Lebanon’s Tragedy Is All Too Familiar
Americans know what it’s like to suffer the consequences of negligent government.
“That the Lebanese have suffered so much both for reasons beyond their control and because of the fickleness of their political machine is a tragedy,” the American Enterprise Institute scholar Michael Rubin wrote in the Washington Examiner after last week’s horrific explosion in a Beirut port. Only “when the Lebanese people shirk off corrupt and incompetent elites and a political culture where too many act with impunity will the country thrive, and its people achieve the justice they so much deserve.”
Rubin is right, of course. The history of modern Lebanon is a history of, among other things, governance failure—and the explosion in downtown Beirut is a tragic kind of capstone.
But it is no defense
