In less than 24 hours, the Lebanese experienced the horrendousness of vacuum. They felt the harshest facets of national emptiness and what it was like to stand naked in the face of the storms sweeping their region, without any help or support. Armed men are kidnapping whomever they want, whenever they want; dozens of Syrian workers are being detained by the “armed wings" of clans; thousands of others are taking a risk and returning to Syria despite the fighting there; states are asking their nationals to “immediately" leave Lebanon; the two vital veins linking Lebanon to the outside world (the airport road and the Masnah border crossing) are blocked; most of the media outlets have fallen into the abyss of cheap racing for news, even if it features blatant sectarian instigation to kill. All of this happened two weeks after the Army Day, which saw the posting of giant billboards on the roads and pictures of its commander on the squares, while waging a fierce media war against its critics and demanding the lifting of parliamentary immunity off of a certain person. It is that same army from which not one element interfered to open a blocked road or save one kidnapped individual. The prime minister for his part justified the abstinence of the political leadership from issuing the necessary orders to the armed forces by stressing the insistence on avoiding bloodshed. Also, this happened one day prior to the national dialogue session that should have looked into the national defense strategy, as though the security of the citizens, the defense of the safety of the residents and the upholding of everyone's right to safely move in the country did not require a national strategy, and as though allowing unidentified-known armed men to move as they please was based on the wisdom of maintaining national unity. There are no limits for the dark comedy in Lebanon and no borders separating between the domestic arena and its structure, and the foreign arena and its requirements. He was right on the mark, he who said that what happened on August 15 in Lebanon was Plan B, following the exposure of the Michel Samaha-Ali Mamlouk conspiracy to detonate sectarian conflict in North Lebanon. That day marked Lebanon's return to its primary raw state, one governed by sensitivities, armed sects and the moral decadence of highly influential media outlets. In the meantime, the elite and the intellectuals are unable to get their voices heard – not to say practically impact the situation – at the level of the “families'" alignments, the alliances of the clans and the mutual provocations. It is a state of Lebanese racism in which the poor and the marginalized are seeking a meaning for their existence in the persecution of other poor and marginalized people. There is not a single naïve person in Lebanon who believes that the Syrian regime or its allies (especially the strongest among them) is innocent from what happened two days ago in the Southern Suburb of Beirut and a number of Bekaa areas. Moreover, there is not a single average newspaper reader who is unable to see the intertwinement between the open kidnapping campaign in Lebanon and the insane bombardment carried out by Bashar al-Assad's aircrafts against the town of Ezzaz, in order to kill the Lebanese hostages and reach the result desired by Samaha-Al-Mamlouk. In short, the incidents of the last two days in Lebanon do not only herald the retreat of the purpose of the Lebanese meeting and the prevalence of its civil components over its national core solely, but also the impossibility of introducing democratic change to its political system, of staging a revolution, turning against the sects' control over daily life in it, in addition to the impossibility of alleviating the influence of foreign events on its policy, security and society. This is more terrible and bitterer.
