LEBANON: Hurry up and make me president!

Lebanon's president-in-waiting is mad as heck and he's not gonna take it anymore.

Gen. Michel Suleiman, popular commander of the Lebanese says he is fed up with the country's never-ending political deadlock. And he's not keeping quiet about it anymore.

"I'm tired of the ongoing argument over my name as a consensus presidential candidate," he said in an interview, published today in a local newspaper, Assafir, and translated into English here.

For months now, Suleiman had been promised the top job in the country by almost everyone. Posters of him have already been displayed in many parts of the country.

But despite a wave of local and international support, Suleiman is still waiting to sit on the coveted presidential chair.

For the first time in its history, Lebanon is without a president. It's now been nearly four months since the last president stepped down. Although both the Western-backed government and the Hezbollah-led opposition backed by Iran and Syria say they want Suleiman to be the next president, their ongoing struggle for power has blocked a parliamentary vote again — 17 times, to be exact. 

Suleiman said in his outspoken interview:

I have always said I was ready to make any decision, even if it does not serve me or even the army, so as to bolster national unity ... I have accepted and still accept being a consensus candidate to better serve my country.

Suleiman also held all Lebanese politicians responsible for the current limbo. He warned that if the crisis continued, it would wear out the army, which has proved to be the only institution capable of holding the country together in times of deep political division.

Suleiman must wonder whether any of the  political groups here were ever serious about promoting him as a president, or just trying to use his credentials to bolster their own position in the ongoing game of chess between the two sides.

— Raed Rafei in Beirut

Photo: Gen. Michel Suleiman. Credit: File photo