Presidential Vacancy

On Friday, LebanonParliament Speaker Nabih Berri announced the fifth postponement of a session among legislators that's needed in order to elect the country's next president. This latest delay will leave the country without a head of state for at least a week. Current President Emile Lahoud is scheduled to quit the presidential palace Friday at midnight, while Berri has targeted Nov. 30 as the next date to try and get bitterly opposed members from the pro-Western government and the Hizbullah-led opposition to agree on a consensus candidate. (The pro-Western government could attempt to elect a president with a simple majority in Parliament, but only at the risk of sparking street violence in a country with a nasty history of civil war.)

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The labyrinthine saga of Lebanon's presidential woes has gripped political observers throughout the Middle East, who largely see the country as a pawn in the larger game of international chess currently taking place between Iran, which provides arms and money to Hizbullah, and the United States, which has lent both financial and moral support to Lebanon's government. Also paying close attention is U.S. Ambassador to Lebanon Jeffrey Feltman. A controversial and outspoken figure inside the country, he spoke to NEWSWEEK's Seth Colter Walls earlier this week about the density of issues facing Lebanon's political class, and whether a U.S. envoy can truly stay neutral when Hizbullah is involved in a political dispute. Excerpts:

NEWSWEEK: What's the best possible outcome in Lebanon, given this controversy over the presidency?
Jeffrey Feltman: The best option is that there is a president who is broadly accepted by the Lebanese. That's what we hope will happen. The current diplomatic push is meant to help create the atmosphere where that can happen according to the Lebanese Constitution. The international community is not playing the "name game." In the past, many countries have gotten involved in approving or vetoing certain candidates. But it's Lebanese who have to choose members of Parliament, who then choose the president. The diplomatic whirl you see is about promoting process, not a candidate. That's new in Lebanese history.

Prior to this controversy, Westerners never heard much about Lebanon's president—in contrast to Hizbullah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah or pro-Western figures like Saad Hariri or Prime Minister Fouad Siniora. How does the president factor into Lebanon's politics?
First of all, Lebanon's president has considerable legal and moral weight in the Lebanese system. The president, by being Christian, and in working with the Shia speaker [in Parliament] and Sunni prime minister, provides balance in the system. The president ends up playing an important role in making that power-sharing work. I would say that part of the gridlock now within the Lebanese system is because the current president, Emile Lahoud, is so deeply beholden to the Syrian regime that he is not accepted by the majority of Lebanese as legitimately representing Lebanon's best interest.

After Syria left Lebanon in 2005, members of Parliament who had been there at the time of Lahoud's [three-year] mandate extension in 2004 signed a letter attesting that they had only done so because of pressure from Syria. So it became crystal clear that Lahoud's presence in [the presidential palace] beyond his first six-year turn was due to Syrian pressure.

Right now, the struggle between the narrow pro-Western majority in Parliament and the powerful Hizbullah-led opposition to elect the next president is widely viewed, in Lebanon and elsewhere, as reflective of an ongoing proxy war between Washington on the one hand, and Damascus and Tehran on the other. Is that a view you credit?
I think this election is about, "What kind of country does Lebanon want to be?" Do they want to be a country in which the sort of diversity of views is valued the way it has been, versus a Hizbullah-type regime. Hizbullah, right now, is doing things like building a telephone network—their own private telephone network. They're importing arms from Syria and Iran, the locations and amount of money [attached to which] are not known. Last year, they took the decision to kidnap Israeli soldiers ... All these things were done without public accountability or transparency. So the major decisions of war and peace are taken secretly. Foreign powers can export weapons. The state of Lebanon today is weak. The goal should be to strengthen that state. I don't think that's what Hizbullah seeks.