(This article was written by Maria Maalouf and appeared in Arab News. Not even ‘Robin Hood’ Yassin Fawaz can save Lebanon from its rulers)

The political and economic crises in Lebanon reveal the ruling political system’s state of denial. So great is their delusion, the political elite for a time maintained, despite all evidence to the contrary, that the causes of Lebanon’s woes were foreign in nature.

But the truth always comes out and it was demonstrated by the Oct. 17 revolution in 2019: That the problems with the Lebanese political system come from within because that system adopted and mainlined corruption.

The Lebanese people took to the streets and erected a gallows in Martyrs’ Square in the center of the capital, Beirut. In so doing, they removed the fig leaf that the elite used to mask their illusions — a fig leaf that included the idea that the Amal Movement, a nominally peaceful Shiite establishment party, and Hezbollah, an international terrorist group, are fundamentally different.

The political elite sold those illusions, hidden behind that fig leaf, to Lebanese citizens, who were forced to become prisoners of an economic crisis classified as the worst financial disaster to befall any country in more than a century. This is what prompted Western countries to take the initiative in an attempt to save what could be salvaged, with the support of the US.

The Lebanese were told that, to be helped, they must first help themselves — and the Americans and others in the West bet on the people to bring about vital political change. They hoped that this would happen in the parliamentary elections that took place in May 2022, especially as they included, for the first time, candidates who offered a political and economic vision for the salvation of Lebanon and its people.

Perhaps the well-known Lebanese American businessman Yassin Fawaz (known as King Rolodex on social media and in the streets) could have been part of the necessary changing of the guard. Some said that, rather than Amal’s candidate for speaker of the parliament — Nabih Berri, an 85-year-old man who has been in office since 1992 — Fawaz, who represents the youth, could have taken the role.

But those who are part of the corrupt system in Lebanon had other ideas. Berri is Hezbollah’s man. Fawaz was intimidated and eventually forced into electoral oblivion because he was an enemy of the corrupt establishment and Hezbollah, which brought about the country’s collapse.

Fawaz ran as a Shiite candidate in last year’s parliamentary elections. He did so as an independent, stating that he could not run a real campaign as it was not a real election — because Lebanon does not have real democracy. This is something the people understand, he said.

If we had a real democracy, politicians would not remain in office forever. They would feel the consequences of their role in disasters such as the Beirut port explosion and the financial crisis. But until this changes, everything in Lebanon, including the media and politics, will continue to be controlled by the politicians and the establishment — people who have been in power forever.

Some have described Fawaz, who combines charismatic eloquence with political activism and philanthropy, as the “Robin Hood of Lebanon.” They say he is authentic in a way the elites cannot match because he is genuine, with no links to the corrupt political class. His castigation of the people who voted for the same old politicians in last year’s election went viral and struck a chord.

For many Lebanese, if Fawaz is Robin Hood, the country itself and its government is the villainous Prince John, robbing them of their savings, imposing harsh charges and rationing services. Fawaz can strive to raise awareness of poverty in Lebanon and help the people he meets, but lasting salvation for those who are suffering lies solely in the hands of the state — if it were willing to help. Robin Hood cannot save the kingdom on his own.

Observers see and know that Hezbollah is the cause of the economic collapse in Lebanon and the country’s isolation from its Arab neighbors. Hezbollah’s weapons, its terrorism, its military adventures in Syria and elsewhere abroad, and its leadership’s influence on the repression of Arab countries all contribute to Lebanon’s poverty and isolation.

As a result of all this, the crisis has deepened. The corrupt elite have blocked the political horizon for resolving the situation. The failure of the system in Lebanon to implement the structural reforms of the economy and politics that were promised to the international community, together with the elite’s procrastination, have led to disaster.

Lebanon’s leaders have had to be dealt with harshly and this has meant an international policy of imposing sanctions on all who obstruct political and economic reform, not to mention their disruption of vital government work.

Those affected by this package of sanctions include the head of the Free Patriotic Movement, Gebran Bassil, a minister who stood in the shadow of his father-in-law — former President Michel Aoun — and basked in his reflected glory, thinking himself responsible for the accomplishments that earned the credit.

