Goodbye to all that, in the newsroom - Michael Young - The Daily Star

For almost 20 years I have been writing for The Daily Star, first as a free-lancer then as the newspaper’s opinion editor. Even for someone devoted to deadening routine that’s not too bad.

This is my last week at the newspaper. Looking back on those two decades I admit that I was very lucky to be able to follow the changes in the country and region from this outpost. In many respects the Star made me who I am, and for that I’m grateful.

During my period with the newspaper Lebanon went through several permutations. First there was the reconstruction period after the war, when Jamil Mroueh decided to revive the Star after a hiatus of many years. The paper somehow became another embodiment of the country’s revival, as both young Lebanese and foreigners flocked to its cramped newsroom. There was a buoyancy in those days that was thrilling, a sense that the paper was part of something fresh, vital, in a country somehow normal again.

The euphoria aside, the early postwar years were also characterized by uneasy interaction between Lebanon’s volatile chemicals. On the one hand the logic of reconstruction and economic rehabilitation; on the other, that of resistance against Israel’s occupation; and overseeing these incompatible agendas, a Syrian regime exploiting Lebanese divisions to reinforce its own hegemony at the expense of constitutional institutions.

It was possible to write about these things at the Star with little encumbrance. The telephone calls would sometimes come, but the paper always seemed willing to act as a cushion. I can’t speak for the other pages, but what constituted censorship on the opinion page in those early days was generally limited to softening a troublesome sentence or two. Maybe that was because the boundaries of what was acceptable were wider in English. To the newspaper’s credit it didn’t try to shrink them.

After September 2001 everything changed. The attacks against the United States sent shockwaves throughout the Middle East. I joined the Star’s staff in 2003, just as the United States was preparing the way to invade Iraq. My support for the invasion earned me the label of “neocon,” a largely irrelevant term in the Lebanese context. All I could think was that the fall of one Arab dictator might perhaps push another to remove his soldiers from our country. That might have been simplistic but there is still an argument to be made that the American military presence in Iraq pushed Syrian President Bashar Assad to take the reckless decision to extend then-Lebanese President Emile Lahoud’s term in 2004. The repercussions led to the assassination of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri soon thereafter, provoking the uprising of 2005.

For a decade after the Iraq invasion journalists would have their plates full when it came to the region. To any editor this was a boon, a boundless wellspring of copy, good and bad. The first opinion piece I published in 2003 was one that I commissioned from the historian Niall Ferguson, who significantly reworked a piece on Iraq that he had published in the Wall Street Journal.

In the aftermath of the Hariri assassination our attentions turned inward as Lebanon was riven by domestic strife. A number of journalists were assassinated, including Samir Kassir and Gebran Tueni. I still flinch when looking back on my articles written at the time, their ridiculous hopefulness utterly at odds with the reality of the situation. One is never too old for bad news.

In fact if there is a lesson from my years writing for the Star, it’s that it is worth being paid for every wrong prediction you make. But then again the pieces that were always most interesting to publish were those written by authors who preferred to go out on a limb rather than weigh down their articles with innumerable caveats to ensure that in exchange for saying nothing interesting they wouldn’t be accused of getting it wrong.

The post-2011 period was an eye-opener for many Arabs. The region’s uprisings which, for a moment, seemed carried by the overwhelming force of history, proved nothing of the sort. Everywhere populations are suffering, and to make matters worse the argument that Arab emancipation is inherently destabilizing, therefore dangerous, has again gained credibility.

At the same time the tectonic shifts in the region will not be easy to control in the future. Something has changed in the minds of Arabs, a refusal to accept things as they were. So even if today the record is one of failure and violence, no one has put the genie back in the bottle. It is this that newspapers such as the Star will be covering in the coming years, as the region regains its balance.

However, something has also changed in the Lebanese mood, a momentary sense of profound fatigue with politics. I sensed this when people began asking me why I had stopped writing for the paper. I could only respond that it was more likely them who had stopped reading, since my writing habits were much the same.

Now, at least, I will have a good excuse when the question comes.

Michael Young is opinion editor of THE DAILY STAR. He tweets @BeirutCalling.