With the hawks’ departure from the US administration, and the doves’ entry, there’s no harm in some murders. Preparations for changes which Iran’s supporters have been talking about have begun. Trump left and Biden arrived, bringing friends of Ali Khamenei and Bashar al-Assad to his administration. A new victory has been added to a series of victories that has no beginning or end.
Media outlets funded by arms of the Revolutionary Guard foreshadowed that the US had been on the brink of collapse a few weeks ago. But it has regained its vigor, it seems, with the arrival of diplomats who had colluded with their counterparts to let Assad’s chemical attack in Ghouta go unpunished. In their view, the US is once again a power that downplays the sacrifices needed to garner their amity, and it becomes easy to kill intellectuals and researchers, like Lokman Slim, to catch the attention of their new friends in the State Department. We are here, the murderer is saying, and this is Lokman’s head pierced with bullets. See our might, and return to the negotiations so we can show you our generosity and hospitality.
Why strive to catch the Americans’ attention in Iraq, Lebanon and Syria if Washington’s transformation into a third world suburb is around the corner, as the axis of resistance’s “intellectuals,” writers and strategic analysts, claim? Trying to find the logic in the expansionist project is futile.
Ironically, the victims of the “axis of resistance’s” assassinations never believed in a fantastical alliance with the US, nor did they believe that the remedy for wars and suffering would come from the West. The story of the West letting down of its allies, friends- and even its agents- repeats itself uninterruptedly; no one in these countries believes in such fantasies anymore. This project’s victims and their compatriots are keenly aware that Hezbollah’s burden on Lebanon has become unbearable.
That recruiting young Lebanese men to further the Iranian project in Syria, Iraq, Yemen, and elsewhere has catastrophic repercussions on Lebanon, its economy, and its Arab and international ties. The country has limited natural resources with no productive sector to speak of because of the legacy of self-deceptive practices of “savviness” and similar farcical illusions conjured up by the mercantile mind, which showed its mafioso side and its alliance with the clientelist sectarian regime protected by murderous militias as soon as Lebanon’s position in the Arab system was undermined.
The irony, then, is that this grim imperial project’s victims merely want a country like those in the rest of the planet. A country where those who murder people with opinions, politicians, and ordinary citizens cannot find refuge in their ever-apprehensive armed group, which is obsessed with fears of besiegement. A country where the state does not collapse, where the “actual ruler” does not make an appearance to announce a ban on protests two days after they begin, betraying those protesting against corruption and explicitly protecting the state, banking and sectarian mafias.
A country whose capital is not destroyed by Ammonium Nitrate whose source is unknown and which had been stored in the port for six years, right under the noses of officials in whom traditional corruption and intentions of mass murder converge. A country where the judiciary is not prevented, publicly and openly, from prosecuting those who stole depositors’ money, those who imported the explosive material, and the murderers who go on television to threaten to commit more crimes and are mired in a struggle for power, which is code for a struggle over who can continue to plunder the state.
Perhaps, Lebanon’s current state of affairs sums up the failure of the October 17 revolt. The revolving door in Washington where hawks are departing and doves are entering is not the issue, with the country’s conditions changing with the alteration of third-grade employees at the State Department. Our country deserves to be more than a mere bird and chicken farm that feeds Washington’s doves and hawks. The October revolt, like the other Arab revolutions, was an attempt to take back the country’s independence. Its calamitous fate does not differ from that of the other revolutions that were stuck by civil violence- in either its jihadist religious form or through the emergence of the specter of civil war, as is the case in Lebanon- and authoritarian despotism.
If Lebanon can't become a country that reflects its people and paves the way for these dreams’ actualization, then let the massacres continue.
Lebanon’s game of power, subjugation and blood has no more secrets. There are no more taboos or names that are whispered. The killer has shown his face, and he was the only one to be surprised by the new scene. All the Lebanese have known for decades. The only difference is that Lokman’s corpse brought down the last rules of the hiding game.
