No Cult of Personality for New Lebanese President

The United States has its corporate memoirs. The Middle East has its big sprawling billboards--advertisements for the despot of the moment. Back when he was still lording it over Iraq, Saddam Hussein, besides having his likeness plastered all over Iraq in posters, billboards, statues and facades, took to comparing himself to Nebuchadnezzar, the great Babylonian king who fought back Persians, recaptured Jerusalem and established Babylon in the sixth century B.C. as the New York City of its day. In Syria, the late president Hafez el Assad's face is still peeling off many a wall even though his son has been Syria's ruler since 2000: the son's big posters don't cover the father's so much as adjoin them.

It's the same all over the Middle East, with the exception of Wahhabi places like Saudi Arabia, where the religious police forbids overt depictions of the human face for fear of appealing to idolatry: Kings, presidents, mullahs and ayatollahs like their faces in people's faces. A reminder not sop much of their power as of the insecurity that power illegitimately claimed and held engenders.

That's what makes one of new Lebanese President Michel Suleiman's first acts so remarkable. When he was finally elected president following an 18-month crisis that brought Lebanon on the verge of civil war, various factions and supporters automatically responded by plastering his face all over billboards, alternately thanking him and branding him Lebanon's "savior." It didn't sit well with Suleiman, who is both more clever and less insecure to fall prey to the Middle East's fables of flattery. He asked that they all be taken down by Monday. Not to be misunderstood, he called on police to tear down the posters if citizens don't comply on their own.

The "request" wasn't one-sided. It was a tactical move. Its flip-side was the "request" that all other posters bearing the likenesses of other militia and sectarian leaders around the country, and there are many, be taken down. That includes the sprawling, ayatollesque paint jobs bearing the picture of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, ubiquitous all over the areas of the country he controls (which are now many).

What if Hezbollah followers challenged Suleiman's authority on that score?

As Lebanon's Daily Star reported earlier this week, "Posters in Lebanon are sometimes erected or torn down during street clashes and have even prompted fights in neighborhoods where confessional groups or political tensions mix. During May's armed clashes between pro-government and opposition gunmen, Syrian Socialist National Party insignias and flags - sometimes, but not exclusively replacing Future Movement signs - were erected across areas of Beirut in what remains a provocative and lingering aspect of the battles."

It's unlikely Suleiman would provoke a fight over the posters. When Hezbollah invaded West Beirut last month, challenging the authority of the government Suleiman now presides over, Suleiman, as leader of the Lebanese military, did nothing. He was on the cusp of becoming president, he was prizing the unity of the Lebanese army ahead of factionalism, he was gambling that taking on Hezbollah was more risky than letting it vent. Whatever the case may have been, the Lebanese government and the Lebanese army did nothing. That tells you who wields real power in Lebanon these days. It isn't quite Michel Suleiman.

But Suleiman is Lebanon's 12th president. Some question marks surround his past. But so do halos, bequeathed by a hopeful Lebanese public that includes an impressive cross-section of a usually fractured population.

Who is Michel Suleiman? Read my new profile of the man Lebanon hopes will unite the country for good.