A liberal approach to Lebanese security

BY A. ALABED

The heinous terror of the last days and months poses an ethical conundrum to liberal minds struggling to combine their liberal values with an effectiv approach to security that is able to protect your family and friends without restricting civil liberties.

Impossible? Hardly. Highly difficult? Of course. Nevertheless security and liberty are not antithetical, not opposed to each other. Liberty is in quite on the contrary an essential prerequisite for security. It is never good to concentrate too much power in one hand, even if it is that of your hopefully caring mother country; this would open other quite distinct ways to jeopardize our personal security, just imagine a possible leak in all-embracive surveillance system...

In addition to the obvious enfringements of civil rights such a comprehensive system would implicate it becomes clear that this is not a road we want to go down. What we hencefore have to develop is a new approach to security that acknowledges the fact that there is no such thing as absolute security and ist therefore not prone to totalitarianism.

So how should such a liberal security doctrine look like? Well, effective prevention should form the backbone of it. That means that particularly in regard to terrorism we have to get down at the root of the problem and prevent first of all our Muslim adolescents in the suburbs from radicalizing and then of course control and prevent the influx of potentially violent individuals from Syria and Iraq.

It is not back-breaking work to achieve these premises, however hard it my seem at first sight. In regard to the latter there has to be more profound cooperation on the regional and international level to contro the flow of migrants displaced by the Syrian civil war. That's a given. And on thing must be clear: A country that does not accept the principle of solidarity that is imperative to make a union function has no place whatsoever in this union.

To get back to the issue of  influx control: What we need is a policy-mix: effective control of our borders and territories, utilizing concentrated mlitary and police forces and fences, combined with typically Levantine hospitality, to give a warm welcome to those who legitimatey flee terror and death. In order to achieve that we have to collaborate closely with our regional allies and the Eu in order to set up a responsible and sustained way to distribute them in a fair way upon the participating state.

Aforementioned countries have to join forces to actively fight radicalization. That means among others the establishment of a joint Arab intelligence and close cooperation with EU and US intelligence agencies while safeguarding interests and privacy of the Lebanese public. The Lebanese government itself must commit itself to fight the economic and social issues underlying the transormation of "average" young adults and adolescents into  blood-thirsty psychopaths. It is common scientific consensus that economic growth would alleviate at leats some of burning social issues of the likes of discrimination, racism and xenophobia. Discussing Lebanon`s faltering economy starving for economic reforms and liberalizations however goes beyond the constraints of this article and will be dealt with in another issuer.

Then of course there is the issue of Hezbollah, which is directly involved in the Syrian civil war and thus jeopardizes the Lebanese public by attracting terror attacks carried out by its Syrian foes. Of course the issue here is more complex and of course we are in favor of fighting the psycopaths of Daesh also in Syria; however Hezbollah should coordinate its actions with the official Lebanese government (of which it is by the way an essential part) and security forces. Let's see if thta's gonna happen...

While implementing the measures suggested above the responsible policymakers have to beware of  not making the same mistakes the Americans committed in the aftermath of the lurid nine-eleven attacks: establishing all-comprehensive surveillaince and pausing the state of law can never be an option, because, as I have argued before, this is exactly what the perpetuers of the nine-eleven, Paris, Beirut, Sinai and Ankara terror attacks want us to do. They WANT us to toss overboard our concept of a liberal, pluarlistic and democratic society. Therefore we should indeed take responsible security precautions. Never though sacrifice our believes on the altar of the imaginary fetish of absolute security.