the numbers of people who gathered, and by taking the trouble to conduct mathematical calculations that aimed at saying the throngs who gathered numbered in the tens of thousands, and not the hundreds of thousands. Moreover, the March 8 public was busy making sarcastic comments about Hariri removing his jacket when he gave his speech, to cover his hard-line speech about Hezbollah's weapons, under the slogan of rejecting the power of arms over domestic political life. This represents another denial of the stance of a large portion of the Lebanese vis-à-vis the means used by the party and its allies in adopting a policy of pressure on the domestic scene. These groups have hinted at “civil strife,” the keys for whose launching remain limited to a group that is able to feed this strife through means of violence, at which it excels. Doesn't the denial of the crowds who gathered in Martyrs' Square, under this or that pretext, symbolize the “elimination” of the reality of Hariri's leadership by political forces that hold on to decision-making power at the present time? Doesn't ignoring Hariri's stance on Hezbollah's weapons represent the ignoring of a wide social and popular segment of the people that reject these weapons, and support for the stance of its leading figures on these weapons, as this segment of the public feels oppressed when the weapons are pointed at them, or their use is threatened? Doesn't this policy of ignoring these facts contradict with Hezbollah's admission, by its leaders, led by Secretary General Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, that arms have never been agreed on, but were in fact a divisive topic? Does this mean that what Lebanese disagree about should not be a matter of debate? What does it mean for Hezbollah to say that it no longer needs the National Dialogue sessions to set down a defense strategy, other than a denial of the other party's right to put forward solutions for this impasse? These solutions would find harmony between seeing weapons in the confrontation with Israel and seeing them retreat domestically, so that there is no need for this confrontation. The more the new opposition, made up of March 14 forces, faces the challenge of formulating “no”s to Hezbollah's weapons and other things, in a clear program that suggests specific steps, instead of relying on objections and complaints, so as not to collide with the wall of the other side's positions, the more March 8 will face the challenge of leaving behind the policy of mocking its rivals' ability to form an effective opposition, frustrating the new majority's wager on weakening or ending the leadership of Hariri, which will not stand by idly and watch the new government strip it of its popular support, particularly among Sunnis. The March 8 camp and allies of Syria in Lebanon previously practiced the policy of denial, after 2005. They denied the right of their rivals to object to the assassination of Rafik Hariri, going as far as to reject the political consequences of this assassination, and the ones that followed. The matter turned into a quasi-denial of the assassination itself, and all of these denials have been counter-productive for the goal that lay behind them. Most likely, this will happen if the same policy is repeated.
