I am growing to like Najib Mikati, the prime minister of Lebanon.
On Tuesday, the billionaire from Tripoli who made his fortune in mobile telecommunications cheered me up no end when he proclaimed to the newspaper Al-Jumhuriya that Lebanon "has entered the Guinness book of wasting opportunities".
It's a difficult to claim to argue with. An honest appraisal of Lebanon's performance - with all due respect to the late Rafik Hariri's spectacularly expensive efforts to rebuild the centre of Beirut - would suggest that, like a protégé with a penchant for self-destruction, Lebanon has thrown it all away.
And if you wonder why the country that could be a beacon of commerce, enterprise and creativity, has consistently failed to deliver on a national level, you needed only listen to Mr Mikati calling the resumption of cabinet meetings "a victory for all Lebanese".
If getting a supposedly unified cabinet to gather round a table and do its job is a national triumph, then the bar must be set very low indeed.
Much of the recent bickering has been over extraordinary government spending. Now everyone has kissed and made up, the government is understood to want to borrow an additional US$5 billion (Dh18.3bn) by the issuing of treasury bills. And this at a time when the debt is already 150 per cent of GDP.
But our skill at fiscal mismanagement is nothing compared to our gift for fantasy.
On Saturday, Fadi Abboud, Lebanon's tourism minister, speaking at a conference in Beirut entitled The Arab Spring: Transformations and Expectations, announced that his ministry was working to persuade 4 million tourists to visit Lebanon by 2015. We currently welcome just over 1 million so his target is ambitious, especially given the fact that the region is at its most unstable since 1967.
But wait for it. The pillar of this new plan is not, as one might imagine, allowing budget airlines to land in Beirut, improving the roads and cleaning up the countryside. No, Mr Abboud apparently wants to turn the Tripoli International Fairground "into a resort similar to Disneyland".
Tripoli is Lebanon's second city, 70km from the capital, but it might as well be 7,000km. The city does boast a magnificent fort and a handful of historic hammams and khans, but nothing that will excite the typical tourist.
The Tripoli fairground - renamed the Rashid Karami International Fairground after yet another assassinated prime minister - is a 1 million square metre concrete complex that sits on the edge of the city.
Designed in the 1960s by the Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer, the man who gave us much of the architecture of modern Brasilia, the fairground was completed just before the civil war in 1975. It has remained empty, a ghostly reminder of long forgotten aspirations.
Oh, and another thing. If Lebanon does get sucked into the mayhem in neighbouring Syria, Tripoli will be the vortex.
There are tensions between the city's Sunni and Alawite communities over what is happening in Syria. In 2007, Tripoli was the scene of vicious fighting between the Lebanese army and Fatah Al Islam insurgents. Now the state believes that by adding a few theme rides to an empty and sprawling concrete landscape, Tripoli can become the epicentre of Lebanon's tourist market. I just can't see it.
On Sunday I spoke to a foreign journalist who had just made it out of Syria through smuggling routes that dot Lebanon's northern border. We were sitting in Beirut's Zaitunay Bay, the new retail and leisure development area. It was packed with diners and families rubbernecking the now sizeable collection of yachts on the moorings. "We may not be doing this in two years," he said.
"Trust me. The region is going to hell. Syria will be the epicentre with both Lebanon and Iraq dragged in. I can't see it going any other way." No one can read the runes that well, but it was a sobering assessment, especially given that Zaitunay Bay sits in the shadow of the bombed-out Hotel St Georges.
Is it a quirky juxtaposition of the past and the present or a reminder the dream can still go horribly wrong. Time will tell.
Michael Karam is the associate editor-in-chief of Executive, a Lebanese regional business magazine
