Michael Totten, a truly invaluable source of information on Lebanon, has a post up detailing how close Hezbollah's leader, Hassan Nasrallah, is to igniting a civil war. Totten puts the odds at North of 50% and growing. The problem is that Nasrallah is riding, as Totten puts it, three tigers at once.
But Hezbollah went further, after all. Blockading the country for one day triggered three days (so far) of violence. Hezbollah can’t keep this up without provoking a serious murderous backlash. But Hassan Nasrallah still says he will escalate even now. If he does, my prediction for another round of war in Lebanon is well above 50 percent. It could be a short one (we're not talking fifteen more years of hell here) but it would be war all the same.
These things change, though, like volatile weather. A compromise is still possible. And Nasrallah may yet back down. Hezbollah can likely win a defensive war if Lebanese try to disarm them. But they can’t conquer the country. No one is strong enough to do that. If Nasrallah starts that kind of war he’ll lose everything.
The Sunni Arab “street” outside Lebanon rallied behind him as a hero in July and August for his “resistance” against the Israelis. If Nasrallah becomes, instead, the butcher of Sunnis, he will become one of the most detested Arab figures alive.
The Syrian regime wants civil war in Lebanon. Bashar Assad’s late father Hafez helped foment the last one and kept it boiling for fifteen years until Lebanon all but surrendered to Syrian domination. The younger Assad has been trying to re-ignite it ever since March 14 two years ago. He hoped to demonstrate that only Syria can keep order in Lebanon, that Syrian withdrawal means mayhem and blood in the streets.
As always, read the whole thing. Totten is miles above most of the wire service reporting and is always worth reading. The biggest problem for Nasrallah is that he has lost control of his followers, as demonstrated by the riots yesterday. The fact that a Syrian sniper has been arrested in connection with the deaths yesterday indicates that Nasrallah's Syrian sponsors are working secretly against him. He appears to be in trouble and in serious danger of losing any control of the situation.
Unfortunately, Lebanon is in the middle of the power plays going on right now. It is looking pretty grim.
