Walid Joumblatt takes on Lebanon's self-appointed geo-strategists

Walid Joumblatt is hereditary leader of the P.S.P, the Progressive Socialist Party of Lebanon. If that sounds a little strange, it is. Walid inherited the leadership from his father, Kamal Joumblatt, who founded the party and who was assassinated by the Syrians back in 1977.

Kamal was one of Lebanon's true giants, a man who cast his shadow over decades of Lebanese history, who embodied endless contradictions and who combined within himself thinker, mystic, factional chief and politician. I had an opportunity once to spend several hours with him at his home in the Shouf mountains. As I was leaving he walked into another room and returned with a well-worn book by the Indian mystic Sivananda, which he gave me as a parting present. I still have that book to this day and I've spent many an hour with it over the years.

Politically speaking, the P.S.P., over time, became much more the sectarian faction of the Druze community in Lebanon than an ideological party with general appeal.

Walid, who took over after his father's murder and had to shepherd the Druze through years of civil war and invasions by Israel and Syria, has been less the intellectual and more the warlord, by his own accounting. A few years ago, while discussing Lebanon's future he was quoted as saying something like: 'Let the new generation take over. None of us should even have a seat at the table. We all have far too much blood on our hands."

All that said, Walid is a pretty interesting guy in his own right and certainly an intellectual by any standard. With a marked tendency towards shooting from the hip and and a love of heavy sarcasm. The reason I'm writing this post about him is because of something he wrote in the P.S.P magazine yesterday. Sounds like he might be getting just a little fed up with his countrymen.

I'm translating (freely) from a French-language article I ran across in l'Orient le Jour. Translating from the orginal Arabic would take me a week.

"(Walid Joumblatt) indicated that 'if he didn't want to take a position (on the US strikes against Syria) it is because he doesn't want to disturb the integrity and the concentration of the Lebanon's great strategists, and also because he is in full support of the right of the Lebanese to acquaint themselves with every possible military and political point of view, no matter how superficial and assinine it might be.'

'The heavyweights of the Lebanese political class, with their many branches in Lebanon and the four corners of the globe, have long since become geo-strategists in their own right and now can spend their time planning, reflecting upon and interpreting all the huge and momentous changes taking place in the Mideast. '

(What they forget to think about)  'are things like the ever-growing flood of Syrian refugees in Lebanon, the budgetary deficit, the fact that Lebanon has gone now several years without even having a budget, corruption, administrative deterioration,' (and he goes on to mention several other important local issues).

Mr Joumblatt goes on to explain this disinterest by the fact that 'the majority of these political heavyweights have transformed their bedrooms and even their bathrooms into regional operations centers where they wait in front of their personal radar screens for the first missile launch.'"