War & Peace Quote by Walid Jumblatt

Jumblatt’s certainty is doing political work. “I know something quite sure” isn’t just a claim of insight; it’s a bid to end debate inside his own camp by recasting a messy regional struggle as a settled fact. The phrasing is blunt, almost weary, like someone trying to pre-empt the recurring temptation of accommodation. In Lebanon’s famously elastic politics, where yesterday’s enemy can become tomorrow’s coalition partner, the line draws a red boundary and dares others to cross it.

The target is not “Syria” in the abstract but “this Syrian regime,” a careful distinction that smuggles in both moral indictment and strategic wiggle room. He’s condemning Assad’s apparatus - security services, proxies, the machinery of domination - while leaving open the idea that peace might be imaginable with a different Syria. “Relief” carries the charge of lived trauma: it implies pressure, occupation, assassinations, intimidation, the sense of a smaller country being pinned down by a larger neighbor. It’s an emotional word that makes geopolitics bodily.

Then comes the switch from policy to memory: “we’ll never forget that.” This is collective grievance turned into a governing principle, a warning that time won’t launder responsibility. Subtext: don’t sell normalization as pragmatism; don’t treat wounds as bargaining chips. For a leader whose own history includes tactical pivots, the absolutism is itself a signal - a moment when survival politics hardens into something like a doctrine, because the cost of forgetting has started to look higher than the cost of permanent enmity.