❊ The Good Reason and the Real Reason

When talking about the arrest prospects of the 4 indicted Hezbollah members, this is what Sayyed Hassan Nassrallah had to say on Saturday:

Don’t ask PM Miqati’s government to try to arrest the indicted individuals, because you wouldn’t be able to do it yourself even if you had a 100% March 14 government.

You don’t need a genius to understand the underlying challenge to the Lebanese state implicit in that statement. The message is clear: We are too powerful to be caught by lebanese law enforcement. We will stand by our “honest resisters” and protect them

The “reasonable voices” (aka the “Mikati Centrists”) in the new majority then soon stepped in. They had to do what they did best: Mask Hezbollah’s intents with internationally acceptable language. Here’s how speaker Nabih Berri added nuance to the inability of the Lebanese government to arrest the four suspects:

[The suspects] are in unknown locations. If we go to their villages and ask about their whereabouts, nobody will be able to guide us to them because they left their homes a long time ago to escape Israeli targeting

Translation: We want to arrest them, but we can’t. That is a small but important shift from Nasrallah’s “catch us if you can” power flaunt.

The Minister of Interior also chimed in. This is what he told Al-Diyar this morning:

The arrest warrants will be executed without publicity. We will raid the known addresses of the four indicted people, and if we were unable to apprehend them or find them, we will report that to the relevant judicial authorities

Again, the audience here is the same: The international community. The message is also the same as that of Berri: “We wanted to, but we were unfortunately unable to arrest them”

Tom Carlyle once said that “A person usually has two reasons for doing something: a good reason and the real reason.”. In this case, the good reason for not arresting the suspects, the reason being publicized for international consumption is that the Lebanese government is committed to arresting the suspects.

To know the real reason, you’ll have to listen to Sayyed Nasrallah.