He is one of the reasons for Lebanon’s transformation into a failed state, due to the enormous waste and plentiful corruption at the Ministry of Energy, which he presided over. Much other responsibility can be laid at the feet of Bassil’s political team, which did whatever it wanted for more than a decade. Half of the Lebanese public debt is the result of the costs of supplying electricity and other arbitrary plans.

Still the politicians were not deterred, so it has been necessary for those in the international community who want to see reforms to escalate their efforts to target the Lebanese political and economic system.

Sources in the US have indicated that the administration of President Joe Biden is close to imposing sanctions on Riad Salameh, the governor of the country’s central bank, Banque du Liban, after the Treasury Department raised concerns about his relationship with Hezbollah and links between Hezbollah financiers and the bank.

American officials are confident in their assessment of Salameh’s relationship with Hezbollah. Some have linked this with the US Treasury’s decision to impose financial sanctions on money service company CTEX Exchange.

Its board of directors is headed by economist Hassan Moukalled, who is considered to have close links to Hezbollah on the one hand and the Russian business community on the other. He also has an excellent relationship with the governor of Banque du Liban, which granted him a banking license in March 2020 in the midst of the economic and financial crisis. Moukalled’s company was reportedly carrying out exchange operations for the benefit of the central bank, in coordination with Salameh.

The Treasury said it was sanctioning Moukalled and CTEX for facilitating the financing of Hezbollah through the company’s exchange centers.

It is clear that the crisis in Lebanon can only be resolved through a decisive and firm approach. The question now is not whether Lebanon’s Robin Hood and his friends can ride to the rescue and save the country but, sadly, will we be faced with more painful decisions caused by the corrupt political system?

Maria Maalouf is a Senior Media Fellow at the Gold Institute for International Strategy, a Washington D.C.-based foreign policy and defense think tank.

This article first appeared in the American Spectator Magazine: https://spectator.org/the-2022-titanic-vote-iceberg-ahead-or-are-we-already-sinking/)

The history surrounding the April 15, 1912 peacetime sinking of the “unsinkable” RMS Titanic has been exhaustively documented. The primary historical takeaway has been that the ship’s builders, and its boosters in government and industry, had fallen prey to technology hubris: ships could be built to withstand the worst natural hazards and calamities that Mother Nature could throw at them. A massive iceberg in the North Atlantic put paid to such conceits, with over 1,500 on board sent to their deaths in the briny deep. In the wake of last fall’s catastrophic mid-terms, the GOP may be discovering that the electorate—at least, those that went to the polls, inhabit political worlds different than imagined, different than polls suggested, and, above all, different than standard diagnoses indicated.

Many post-election diagnoses identify bad candidates, lack of positive issues, focus on 2020 election, Donald Trump, poor allocation of limited campaign resources, etc. All these points carry some salience. But they miss—excuse the pun—the elephant in the room: failure of GOP and independent voters to keep uppermost in mind what mid-terms above all represent: a referendum report card on the performance of the president.

In ordinary times this focus is less significant, and voters may choose to focus on the candidates on the ballot—Congressional, senatorial and gubernatorial candidates—even, at times, key high-visibility mayoral races. In the presidential year of 1960, the Kennedy-Nixon debates showcased remarkably similar positions; a common expression of the choice was Tweedledum and Tweedledee. In such times, off-year elections have less saliency.

Not so in 2022. Not when the country is seen the worst performance of a president’s first two years since at least the Civil War. Many have said that had President Biden purposefully set out to damage America, he hardly could have done worse; some indeed have asserted that he intentionally sought to weaken America. Who is correct on this proposition matters not at all.

What mattered most was stopping the president from another two years of inflicting catastrophic damage: (a) roaring inflation, the highest in 40 years; (b) runaway spending, added trillions to the national debt, already at record levels; (b) replacing a net energy surplus in 2020—the first in 70 years, with renewed dependence on foreign oil—necessitating tin-cup tours seeking access to increased oil production exports; (c) a literally open border, with record millions streaming across our undefended southern border—without screening for terrorists, or for Covid, despite such screening being supported by 80 percent of the voters;(d) allowing crossings by migrants under indentured servitude to the drug cartels and annually importing enough fentanyl to kill every American; and (e) an epic crime wave underway in America’s large cities.

