Mr. Former President,
There are names that resonate in history as milestones of national pride. And then there are others—names that cling like indelible stains on the canvas of failure. Your name, Mr. Former President, undoubtedly belongs to the latter. You dared to claim the mantle of savior for a Lebanon that you methodically, inexorably, led to the brink of the abyss—to “hell,” as you yourself put it.
You climbed the ranks of power over the years, waving the banner of the “liberator,” jealous of your laïcism, then of “Christian rights,” always driven by political opportunism and an obsession with power. Yet what you bequeathed to your community and the nation was a drained country, stripped of its youth and talents, handed over to a foreign militia.
You crowned yourself a “strong president,” but history will remember that your strength never exceeded what Hezbollah lent you to ensure your willing servitude.
Irony has a cruel sense of humor, Mr. Former President. The true break with your legacy did not come from your adversaries but from your successor, Joseph Aoun. With his inaugural address, he accomplished in a few moments what you failed to achieve in six years: to give the Lebanese people a glimmer of hope, however fragile, of a return to sovereignty and the rule of law.
Whether this speech will translate into action remains to be seen, but it has at least succeeded in relegating your populist and destructive “Aounism” to the realm of bad memories—a political aberration that will be remembered with shame in history books.
Under your reign, the Constitution became an abstraction to be twisted at will to justify your whims and those of your entourage, beginning with your son-in-law and your coterie of advisors.
You, the president who swore to defend the state, became its gravedigger, sacrificing its territorial integrity, institutions, and economy on the altar of a deadly alliance with a militia that turned Lebanon into a vast wasteland of despair and desolation, soaked in the blood of sovereignists—a haven for drug trafficking and money laundering.
Your quest for greatness, Mr. Former President, revealed itself to be a tragic farce—and the recent antics of one of your parliamentarians, his machismo, condescension, vulgarity, and supermarket testosterone perfectly encapsulate the decadent caricature your movement has become since your return from exile.
You fancied yourself a visionary statesman, yet you embodied barely veiled sectarianism, a pitiful authoritarianism, and abject submission to an imperialist project. Allies whom you once insulted from Paris in the name of sovereignty became your bedfellows as you denounced any sovereignist other than yourself as a puppet of foreign interests.
You sought to be the “president of the Christians,” but in reality, you were only the president of a party, a clan, and, above all, the symbol of an unprecedented national collapse.
With the election of Joseph Aoun, Lebanon seems—dare we hope—finally to be turning the page on your presidency and, before that, on decades of chaos and the absence of a state.
But let’s be honest: the task will not be easy. You have left behind a field of ruins, a divided nation, hollowed-out institutions, an unprecedented economic and financial collapse, and unparalleled destruction for which you bear moral responsibility, as it was under your watch that the militia fortified its infrastructure with impunity.
None will ever forget, in this context, the cataclysm of August 4 and your unbearable lightness in dealing with the event and the families of its victims.
The ultimate irony: if history ever speaks of “Aounism” in the future, it will no longer be about you but about the man now burdened with the task of rebuilding everything you destroyed.
Your “strong president” is dead; long live the president who, we hope, will finally embody the role of a head of state worthy of the title.
Mr. Former President, history will judge you.
But if it has even a shred of justice, it will inscribe your name not in the marble of great men, but on a footnote—a cautionary tale for future generations of what unbridled ambition and compromise can cost a nation.
Please accept, Mr. Former President, the collective relief of seeing, at long last, the end of your legacy—a legacy that aspired to emulate de Gaulle but turned out to be a mere echo of Pétain. Or closer to home, that dreamed of walking in the footsteps of Fouad Chehab, yet will only ever be the shadow of an Émile Lahoud.
*Beirut