One more thing on Michel Aoun: I didn’t mean to suggest that his defection to the Hezbollah was recent. I meant merely that before his return a few years ago from exile, one could always assume he would stay on the side those who fought for the Cedar Revolution, given that he was a leader of the anti-Syrian struggle in the 1980s. Instead, in the last few years, he has unscrupulously played ethnic politics above constitutional politics, because he thinks it a better way to get to what he had in his hands in the late 1980s: the keys to the presidential palace.

One reader thinks Aoun hasn’t changed his colors at all, recalling that after his “suicidal attack on the Syrians” Aoun

spent most of the last two decades in exile in France and when he came back he sought to convince the Lebanese people that it was his lobbying with Washington, and not the hundreds of thousands strong crowds, that ousted Syria from Lebanon. This was part of a wider strategy to claim the presidency after Lahoud’s departure (he’s a Maronite, though an avowed secularist). When he realized this would be unsuccessful, he joined with Hezbollah and to an extent with Syria in the hope that the failure of the present government would ultimately allow him to succeed Lahoud on the back of Hezbollah and Syrian support. His support, to the extent that it does exist, stems mostly from Maronites who fear that Sunnis have hijacked the leadership of Lebanon. Thus he is not a “defection” so much as a punchline.