Presiding over Chaos

On October 31, the Lebanese parliament elected Michel Aoun president, ending a two-and-a-half-year stalemate during which the country had no head of state. The presidency is reserved for the country’s Maronite Christian sect, so Christians there are celebrating the election of the controversial 81-year-old former general as a gesture of reconciliation for an often divided community. The excitement is unlikely to last. The presidency is one of the last remaining tokens of the Maronites' fading power in Lebanon, and there is trouble ahead, not just for the Christian community but for Lebanon and the Middle East at large.

The election is unlikely to alleviate the country's most serious problems. There is a refugee crisis, which, according to some estimates, has left some 2 million Syrian, mostly Sunni, refugees in a country of 3.8 million with limited resources. And the red-hot war in neighboring Syria will continue to exacerbate sectarian tensions in Lebanon, a country still reeling from its own civil war, which saw 150,000 killed between 1975 and 1990.

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“Analysts have long misunderstood what it means for Iran to export the Islamic revolution,” says Tony Badran, research fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. “It's not about forcing veils on women, or forbidding alcohol, or anything like that. Rather, it's about replicating the Islamic Republican system. Sure, there's a political system with ostensibly independent actors .  .  . but what matters is the parallel system. In Iran the important parallel institution is the Revolutionary Guard. In Lebanon it's Hezbollah. The real head of state and government isn't the president or prime minister but the supreme leader, who is the arbiter of anything that matters. In Iran that's Ali Khamenei. And this is the stage we've reached with the appointment of the president of Lebanon—it's okay, because Nasrallah says it's okay. He's the supreme leader.”

Aoun's inaugural speech on October 31 made clear that his plans for the presidency conform with official, i.e., Hezbollah, policy. “As for the struggle with Israel,” he said, “we will not spare any effort or resistance in order to liberate Lebanese land still under occupation and to protect our country against an enemy that still covets our land, our waters, and our natural resources.” Aoun promotes the idea that Lebanon should continue its state of war against Israel because Hezbollah, which has placed rockets and missiles pointed at Israel throughout the entire country, wants him to.

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