Saad "Hariri’s premiership is a sustained absence. If he’s not in Saudi Arabia or Damascus, he’s in Sardinia ..."

Via Friday-Lunch-Club

Elias Muhanna:

"... I don’t expect Saad al-Hariri to be a Sunni Nasrallah. He doesn’t have to be a great communicator to be an effective prime minister. His father was not particularly eloquent, but at least he had some kind of… presence. By contrast, the dominant feature of the younger Hariri’s premiership is a sustained absence. If he’s not in Saudi Arabia or Damascus, he’s in Sardinia. When he’s not responding to developments in Beirut through his spokespeople, he’s giving interviews to foreign newspapers. Hariri’s approach to solving problems at home is to cut deals abroad, while his opponents bring their fight directly into Lebanese living rooms.

It is increasingly clear that these opponents have largely succeeded in convincing a majority of the Lebanese public that the Special Tribunal for Lebanon is bad news for the country. What will Hariri do when Hizbullah demands that the government formally renounce its support for the STL, on pain of a million-man march on the Prime Minister’s office, à la 2006? If he wasn’t able to order the ISF to arrest Jamil al-Sayyed at Beirut airport last week, where is he going to get the muscle and political cover to arrest indicted Hizbullah members, particularly in the face of a well-orchestrated campaign to incite public hostility towards the STL?

In such a scenario, one can only predict that Hariri will fall back upon his tried and true strategy: cultivating ambiguity through absence. But with the stakes so high, a hastily-planned trip to Riyadh won’t do the trick; it will take an absence of greater import. The young Hariri will have little choice but to resign, and one imagines that he may even feel relief when someone calls his bluff."

Posted by G, Z, or B at 6:37 PM

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