Word: lebanons
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...then news reached Lebanon on Tuesday morning that the talks had produced an agreement that may end the country's 18-month-old political crisis. The Beirut stock market jumped, and opposition leaders announced they would dismantle their protest campground in downtown Beirut that has clogged traffic, destroyed local businesses, and become the tattered symbol of Lebanon's dysfunction. But the relief among war-weary Lebanese is unlikely to be echoed in Washington, Paris and Jerusalem, since the new arrangement is bound to reverse years of effort to blunt Hizballah's influence...
...current government could have continued to hold out against Hizballah and clung to office and symbolic support from the West. But in the absence of any real central authority, the country was already starting to unravel along sectarian lines. Lebanon's multi-religious character and political system - which divides power among the country's largest sects - is famously fragile. The sectarian feeling unleashed by clashes between Hizballah, a Shi'a Muslim party, and government supporters, who are mostly Sunni and Druze Muslims, threatened to push the country into another civil...
...agreement doesn't mean Lebanon is out of the woods. For real stability to take root, the foreign countries fighting for regional supremacy in the cold war for the Middle East will have to stop using Lebanon as a battlefield. On the one hand, Syria could use Hizballah's political and military victory to work its way back into dominance over Lebanon, which Syria occupied until 2005. Hizballah's strengthened government role will help Syria get the new Lebanese government to scupper plans for a U.N. tribunal to investigate the assassinations of a series of anti-Syrian Lebanese politicians...
...government may find a Hizballah-dominated Lebanon hard to swallow. Disarming Hizballah and securing Lebanon's independence from Syrian and Iranian influence was one of the Bush administration's major Middle East policies; it garnered broad support among European governments, including France, that were not on board in Iraq. Nor will Israel be keen to live with the fact that its most formidable adversary is now in de facto control of almost an entire country, with a sophisticated banking system, an international airport and a varied mountainous terrain in which to train and prepare for war. But Israel and America...
News that Israel has for months been secretly negotiating with Syria has sent a frisson of excitement through the Middle East - overshadowing, at least momentarily, the new political deal in Beirut. The standoff between Syria and Israel has historically been much more intractable than that between Lebanon's warring factions, so any exchange between Damascus and Jerusalem that doesn't involve invective or military ordnance deserves to hog the headlines...