Lebanon has always deserved better from its leaders. The port blast lays that bare
The monstrous explosion that tore into the early evening of a mid-summer's night this past Tuesday in Beirut is, whatever way you cut it, just the latest manifestation of the multitude of endless avenues of miserable corruption that have plagued the country for generations.
Lebanon's political oligarchy engages in kleptocracy with a rampant intensity unlike almost anywhere in the region, seemingly unrestrained by any sense of public compassion or institutional necessity. There is an apparatus of corruption that has, for decades, hollowed the entire country from the inside out in an endless cycle of dysfunction and theft.
Now, that bottomless dispassion has culminated in much of its capital being reduced to something akin to a post-apocalyptic cityscape.… Seguir leyendo »