❊ The End Of A Mirage

In the end, it doesn’t really matter who killed the fabled Saudi-Syrian initiative. Fingers will be pointing here and there, but we should remember that the initiative was doomed from the onset.

You can talk all you want about compromise, solutions and bargains. But this particular corner was impossible to round. This was a zero-sum game to its core: One party wants to kill the tribunal, the other wants to strengthen its sacrosanctity.

Signs of the impending failure were right in front of our eyes. The Saudi ambassador in Lebanon again and again downplayed the talks’ importance. The secrecy surrounding the discussions was so watertight that to the last day, people wondered if such initiative even existed. Some tried to fill the void by giving the S-S talks a fantastic scope.

And yet everybody wanted the initiative to succeed. It represented hope that the coming confrontation can be dodged. That the gods of sanity will somehow bestow their wisdom on the Lebanese warring parties, and on the Lebanese people who lived the last few weeks in a collective state of suspended disbelief.

Today, we fall back on reality. A new phase of the confrontation has begun. Things will be difficult, but at least we will be living in the real world.