FARID ABBOUD: A MAN OF LITTLE CHARACTER

        By: Dr. Joseph Hitti
Edgartown, Massachusetts
22 April 2004

At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge yesterday, members of the Lebanese American community were graced first-hand with the utterly annoying spectacle of Mr. Farid Abboud, a rather insignificant man posing as the Ambassador of Lebanon, speaking to a mostly Lebanese-American audience. We had to put up with an hour of this political dwarf praising the Lebanese for their achievements in the Diaspora when his own government continues to push more young Lebanese out of the country day after day because of human rights violations, a defunct economy, a dire lack of opportunities, and rampant corruption. Not to mention the permanent state of war imposed on Lebanon by the Syrian occupation that appointed Mr. Abboud himself to represent Lebanon in Washington DC. This was the ultimate bureaucrat, stepping straight out of a surreal Kafka novel. This was a man with no character, who appeared gleeful to have "arrived", to have made it thanks to his willingness to work as a collaborator on behalf of a foreign country whose stated objective is to dismantle Lebanon as a state and annex it. Indeed, people who "make it", like Mr. Abboud, often do so by selling their principles, by compromising on everything, by not standing up to any belief or conviction because deep down they have none.

Speaking with the meandering tongue of a black market dealer trying to rob his audience of a few pennies of sympathy, this mercenary spoke a lot of "compromises" and "managing problems". He never spoke of principles, aspirations, courage, and hope for a better future. Not once did he speak with the conviction of a man who has a vision for his country. He, in fact, fumbled when a young Lebanese woman asked him a simple question: How permanent or temporary did the Ambassador think Taef would be? He paused for a long moment, and then mumbled an incoherent answer, as I imagined his mind rummaging for an answer that would not get him in trouble with his masters back in the occupied homeland.

Speaking with the hushed tone and shifty eyes of someone who is carefully watching every word he was saying, and of course, his back, this mercurial and spineless snake took no clear position on any of the issues that confront Lebanon today, telling his young Lebanese-American audience that the Lebanese people's aspirations and hopes are irrelevant in this day and age. Rather, he advised his audience to look at everything through his own lens of the mercantile dealer: A ledger of accounts. There are pros and cons to everything, this traitor-turned-Confucius said, and when all of Lebanon's problems are analyzed through this revolutionary prism, one ought to reach the same conclusions as Mr. Abboud: All of Lebanon's predicaments for the past 40 years are, on balance, positive developments to be proud of.

On balance, the ambassador said that the Syrian occupation is positive even as, by his own admission, there are corrupt Syrians who are robbing the country blind in collusion with their corrupt Lebanese counterparts, and Lebanon's young people continue to leave the country in droves because of it. The Syrian occupation of Lebanon is not an "occupation", he argued. It is merely an "interference", he said, and to back his argument, Mr. Abboud claimed that every country interferes in every other country's affairs. That is normal, he said. Why are people surprised with Syria interfering in Lebanon? Israel, he said, interferes in US politics because of the nature of the US political system, an allusion to the much-repeated Syrian argument that the Jewish lobby steers US policy in favor of Israel. The US interferes in the affairs of the Gulf States with the military bases it has there. But his own cunning Lebanese government, the ambassador said, is "managing" the Syrian interference. He obviously could not tell his audience, though, how long will this "managing" go on because, by definition, a puppet cannot ask its puppeteer to set it free. Nor did he mention that the Syrian "interference" involves a military occupation, the illegal detention and extradition of hundreds of innocent Lebanese to Syria where they spend decades in Syria's notorious prisons without due process and many never come back, and the direct appointment of presidents, prime ministers, and members of parliament.