With such calamities unfolding, a Red tsunami was essential, to keep to a minimum further damage during the president’s term. Instead we have what is barely a sidewalk puddle. This happened because Republican and independent voters did not turn out in sufficient numbers for the only poll that matters, cast in the voting booth. In doing so they voted for two more calamitous years. This holds regardless of their motives; voting machines tally actual votes, not the reasons behind voter choices.

In order to stop the president and his minions on Capitol Hill, the GOP needed enough of a margin to lose wavering Republican votes; unlike the Democrats, who have the internal discipline of a totalitarian party, the GOP has a bigger tent. Thus, John Boehner, who ascending to the House Speakership, in the wake of a GOP landslide in 2014, could not keep his flock in line with 255 votes; the Democrats can run the House with 218 votes. The House is now 221-214 Republican, and while Speaker Kevin McCarthy is off to a good start, the narrow margin will often severely limit what the GOP can accomplish. The 51-49 Senate means the Democrats can confirm another passel of hard-leftist judicial nominees, a collection of Kentanji clones.

Thus, voters unable to set aside their reservations about GOP candidates as to their positions on specific issues delivered what the president and his legislative leadership interpret as a mandate to continue the policies that are impoverishing, sundering and literally endangering the republic. In these highly partisan times—now arguably the most deeply divided since the Civil War—voters should have felt an overriding obligation to above all limit further vast damage inflicted on America by the party in power.

Democrats are further energized because: (a) despite blatant election fraud, an Arizona judge dismissed gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake’s lawsuit; (b) most voters gave Biden what amounts to an ungentlemanly C—instead of a failing grade; (c) the GOP ran poorly with independents, winning 38 percent, way below the 51 percent Democrats won in 2018; (d) a hyper-partisan mainstream media deliberately covered up the border chaos with words calculated to obfuscate, leaving most voters blissfully unaware of the massive influx of illegals—unprecedented in modern times; (e) the government’s admission that it cannot even locate records of 378,000 migrants taken into custody—a number greater than a plurality of poll respondents gave for total 2021-2022 border crossings; (f) an avalanche of bogus asylum claims, creating de facto mass amnesty.

The full extent of the mainstream media immigration news blackout is made clear in this detailed description by Never-Trumper Andy McCarthy:

Broadly speaking, the country does not know how bad the situation at the border is. As the Center for Immigration Studies’ Andrew Arthur points out, in recent polling by Harvard’s Center for American Political Studies, just 13 percent knew that there were over 2 million illegal border crossings per year. Not only did the remaining 87 percent significantly underestimate the number of illegal entries, but more than half of them believed the number to be less than half a million.

McCarthy goes further, charting a course to bypass media disinformation and set the stage for Republicans winning on 2024 what they utterly failed to do in 2022. His article gives the staggering numbers for illegal migrants during Biden’s first 23 months: at least 6 million, or 2,600 per day. But that doe not allow for the steep increase in 2022, as it took months for the cartels to organize caravans, etc. McCarthy explains the results to date, and the likely consequences to come:

To provide some perspective, during the Obama–Biden years, the Department of Homeland Security regarded it as a crisis if the number of illegal-alien encounters inched up to 1,000 per day, which computes to 365,000 per year. “A thousand [per day] overwhelms the system,” Obama’s former DHS secretary, Jeh Johnson, acknowledged in a 2019 interview. At the time, the Trump administration was dealing with four times that amount due to a surge in border arrivals by alien family units and unaccompanied alien minors. (The surge was caused by the refusal of congressional Democrats to cooperate in Trump’s signature border-security priority; it was quelled, as Rich Lowry related, because Trump induced cooperation from other countries.)

Thanks to Biden’s wholesale adoption of transnational-progressive radicalism, we are now at seven times the number that Johnson conceded would constitute a crisis. Post–Title 42, we could find ourselves at 18 times that amount, or perhaps even more — and remember, that’s just the apprehensions, not the got-aways.

