Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and Syrian President Bashar Assad (AP)
The conflict, which claimed the lives of 1,200 Lebanese and 158 Israelis, inflicted billions of dollars worth of damage to Lebanon’s infrastructure and displaced nearly a million Lebanese, was over relatively swiftly. But it appeared only to signal the onset of a renewed period of prolonged instability for this historically unstable country.
In the year since the war erupted on July 13, Lebanon has lurched from one unresolved crisis to another, to the point where the entire country now is in the grip of a series of overlapping crises, some of them seemingly unrelated yet all tied to the broader struggle for influence that is unfolding across the Middle East. …
"All of the region is all entangled together here in Lebanon," said Ahmed Moussali, a political scientist at the American University of Beirut. "It’s a crossroads for all of the conflicts, between Syria, Iran, