Perhaps the stalemate in forming the national unity government in Lebanon can be solved should the Minister Gebran Bassil decide to beat his wife. This would end General Michel Aoun's insistence on Bassil's return to the government. However, Engineer Bassil is a polite and respected person who would never do any such thing; hence I expect this crisis to continue for the time being. I was recently calling my colleagues in Beirut from London, asking them when they think our brother Saad Hariri will form his cabinet. Some of them said “after the Eid”, and I thought they were talking about Eid al-Fitr. However, I then visited Beirut this week, and heard enough there to make me believe that they meant Eid al-Adha, if not Christmas or New Year's day or even All Saints Day. In such a situation, the Prime Minister Mr. Fouad Siniora may soon find that he will remain as the head of the caretaker government longer than he was the head of the government that supervised the elections. While these elections resulted in the creation of a majority and a minority, as is well known, the Druze leader Walid Jumblatt turned the table on everybody before they had a chance to sit around it. The question here is why did he do that? I will not describe Walid Beik as being mercurial, because mercury only wobbles if touched. Walid Beik, on the other hand, swings without prejudice. Again, what is the reason behind this? The first and most common explanation is that the leader of al-Mukhtara is trying to make amends with Syria, since he discovered that while the latter had withdrawn from Lebanon, it did not actually leave the country entirely. In fact, Syria succeeded in maintaining and developing strong allies in Lebanon after 2005. In this vein, I want to say that the Syrian regime has completely lost its confidence in Walid Jumblatt, however, and it shall not open the gates of Damascus to him again anytime in the foreseeable future. Conversely, I heard in Beirut another explanation that is smarter (and more pessimistic) about Jumblatt's new stance. According to this explanation, the Druze leader expects all the relevant factions to fail in forming a government of national unity, and thus expects a return to violence, for both internal and external pressures coming from the same parties that have always interfered in Lebanese affairs. He thus does not want the Druze to side along with the weaker faction in the next confrontation, and as such has decided to leave the March 14 coalition in order to protect the Druze. It is not that this is a difficult situation, but rather, it is a dangerous one, and the formation of a cabinet in Lebanon does not seem to be a top priority for the major actors involved, nor is it for some of the Lebanese. While it is true that there are improved relations between Saudi Arabia and Syria, and the subsequent role of Syria in the Lebanese parliamentary elections, or the lack thereof if we are to be precise, all constituting a clearly positive development, I do not see anything else that calls for optimism. This is because Cairo seems to be staunchly opposed to the Iranian influence in Lebanon and the Gaza Strip for instance, and does not seem to be willing to change its position, something that would definitely hinder the efforts of reconciliation in the region. Also, Israel is currently under extreme American pressure to stop settlements, and to move in the direction of the two-state solution. However, Israel may choose to evade this problem by provoking a new war with Hezbollah, in order to divert attention away from the Palestinian territories. Anyone who happens to follow the newspapers in Israel these days, will come out with the impression that a third war with Lebanon is now imminent. Meanwhile, the Obama administration in the other part of its policy towards our region is attempting to pressure Iran into halting its nuclear program. With the absence of any military solutions, the most likely option in this regard is imposing economic sanctions up to an embargo, which is what happened with Saddam Hussein. As a consequence to all of the above, do the claims that the government will be formed after the Eid in fact mean that we're waiting for Barack Obama's speech at the United Nations around that same date, i.e. around the 24th of September? In any case, Iran will never abandon its nuclear program, and will definitely not give up its Lebanese card without anything in return. Meanwhile, Israel may act unilaterally against Iran in order to drag the United States to the confrontation, while Lebanon finds itself in this situation placed between the hammer and the anvil. I went to Beirut to participate in a meeting of the Arab Thought Foundation, aimed at selecting the winners of the Arab creativity awards. As in the selection process for the Lebanese cabinet, the wheat had to be separated from the chaff - with the wheat being more. We excluded many of the candidates, and when the time comes for the awards to be announced, only those truly eligible would have won, which is more than I can say when it comes to the formation of the cabinet. This is because we are working [in the awards committee] without any pressures, be they from internal or external forces, nor are we affected by special interests. During the meeting, I sat down with Dr. Suleiman Abdel-Moneim, the Secretary-General of the Foundation, and Dr. Munira al-Nahed, the Assistant Secretary-General, in addition to a group of high-calibre Arab intellectuals. We were then subdivided into committees, each according to his or her competence, in order to scrutinize the candidates for the awards. As such, I sat in the committee on media creativity, and I started thinking: why do we find good capabilities and creative minds in every Arab country, then we arrive at bad results that do not reflect these capabilities and minds? The answer came to me in the Al-Hayat newspaper that day: first, the front page story was about the press conference held by General Aoun, and second, the news item published on the last page about the British Council's decision to close its library in Cairo, its first ever library in the world dating back to 1938, because people there do not read. The fact that Arabs do not read is a major disaster, which becomes worse when we remember that a study conducted by the Arab Thought Foundation has shown that those who read in fact choose religious books written by authors who are usually unqualified and have no formal training on the subject. The sad thing is that this big disaster becomes a catastrophe when we add that refraining from reading is taking place in none other than Egypt, the country that is assumed to be the seat of Arab leadership. We tried to set down selection criteria in the committee on media creativity. I suggested that we should require the winner to be the son-in-law of the committee's chairman, and I don't know whether this should make me laugh or cry. In any case, the time to talk about this will come after Eid. In the meantime, I'm looking for a wall to bang my head against.