On balance, the man said that the moribund Lebanese economy is quite positive, even though, in his own words, the national debt continues to grow at alarming rates and Lebanon's main resource, its people, are lining up at Western embassies for immigrant visas. He said that the Lebanese are very good at destroying things, in reference to the war years, but they are also very good at rebuilding them. He failed to specify that downtown Beirut was rebuilt with Prime Minister Rafik Hariri's own money, which he lent to the country after extorting the real estate out of its rightful owners, thus imposing a debt of 40 Billion dollars that will haunt future generations of young Lebanese. The ambassador also failed to say that only downtown Beirut was rebuilt as a façade to attract investors, leaving the rest of the country in shambles, and truly insulting the investors' intelligence who know that as long as Syria and its collaborators are "managing" the country, they will not put a single penny down in long term instruments. All the investments that are paraded by the collaborator regime as success stories are short-term, and if MacDonald's and Starbucks were eager to sell their blandness in downtown Beirut, they will as eagerly pack and leave, and they should not be seen as positive developments for the long term recovery of the country. So Beirut, the man said, is now rebuilt, as if refurbishing a few buildings and cleaning a few streets were substitutes for rebuilding confidence in the hearts of the Lebanese people or in the minds of investors or healing the scars of the Syrian War on Lebanon while the Syrian army and the Syrian Mukhabarat Intelligence Services freely roam the country and appoint its governments. In answer to a question from the audience about why does a driver's permit cost $200 in Lebanon, an amount equal to the minimum wage there, the man's tongue spoke faster than his mind and he said with a smart smile on his face: "Oh, you can get it cheaper, you know….". Here was the Ambassador of Lebanon to the US advocating the use of bribes, a common practice in his corrupt government's institutions and administrations, to get a simple driver's permit. And I wondered to myself how much money did he have to pay or whose hands did he have to kiss to get the post of Ambassador in Washington?

On balance, the ambassador said that the advent of the terrorist organization Hezbollah is a positive development for Lebanon, even though Hezbollah 's Iranian-funded, Syrian-sponsored, futile war in the south is by far the main reason for the destabilization of the country for the past 2 decades, and is directly responsible for the death of thousands of innocent Lebanese civilians, in addition to 241 US Marines, 58 French paratroopers and hundreds of other foreigners in their bombed embassies. Mr. Abboud admitted that Hezbollah was a problem, but his government was, again, "managing" this problem with the wishful thinking of collaborators who want us to believe that one day Hezbollah would by itself drop its weapons, become civilized, stop advocating the establishment of a an Islamic State in a country that is half Christian, and end its violent and irrational exploitation of Islam for the destabilization of Lebanon under the Syrian Baath regime's sponsorship.

On balance, Mr. Abboud stated that the Taef Agreement was a good compromise. Not everyone liked it, but it was good. Never mind that Taef was a compromise on the sovereignty of Lebanon that ultimately legitimized or exacerbated all the other problems that the Ambassador discussed. He failed to see any connection between all these problems, speaking as if they were separate and independent of each other, when in reality the Syrian occupation as legitimized by the Taef Agreement is the glue that holds Lebanon hostage to the Syrian regime's ultimate satisfaction in a solution to the Middle East conflict and keeps all Lebanon's problems unresolved.

Not once did the ambassador make reference to international law or to United Nations resolutions that call for the withdrawal of all foreign armies from Lebanon. Not once did he make reference to the obligation that Lebanon has to send its troops to the border and secure this border against illegal incursions and attacks by private foreign-funded militias that threaten the security of the country. Not once did this diplomat speak of Lebanon and Syria negotiating their relations as two equally sovereign states. Not once did the ambassador mention that Syria rejects the existence of Lebanon as an independent country, as evidenced by Syria's continued refusal to exchange embassies between the two otherwise sovereign countries.

On balance, I concluded, Mr. Abboud is himself an undignified diplomat whose tenure in Washington DC seriously compromises relations between Lebanon and the US. The man had nothing of substance to say, and he said nothing that we did not know. Perhaps, and although obviously content with his role as a petty bureaucrat, there is a redeeming value to the man. Perhaps, somewhere in his tormented conscience, he may find solace in playing the role of the unwilling collaborator since even under occupation bureaucrats are needed to manage the otherwise sinking ship. But that is exactly where a man's mettle is tested: It is at moments like this in the history of their country that little men and great men distinguish themselves, the former in submitting to, and "managing", the anomaly, and the latter in having the courage to reject it and call it for what it is, an anomaly. And in this ledger of accounts, Mr. Abboud, the ambassador of Lebanon in Washington DC, is a big con for his country.