The double-bombing of the Iranian embassy in Beirut on 19 November has aggravated political tensions in Lebanon. Although all factions strongly condemned the incident, it triggered recriminations between the two chief political camps: the Hizbullah-led 8 March Movement and the 14 March Movement led by the Future Movement. The latter blames Hizbullah for the bombings on the grounds that, by intervening in Syria to defend the Alawi-dominated regime led by Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad against the predominantly Sunni opposition, it has courted the spill-over of the Syrian war into Lebanese territory and fuelled sectarian strife in the country. Hizbullah has countered that the bombings were proof that its decision to intervene in Syria had been a correct one. It has argued that not only had it forestalled the spread of the Syrian conflict into Lebanon, but that it had also helped defeat the extremists in Syria through a pre-emptive war against the plague of terrorism which has long been condemned by the Arabs and the rest of the world. The movement went further to charge that critics of Hizbullah were “furnishing justifications of terrorism”. Indeed, Michel Aoun, the leader of the largest Christian faction allied with Hizbullah, has gone so far as to accuse its rivals of supporting terrorism. As the rhetoric escalated between the two sides, the Hizbullah ally also charged that the Future Movement had been responsible for inflaming extremism among Lebanon's Sunni community, while the Future Movement responded that Hizbullah had weakened the spirit of moderation in the Sunni community since it had turned to arms to settle political disputes. 14 March Movement speakers referred in particular to 7 March 2008 when Hizbullah and Amal Movement militiamen had stormed Beirut in response to the government's declared intention to sever Hizbullah's communications networks, an incident which gravely offended Lebanon's large Sunni community. Observers have been struck by what appear to be inherent contradictions in the rhetoric of both sides. That of Hizbullah and its allies is reminiscent of the US-Western rhetoric on Islamist and Palestinian-Islamist terrorism, in particular, which focuses on consequences and ignores causes. The 14 March rhetoric, and especially that of the Future Movement, is intended to play to jihadist Salafis whom it uses as an instrument to fight Hizbullah in view of their own military weakness. In fact, so strong is this movement's tendency to play on seething Sunni anger, that its leaders have been reluctant even to issue a condemnation of the assassination of a Sunni cleric who had been a Hizbullah supporter and who had been opposed to the mounting sectarian tensions that prevail in the northern city of Tripoli, a Sunni bastion. While both camps still appear to be determined to avert clashes on the ground, which would court the spectre of a renewed decent into civil war, the tragedies of which the Lebanese suffered for 15 years in the 1970s and 1980s, the escalation in verbal clashes has been acute. This has heightened fears that, against the backdrop of the ongoing Syrian crisis combined with the political vacuum in Lebanon that has existed since the resignation of the Lebanese government in April, the situation could spiral out of control if further terrorist attacks occur. Although the predominantly peaceful Sunni community would strongly resist surrendering leadership to Salafis of the jihadist stripe, the continuing Syrian conflict, a deep sense of resentment and the increasing acrimony between the major political camps have generated a climate that jihadist groups could exploit in order to recruit forces that could create severe disturbances in the country. There is already a huge wellspring of Sunni rancour fed less by sectarian than by socioeconomic marginalisation, especially among Palestinian and Syrian refugees. While it is true that the Palestinian factions in Lebanon have tried to keep out of the Lebanese conflicts, in the end it is difficult for Palestinian leaders to control the thousands of unemployed Palestinian youths in refugee camps that are brimming over with arms. Many of these youths, incensed at the situation in Syria, could be lured by fiery jihadist rhetoric which strikes chords in them that can no longer be reached by the Palestinian movements, including the overly pragmatic Hamas or the Palestinian Jihad, encumbered by its close ties with Iran, let alone Fatah which has become increasingly irrelevant to these young men's lives. It has therefore come as little surprise that Lebanese security forces have discovered that one of the people who carried out the bombings of the Iranian embassy was a Palestinian refugee who had fought in Syria. The other was a follower of the Lebanese Salafi Sheikh Ahmed Al-Asir, whose militia of around 600 members — a relatively large force by Lebanese standards — had been routed by the Lebanese army this summer. Meanwhile, the Syrian refugees in Lebanon are a ticking time bomb. Numbering over 820,000, according to UN figures, while Lebanese estimates go as high as a million-and-a-half, the refugees' rancour against the Syrian regime has been intensified by their sense of discrimination in Lebanon, whether on the part of the Christian or Shia communities that eye them with suspicion, or on that of the Sunni communities that may sympathise with them but that are growing increasingly resentful of their presence, concentrated in predominantly Sunni areas. In view of the rugged mountainous terrain and overlapping demographic terrain that characterise Lebanon's border with Syria, the influx of refugees would be hard to check by an ordinary country, let alone by one with a history of chronic weakness in central authority. The Lebanese army and security agencies are clearly being strained in their efforts to control the borders. To aggravate the problem, the threat of the jihadist militias in Syria continues to loom, regardless of whether they are defeated there or not. In both cases, these militias might try to infiltrate across the border into Lebanon, either for the purpose of revenge or in order to complete their vision of a fundamentalist theocratic empire stretching from Lebanon through Syria to Iraq. Hizbullah has intervened in a conflict in Syria that a large portion of opinion in the Islamic world characterises as sectarian, even if Hizbullah denies this. The Future Movement is compensating for its military weakness by wielding the Salafist card and a strongly sectarian rhetoric. Both sides are playing a dangerous game of brinksmanship. They may both be determined to avert the slide into civil war, but how many civil wars have flared up in spite of the resolve of conflicting parties?