There is more. Three major polls released in late January/early February present sobering numbers: (a) a majority of voters call lack of leadership the top political issue; (b) a majority also say that President Biden has accomplished little, citing the economy, border crossings and Russia/Ukraine; (c) 41 percent say that their personal finances have worsened under Biden—the worst number in 37 years.

Then there is New York City, 41 percent of whose voters name crime as their top issue, miles ahead of affordable housing (17%), homelessness (12%), inflation and immigration (both 8%). Crime ranks first for 63 percent of GOP voters, 53 percent of independents and 30 percent of Democrats. Forty percent feel “less safe,” 53 percent, “about the same” and 8 percent feel “safer.” Mayor Eric Adams, 13 months into his mayoralty, is 21 points underwater, 57-36 percent; his disapprove number is 78 percent for GOP voters, 63 percent with independents and 48 percent among Democrats. With robbery up 32 percent, rape 11 percent and burglary 29 percent, who can blame them? Gov. Kathy Hochul refuses to blame “get out of jail free” bail “reform” for the rise. Yet NYC voters voted for Hochul over Lee Zeldin, who promised to fire Manhattan’s woke D.A. on his first day in office if elected. Had Zeldin even made the high-30s in the city, he’d have been elected governor. NYC Voters could have sent a message to Democrats nationwide with an upset win by Zeldin. Instead they voted—wittingly or unwittingly—for continued rising crime and unsafe streets.

Something is afoot here: Voter attitudes like these would normally signal a Red wave. Yet voters would not send a message to the Oval Office occupant. Either they opted to accept two more years of catastrophic decline, or they believe that Biden will improve. But a president who reads, as Biden did—the 2022 mid-term result as an endorsement of his policies—in his State of the Union speech, he asserted that “the State of the Union is strong”—is far more likely to double down than trim his sails.

A longtime conservative commentator wrote of the elections that Republican candidates failed on two counts: (a) they did not offer solutions to the problems created by the Biden administration; (b) they addressed abortion solely in terms of federalism—avoiding the substance of the issue. His article missed the boat, so to speak, on both counts. The party out of power cannot pass anything; at best, it can explain why the party in power is messing up. It is only in presidential election years that the party out of power must offer alternatives which, if the party captures the presidency, and wins a sufficient majority in Congress, it can pass and implement.

The party’s message that should suffice in off-year elections is: The first rule of the hole is to stop digging. Had the GOP made tsunami-level gains in 2022, it would have been positioned to stop the president’s program; and with the Senate, it could have forced the president to appoint left-wing moderates, instead of radicals like Kentanji, to the federal bench. A Red tsunami would have shocked Democrats in Congress facing re-election in 2024 to re-evalute their chances if they back the administration.

As to the second point: Federalism is a bedrock foundation of conservative governance. President Reagan made it a central theme of his presidency. And within each state, the principle of subsidiarity pushes solutions down to local levels. The whole point of the Dobbs decision was that Roe v. Wade had taken from the states their rightful role in determining social policy. The states are supposed to be laboratories where policies can be tried, and results tabulated, as to what policies work best. The importance of federalism is best illustrated by the Trump policy of, after a couple months of lockdown, letting the states pursue their own solutions. Had that not been done—had Hillary, or any other imaginable Democrat, been president—a national lockdown policy would be been imposed, following Michigan Gov. Gretchen Witmer (with, of course, a “we’re royalty“ exemption—rules for thee but not for we—for the president and pals). The courts would never have ruled against the lockdown policy in the absence of empirical evidence that anti-lockdown states were doing as well, even better, than lockdown states. Federalism thus saved America from a health policy tyranny.

Bottom Line. The off-year election is the one chance voters have during a presidential term to send a distress message to the occupant of the Oval Office. They chose not to do so in 2022. They will suffer, and deserve, the consequences (along with those who voted Republican and alas do not deserve the pain almost certain to come). As for 2024, all bets are off.

The 2022 election had all the elements in place for a Red tsunami. And the GOP did win 3 million more votes in House races, but did not get a commensurate return. Turnout was 46.5 percent. The latter number surprises. One would think that with all the bad news, and a president voters blamed for multiple calamities, voters would have understood the need to check the White House, and turn out in large enough numbers to flip both houses. But they did not see it that way.

True, there will be fewer GOP incumbent Senate seats at stake in 2024, and more opportunities for pickups. But given the gap between voter attitudes and how they voted, retaking the White House, keeping the GOP House micro-majority while electing a GOP Senate will likely be a tall order.

Which brings us back to RMS Titanic. What Henry Wadsworth Longfellow famously called “our Ship of State” may already have hit the iceberg.

John Wohlstetter, a senior fellow at the Gold Institute for International Strategy, is author of Sleepwalking with the Bomb (Discovery Institute Press, 2d. ed. 2014)

(This article was written by Maria Maalouf and appeared in Arab News. West should not wait to give full support to Iranian protesters)

The Iranian proverb “spring does not come with one flower” applies to the fourth package of sanctions recently approved by the foreign ministers of the EU countries in response to a vote by the European Parliament that called for them to designate the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as a terrorist organization.

The European calculations did not live up to the hopes of the Iranian people, who have risen up in protest at the regime’s killing of Mahsa Amini. Their protests have now turned into a revolution against the mullahs’ regime, which has been repressing the Iranian people for four and a half decades. The brutality with which the uprising is being repressed — as the authorities’ criminality has reached the point of shooting demonstrators in the eyes, as if they want to extinguish the light of the truth — has firmly established that this regime only understands the language of killing and oppression.

Although the sanctions package affected 37 entities affiliated with the mullahs’ regime, the decision did not live up to the European Parliament’s recommendation of designating the IRGC. This group is the Iranian regime’s thickest and most brutal stick. It is the one whose crimes transcend Iran’s borders. Its criminality inside and outside of Iran must be brought to an end.

If the politicians are falling short of calling the IRGC a terrorist organization, a court in an EU member state should issue a concrete legal conviction. This leads us to the question: What are European courts waiting for? Especially since the IRGC’s violations are visible from Iran to Yemen, passing through Iraq, Syria and Lebanon, along with its intervention in the Ukraine war on the side of Moscow, which it is providing with drones.

The EU retains scant hope of reviving the Iran nuclear deal, which has been suspended since the US withdrawal under former President Donald Trump in 2018, based on the background of Tehran’s lack of commitment. Trump discovered early on that this regime does not understand mild language and diplomacy, and must instead be dealt with firmly.

In line with its strategy, Washington announced late last month the imposition of new trade restrictions on seven Iranian entities that effectively contributed to the production of drones that Russia has used to bomb Ukraine. The Department of Commerce said that these companies engaged in activities that threatened the US’ national security and foreign policy.

Meanwhile, the US House of Representatives last month approved, by 420 votes in favor to just one against, a resolution condemning the suppression of demonstrations and protests in Iran, as well as supporting the protesters in achieving their demands. Rep. Claudia Tenney said: “In this resolution, we condemn the gross violation of human rights by the Iranian regime in its suppression of the demonstrators who rose bravely against this terrorist regime to demand their rights.”

It is worth mentioning that Washington also imposed a package of sanctions on many senior Iranian officials.

Gregory Meeks, ranking member of the House Foreign Relations Committee, addressed the Iranian people, saying: “Be strong because freedom will always triumph over tyranny.” For his part, CIA Director William Burns said during a meeting at Georgetown University in Washington: “The turmoil resulting from the widespread protests in Iran has led to confusion in the Iranian regime.” He also praised the “courage” of the Iranian women who are disappointed with the conditions in their country.

It has been proved that the mullahs’ regime in Iran is the world’s biggest state sponsor of terrorism. Therefore, the international community must move with greater force to counter this oppressive regime. The bombing of weapons factories in Isfahan and other cities, in addition to the bombing of convoys in Al-Bukamal, Syria, are just noise — it is time to mute them and unleash the freedom of the Iranians with full support.

Maria Maalouf is a Senior Media Fellow at the Gold Institute for International Strategy, a Washington D.C.-based foreign policy and defense think tank.