Yet that very reluctance to engage in domestic armed conflict is used by the only remaining openly armed militia, Hezbollah, to exercise power over the country at the direction of Syria and Iran, who employ Lebanon as proxy battleground in their battle against the West.
What price domestic peace? Hezbollah is increasingly asserting its right to dominate its countrymen and use the territory it occupies to suit the agenda of its foreign supporters and its own jihadist ideology - that is, it plans to make war and then let the country suffer:
Jeha: The problem is; how do you deal with someone who's main goal is your eradication? How do you convince them that they need to address the secular needs in this life, while their minds are focused on the next? Even if we did not want to go to war, their intransigence will surely lead us to it.
Blacksmith Jade: [E]ven though these people can correctly identify and cognitively address national issues, they choose to reject the logical end [that it is imperative to support the government at this moment in time], simply because of personal reasons, and at the expense of what is (what even they deep down recognize as being) beneficial for the country.
Solomon2: A very important insight of yours, bj, and a very distressing one. By now most Lebanese have figured out the most important lesson of the Israeli response in the face of Lebanese acquiescence to Hezbollah's war of last summer:
Nothing good.
But the Hezb followers have not. Which means that if Hezbollah does indeed start up war again, a morally appropriate Israeli response would be to bomb the civilian targets of Hezbollah supporters directly - far more destruction than Israel inflicted in the 2006 war.
The alternative? For Lebanese to stop fantasizing about how the behavior of non-Lebanese actors on the world stage should change and concentrate on changing themselves and their countrymen instead.
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