The Maronite patriarch, Cardinal Nasrallah Butros Sfeir, has refused to visit Syria, and his reservations about the level of participation by the opposition in the new government, in addition to his objection to Hizbullah's policy and its weapons, appear to be outside the consensus that led to the announcement of the birth of the government. If some believe that what Sfeir has said, from time to time, is in harmony with a certain Christian group, namely the Lebanese Forces, the party that is clearest in its adherence to March 14 Christian demands, those in the March 8 coalition hate this party, for reasons that are not all connected to the history and record of the LF during the civil war. Instead, these reasons are more linked to their conceptions of what Christian leadership should be like in the present and the future. Such a leadership, or za‘ama, would be expected to provide cover for the external roles that are played out on Lebanese territory, or at the least be flexible toward them. It is not clever to hold the LF accountable for its record, twenty years after the end of the civil war and the erasure of the records of allies that were no less dark. Although this is the least that cause amazement in a country that is ruled, from one end to another, by arbitrariness and selectivity. Whatever the case, two observations should be made about the patriarch's stance. The first is that Sfeir has not said anything new, compared to what leading March 14 figures said before they discovered, at a high price, the limits of wishes for independence and the impossibility of achieving it under the domestic conditions in which they arose (before the foreign blockage and afterward), only to later join, after bitter experiences that are well known, those who warn of the Israeli-American conspiracy against Lebanon and grant the resistance to keep its arms as long as it liked. The second observation is that the issues and fears raised by the patriarch have not been treated. The considerable dangers facing the Lebanese Republic, amid the increasing linkage of its domestic policies to regional and international struggles, have yet to dissipate. Moreover, those who reassure the patriarch about the seriousness of raising the Hizbullah weapons issue at the National Dialogue sessions is immediately aware that this dialogue will not rise to the challenge of treating the weapons issue, which is such a major item that there is no reason to doubt the foreign roles that the party has been tasked with playing, which go far beyond defending the southern borders of Lebanon. However, the patriarch is basing his rhetoric on what appears to be a “neutral” conception of the functions of the state and its authorities, roles and institutions. It is a neutrality that might be academic in its definition of what kind of relations should exist among the state, its citizens and political parties, and what civil groups should not engage in, such as forming armies and security organizations, and having political or other relations with foreign states. With some exaggeration, one can say that the patriarch's opinions come from the school of European modernism, which put limits to the state and civil bodies, while his opponents and critics' ideas are an example of postmodern thought, which does not recognize the borders and differences, and accepts an overlapping between the state and armed groups, for the sake of producing civil peace. However, a civil peace that rests on an expectation of good local intentions, while Lebanon appears to stand in a cauldron that is boiling with violence and the possibility of violence, resembles what Amr did in the famous poem by Abi Firas al-Hamadani, namely something disgraceful to which death is preferable.
