Lebanon again

A powerful car bomb in a Christian neighborhood of Beirut killed the eighth anti-Syrian Lebanese politican in two years. Bashar Assad can count and understands democracy. He knows that if he kills off enough of the opposition members of Parliament he will prevent them from carrying out actions he opposes.
The victim, Antoine Ghanem, was killed along with 6 other civilians. This is how the Syrians send messages to the Lebanese, ignore our interests and you will suffer. Of course, some prominent Christian politicians pointed the finger at Assad and Syrian intelligence, but many will be afraid to oppose the Syrians. For the last few years Lebanon has had an anti-Syrian PM, Fuad Siniora, but a pro-Syrian President Emile Lahoud. By killing off the anti-Syrian opposition, the Syrians are telling them not to vote in an anti-Syrian President to replace Lahoud. The Presidential elections that are due to take place in a week now leave the anti-Syrians reportedly with a majority of only two. The Syrians are also trying to prevent the votes required to continue the UN tribunal in Lebanon that is investigating the truck bomb assassination of former anti-Syrian President Rafik Hariri in 2005. This tribunal has already implicated high level Syrian Government officials, possibly including Assad himself, in this murder.
If no acceptable candidate for President can be found that will satisfy both the anti-Syrian forces (Christians, Druse and some Sunni Muslims) and the pro-Syrian (Shia and some Sunnis), then a civil war may erupt again in Lebanon. The Shia pro-Syrian Hizbollah has been surrounding downtown Beirut with a cordon of demonstraters for months. Their aim is to bring down the Siniora Government because they regard it as being too pro-Western. Opposing them is the Lebanese Army that is protecting essential Government buildings.
The recent clash between the extremist Islamist Fatah al-Islam terrorist group and the Lebanese Army in the Nahr al-Barad Palestinian refugee camp in Tripoli in the north took three months and cost ca. 200 LA soldier's lives. This may indicate that the LA is not very competent, but may also illustrate the degree to which extremism is endemic in the Palestinain camps. While paying lip service to the Palestinians, the Christians know that they are essentially aligned with anti-Government forces, even though the Syrians hardly support the Palestinians in Lebanon. The massacre of Palestinians by Christian militias in Sabra and Shatilla camps near Beirut after the 1982 Lebanon War was symptomatic of this situation. Since then all partisan militias were disbanded in Lebanon except for Hizbollah, that has become much stronger with Syrian and Iranian support. Unless this Presidential crisis can be managed and some compromise achieved, all the militias of each of the minority groups in Lebanon will come out of their closets and civil war will erupt again.