Hariri’s legacy continues

There were few more poignant and telling indicators of the impasse that has befallen Lebanon in the past two years since Rafik Hariri’s assassination than the shuttered shops, restaurants and cafés and empty cobble-stoned streets of the downtown district during this holiday season. The Solidere-run city center was regarded as the jewel in Hariri’s reconstruction crown, the fulfillment of the former prime minister’s long-standing ambition to restore Beirut’s pre-civil war image as a financial and services entrepot for the Middle East. But, the legacy Hariri unintentionally bequeathed the nation through his untimely death is not one of a flourishing economy based on tourism and services, but to turn Beirut into the nexus of an ongoing tussle for control of the Middle East, pitting Iran and its allies against the West and its regional partners. It was clear within hours of the St Valentine’s Day truck bomb that killed Hariri and