We only have to count the days that have passed since a victory was achieved and to wait for another that is coming. Dozens of articles, tributes and memories published that do nothing but stress the “qualitative leaps” that have been achieved by the Resistance in restoring its armed force since the summer 2006 war, making the summer 2010 war, as predicted by one of our politicians, a mere stroll on the clear path towards yet another defeat that Israel would suffer. Yet there is something that does not make sense in the idea that Lebanon will witness the final defeat of the Zionist-American project, as predicted by Sayyid Ali Khamenei and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. There is a massive burden being placed with terrifying ease on the shoulders of a few million human beings, the citizens of the Lebanese Republic, and particularly those who live in “areas that embrace the Resistance”, who, by the way, are not all against the idea of waging another war. Such joyful readiness to welcome another victory reveals, among other things, “qualitative leaps” of a different kind that have taken place in the awareness of the Lebanese, towards the entrenchment of an awareness based on demographics and weapons. Numbers and force are the tools and instruments of Lebanese politics. Thus the weapons are aimed at the outside in defense of Lebanon, as is said and declared, yet are able to turn, under the banner of preserving and defending the Resistance, to the inside with relative ease, as the events of May 7, 2008 have shown. It would be harmfully naïve to interpret the events of the year 2006 as being a military victory achieved by the Resistance, separate from the erection of the opposition protest camp in the heart of the capital three months after the cease-fire in the war against Israel, from large segments of Lebanon's sectarian communities announcing their departure from state institutions or requisitioning them, and from what followed in terms of internal Lebanese relations nearly reaching the point of exploding. And it would be on a more dangerous level of naivety to believe that the impact of any future war on Lebanon would be limited to the infrastructure and to public utilities, as Israeli officials have threatened, and to large numbers of civilian deaths and destruction of private property, as experience has shown. Indeed if Israel wagers on the fact that unrest in Lebanese politics and political society would contribute to besieging Hezbollah and limiting its abilities in the field and in politics, as Israeli writers inform us, this would not absolve Hezbollah and its supporters from carefully examining the sectarian and political ground they stand upon, in domestic balances of power before the regional and international ones which defiance takes for cover. Most likely some leaderships in Hezbollah realize the frailty of Lebanon's reality and seek to avoid being driven towards open confrontation with Lebanon's remaining constituents over reconsidering the positions of sectarian communities within Lebanon's power structure, which is what paved the way to ending the civil war in 1990, in the sense of demanding that the formula for rule be dismantled and rebuilt to agree with the factors of numbers and weapons on the part of the Shiites, and to meet with the desire to restore the position that was robbed from them on the part of the Christians. However, this would burden such leaderships with twice the responsibility in the course of formulating a defense strategy that would take the ever-present factors of Lebanese collapse into consideration when thinking of any step at the level of the conflict with Israel. The leaders of sectarian communities gathered at the dialogue dinner table have agreed to the importance of reaching a defense strategy that would take into account the presence of an army parallel to the national army called the Resistance, without advancing any further towards defining or specifying such a strategy. Yet here the question arises of the extent of “qualitative leaps” the Lebanese will have to adapt to for as long as the matter of their existence or their obliteration remains contingent on calculations whose secret is known only to expert mathematicians.
