Those who know Lebanese Prime Minister Najib Mikati well exclude the notion that his inability to bear the burden or his feeling politically embarrassed might be behind his resignation. He most likely resigned after realizing that the “coup" carried out by Hezbollah against the government of the March 14 Movement, which included bringing him to the post of Prime Minister, had achieved its political goals, and that those holding actual influence in his government had decided to remove him. His resignation has led to Lebanon having no executive branch of government. Indeed, even if a new Prime Minister were to be nominated, after binding parliamentary consultations, no Sunni politician who could possibly be nominated to the post will be able to form a new government in the foreseeable future – this being due to the tremendous amount of conditions and counter-conditions that will be laid down, connected to every issue one could possibly think of, be it Lebanese, Syrian, regional or international. One should also point out that, even before the eruption of the Syrian crisis, forming a Lebanese government has never been a simple feat, on a background of considerations connected to individuals, to the balance of power and to voting within government cabinets – considerations of which the most recent have brought down Mikati's government when the time came for it to end. The caretaking phase will therefore stretch for a long time, and it is a phase during which the government will be unable to take any decisions. The headlines of the most recent dispute may well be the issue of the formal body supervising the elections and that of extending the mandate of the General Director of the Internal Security Forces (ISF) during the latest cabinet session. Yet the decision to bring down the government was issued when it appeared that the executive was heading towards a confrontation with Syria's supporters, particularly in its reaction to bombing from Syria on Lebanese soil. Indeed, an official complaint by Lebanon, even if the Hezbollah-affiliated Foreign Minister refused to implement it, would mean the complete exposure of the position held by Syria and by its supporters at the Arab and international levels, as well as at the United Nations – especially if condemning Syria's bombing of locations within Lebanon's borders comes accompanied with denouncing the violation of the sovereignty of a UN member-state. In this sense, Hezbollah has punished Mikati, and through him President of the Republic Michel Suleiman, who is as such entrusted with upholding the country's sovereignty and constitution, because they have publicly clung at least to the policy of dissociation from the Syrian conflict and have declared their opposition to any Syrian aggression in Lebanon under the pretext of pursuing armed groups. Even before publicly asking Lebanon's Foreign Minister to file a complaint with Syria for violating Lebanese sovereignty, Mikati, and through him also the President of the Republic, “committed" the mistake of speeding up the investigation into the case of Michel Samaha and Major General Ali Mamlouk. This placed them both in direct opposition to Hezbollah's political stance in defense of Syria's behavior in all its forms and of Damascus's supporters in everything they do. In other words, it is no longer useful for Hezbollah, and through it the Syrian regime, to maintain the Mikati government, after its primary function had been to strike a blow against the government of the March 14 Alliance and its Prime Minister Saad Hariri. In fact, such a government has at this point become harmful to the work of Hezbollah. Hezbollah had wagered, by passing the so-called Orthodox draft electoral law, that its Maronite ally General Michel Aoun could garner enough seats in parliament to provide it with the ability to form governments without having to offer concessions that would complicate its own considerations. Yet once again the President and the Prime Minister have thwarted such an ambition, even if the draft law obtained the majority in the parliamentary subcommittee. Thus the two heads of the executive placed Hezbollah and its allies before the reality of heading towards elections as constitutionally scheduled under the constitutionally afforded electoral law, preventing them from postponing the elections. Yet driving the government to resign in this manner makes it nearly impossible to hold elections under a caretaker government which cannot, constitutionally, take the decisions required for these elections to be held. Thus Hezbollah has driven Mikati to resign, for specific political ends, and perhaps also because it has begun to feel that it must move from now on within the framework of the Syrian crisis, in a manner that places it in confrontation with the Lebanese government which, in such a case, had better be a caretaker government.
