The decision, the risks and the adviser
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Returning to Beirut from a trip to Damascus, I recalled what I once heard: “Damascus and Baghdad paid in recent decades the price of reckless decisions, while Beirut paid the price of a lack of ability to take decisions.”
It has been 15 years since I last took this road, and I remember the difficulties these capitals had to endure. Time is a master in changing fates. Damascus has changed. We used to visit it before it started to drown in its own blood. It was normal at the time for a visiting journalist to meet the man who made the decisions. That person was President Bashar Assad and he ruled the country with no other partner or aide. At the time, Assad was running Lebanon — before Rafik Hariri’s assassination — and partnering with Iran in destabilizing Iraq, which was under US occupation following Saddam Hussein’s ouster in 2003.
