The Nationalist vote during last Wednesday’s Public Accounts Committee meeting on the Voice of the Mediterranean scandal was a pyrrhic victory for Richard Muscat and friends.

The battle was lost by them on a much wider battle-ground.

That of public opinion.

During the last few weeks I have come across an endless list of friends, constituents, personalities and even Nationalist high-rankers who told me that his alleged mismanagement and lack of corporate governance during his stay at the helm of the VOM stood out with distinction.

The performance of the National Audit Office might have been far from spotless. Professionalism was lacking in certain areas and one would have expected better from certain high-ranking officials rather than them coming up with evasive replies or passing the buck to their juniors. In future they should tighten up their act when they get to the recruitment process.

But if the NAO happens to be going through a difficult patch, it needs even more of our support.

The country can ill-afford to have a national institution that loses its credibility.

Neither can it risk seeing an institution being so overtly threatened for passing judgement and criticising certain people in high places connected to the present administration who may happen to have been running certain organisations in recent years.

Those who might be tempted in future to consider occupying important posts in these institutions will now think twice before taking the plunge out of fear and trepidation that the Nationalists could come down on them like a ton of bricks if they happen to rule against the Nationalist government, or one of its present or former parliamentarians.

The same goes for the negative message that might have been sent out to those employees working in publicly-funded organisations that might not be subject to government financial regulations.

By implication, the PAC decision of last Wednesday seemed – at least to my mind – to be suggesting, directly or indirectly, that they should not worry because if they might happen to break the rules of good governance they will always be shored up by their party, if they happen to be supporters of the party presently in government.

What is even more worrying is that we have seen such threats being made in the not too distant past to other high-ranking officials who occupied positions of importance in independent institutions.

We have seen Mr Ombudsman threatened – and some of his most important decisions shelved – in spite of his being rated as one of the highest-regarded personalities on the island.

And we vividly recall how the former chairman of the Broadcasting Authority was threatened when he once ruled in favour of an MLP complaint.

At the end of the day, these are all serious blots on the Gonzi administration.

It is a shame that both Dr Gonzi and certain newspapers had refrained from commenting on the VOM scandal by the time I wrote this article.

In his case, you cannot expect better.

In political terms he is a true case of a man who is about to lose.

Ned Temko

The name Ned Temko might not mean anything to most of this newspaper’s readers. In actual fact he reported from war-torn Beirut before taking up the editorship of The Jewish Chronicle.

He recently wrote an interesting article which I feel I must share with you.

Entitled Israel will not win security by crushing Lebanon, his piece argued by way of a warning to Israel against its getting embroiled in a deadly occupation.

Comparing what is going on in Lebanon now with what went on in 1978, he argued that now, as then, Lebanon’s government will not and probably cannot extend its writ over a guerilla army that represents a state within a state and is resented by many ordinary Lebanese as much as the Israeli assault it has provoked.

He states that now, as then, the crucial question is whether Israel’s conventional military superiority alone can deliver the security it seeks. The overwhelming evidence from decades of violence in Lebanon is that it cannot.

One only has to remember that in the summer of 1982, Israel’s then Defence Minister Ariel Sharon unleashed an assault the scale, force and ambition of which dwarfed the incursion of four years earlier. Sharon wanted not only to end the rocket fire from Palestinian forces in south Lebanon, but to uproot Yasser Arafat’s state within the Lebanese state by fighting all the way to Beirut.

He did.

In the same way that the Lebanese showed unity when conducting their Cedar Revolution, that was applauded by the international community, the same resolve and unity are now indispensable if Lebanon is to reassert control over its territory – and finally stop being the proxy battleground for the power struggles of the Middle East.

When asking himself what happens next, a Middle East specialist recently analysed the options ahead. These are the following:

Option 1: Israel withdraws unilaterally.

Option 2: Diplomatic settlement.

Option 3: Israel snared in counter-insurgency.

Option 4: Lebanese government falls.

Option 5: Israel invades Lebanon.

I sincerely hope that we will go for Option 2 as Israel becomes increasingly aware that it sees no military solution.

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Leo Brincat is the main opposition spokesman on Foreign Affairs and IT