Back to the Barricades?

It didn't take long for 2008 to start going sour in Lebanon. Last night, Hizballah leader Hassan Nasrallah laid out the demands Lebanon's Syrian-backed opposition parities have for solving the country's presidential crisis. They boil down to this: the opposition wants victory. Nasrallah demanded that the opposition be given enough cabinet seats to ensure it has a veto power over any decisions made by the new government which would be formed upon the election of a new president. But this is the very sticking point that started the entire political stand-off between the Hizballah-led opposition and the American backed government of Prime Minisiter Fouad Siniora in the first place.

Hizballah wants a so-called government of National Unity, because it suspects that the current governing coalition wants to disarm Hizballah's military wing. But the governing coalition refuses to give the opposition extra cabinet seats because it fears that if Hizballah has a veto, they will never be able to free Lebanon from the grip of Syria, which occupied Lebanon until 2005 and which still supplies Hizballah with weapons to fight Israel. Disagreement over cabinet seats trigged the walkout last fall by Hizballah and all the Shia Muslim members of the cabinet, sparked a series of massive demonstrations, and raised concern that Lebanon could descend once more into civil war.

But that didn't happen: the Siniora government refused to give into Hizballah demands and refused to step down even though it no longer had any representative of the country's largest religious group. (By tradition, Lebanese governments contains members of all the major sects: Shia, Sunni, Christian and Druze.) And Hizballah itself backed down from its massive street demonstrations after a day of tire-burning and road blocks sparked sectarian street fights in Beirut. The crisis dragged at a slow burn, preventing the country's parliament from electing a new president when the former head of state's term ended in November, but not causing too many other disruptions to daily life here.

But now it looks as if the presidential crisis could reignite the wider struggle between the government and the opposition. Only weeks ago, it seemed as if both sides had agreed to settle the presidential issue on it own by choosing a consensus candidate before dealing with the other seemingly irreconcilable differences between them. The American-backed governing coalition even agreed to the opposition's choice of a compromise candidate -- Michel Sulieman, who as the army chief of staff accepted Hizballah's existence as an armed force. But having gotten what it wanted, the opposition started asking for more. Last night, Nasrallah said that if the opposition doesn't get what it wants, its people will take to this streets once again, and this time they'll stay.

It's anyones guess why the opposition has suddenly become intransigent. Some see the presidential ambitions of Michael Aoun, the Christian leader allied with Hizballah, at work. Others point to the newfound confidence of Syria's Assad regime, which was called out of the wilderness of American isolation by an invitation to the Annapolis peace conference. The Syrians seems sure that the US needs them so much to help stabilize Iraq, and to participate in the Arab-Israeli peace process, that they can begin reasserting themselves in Lebanon.

But not everyone is so glum. Famous psychic Michael Hayek, whose pronouncements are as closely watched in Lebanon as former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspans' were in the States, predicted that 2008 would be generally good to Lebanon, and that the entire presidential crisis would "soon disappear." Still, Lebanon being Lebanon, political assassinations will continue.

--Andrew Lee Butters/Beirut