Had the Ministry of Energy and the country's electricity not been in the hands of the Free Patriotic Movement (FPM), would MP Michel Aoun have rejected the decision to grant full employment to EDL (Electricité du Liban) contract workers? And would the “Damad" (Farsi for “son-in-law") Gebran Bassil have attacked the FPM's strategic ally Hezbollah, warning that “the Resistance will not survive if corruption eats away at it"? Of course not, as the relationship between the two sides has in the past been through much greater “challenges", during which Aoun and his entourage would compete at devising justifications and pretexts to provide cover for what their allies and their allies' allies had committed. We could in fact get the answer from a statement by Aoun himself, when he said: “we do not meddle with anyone in their own ministry (...) we do not attack anyone, so as for no one to attack us. And if we wanted to talk about other ministries, we could talk about many things". The matter is then one of shares, not one of principle. Thus the slogan of “combating corruption", which the retired General makes use of unfailingly in every statement, becomes a selective and vengeful one in the service of political and electoral interests above all, not a general stance that cannot be partitioned, delayed, stretched or shortened according to circumstances. Aoun and his son-in-law have suddenly remembered that their goal was “state-building" and that they should “confront any attack against the state, whether it comes from allies or adversaries". One wonders: where was their concern for the state when Hezbollah folded it under its wing and decided that decisions of war and peace were its own to make alone, and when it refused, every time the National Dialogue Table was held, any discussion into its weapons, classifying any call in this direction as “conspiracy against the Resistance"? And where was such concern for the state when Hezbollah's army invaded Beirut on May 7, 2008, when it killed army pilot Samer Hanna in the hills of Sojod, and when it thwarted only a few days ago the security plan in Beirut's Southern Suburb and its members prevented security forces from arresting a single lawbreaker? Was Aoun not late to reveal his hidden side? Indeed, he has been from the day he returned from his exile revealing in close circle meetings the extent to which he is upset by the “Shiite invasion" of state institutions and services. Yet this did not prevent him from ratifying his “memorandum of understanding" with Hezbollah so that it may support his claim of being the sole representative of the Christians, nor did it stop him from blindly defending Hezbollah's stances, without making any distinction between major and minor issues, thus providing it with ideal cover for the process of gradually eating away at the sovereignty of the state. And despite the fact that Aoun has rushed to ask that his stance on the issue of the EDL contract workers not be given more weight than it can bear, and not be extended to his entire relationship with Hezbollah and with the Amal movement, there are those who believe his stances to be dictated by the fact that the battle of the legislative elections is drawing nearer, and that considerations of winning and losing in Christian areas and the negative results of opinion polls conducted there are making him take special care to show that he does not hesitate to criticize his allies when required. There are also those who consider that Aoun, whose prediction of the “imminent victory" of Bashar Al-Assad's regime over those who oppose it did not come to pass, has begun a programmed process of retraction to limit the damage that might result from unsuitable developments in Syria. Yet what is certain is that neither this nor that affects his opportunism and his passion for high-ranking posts, and he at the end of the day will accept any compensation offered him, just as he has done many times before. There remains that, had the General of Rabieh been truly serious about reassessing and holding himself to account, there would have been a great deal of mistakes that would require him to apologize to the Lebanese in general, and to the Christians in particular.
