Message to Lebanon’s new Cabinet: Prove us all wrong

What Mikati did tearfully promise, however, is to prepare the ground for next year’s elections. If he fails in everything else, these elections are Lebanon’s sole prospect for salvation, offering citizens the opportunity to pass judgment on utterly irredeemable leaders. This is a nation where suicide rates and use of anti-depressants have gone through the roof. A once world-beating education system is collapsing because of teachers fleeing abroad, as poverty, power and internet cuts, COVID and fuel shortages make school trips impossible. Many children have been out of school since civil unrest in October 2019, and private schools and childcare particularly fell victim to the eradication of most families’ disposable income.

Key to success is whether Khalil and Riachi can restore Lebanon’s financial viability. It’s one thing to slash unaffordable subsidies, because Lebanon’s leaders have never heeded the cries of woe of its citizenry; it is quite another to call a halt to the kleptocratic schemes that allowed factional warlords to live like kings, while cash-starved infrastructure and public services functioned at the level of a failed state. There is debate over whether Khalil’s proximity to the central bank and to Nabih Berri makes him part of the problem or part of the solution.

When Lebanese consider themselves lucky if they have three hours of electricity a day, the ultimate provocation is the energy ministry going to Walid Fayyad — a member of Michel Aoun’s Free Patriotic Movement, whose monopoly over this department facilitated the draining away of billions of dollars while leaving people in the dark. Likewise, Aoun’s choice of justice minister will be perceived as a means of hamstringing the various probes necessary to spotlight and address mismanagement and incompetence.

A key Hezbollah ally is new deputy prime minister, Saadeh Al-Shami, affiliated with the Syrian Social Nationalist Party, while journalist Abbas Al-Hajj Hassan is to be Agriculture Minister and Hezbollah-aligned academics are assigned to the ministries of culture and public works, which have been bywords for Hezbollah corruption and institutional exploitation. As for Hezbollah being awarded the ministry of culture – I am utterly speechless!

Mikati meanwhile pledged: “I will knock on the doors of Arab countries because we need to rebuild the burned bridges. Lebanon belongs to this Arab world.” But Arab states want more than fine words. Will Mikati’s administration halt the flood of narcotics arriving by the ton in Arab, African and European ports, hidden inside Lebanese-exported goods, while Beirut demonstrates zero interest in investigating how Hezbollah has transformed Lebanon into a narco state? How will Mikati address the awkward fact that Hezbollah’s closest transnational partners have been persistently firing missiles into Gulf states?

With Gulf states’ overriding concerns about Iranian hegemony over Lebanon and its neighbors, will Mikati acknowledge that his government was given the green light only after French President Emmanuel Macron’s special pleading to President Ebrahim Raisi? Ultimately, Iran arguably had no choice but to…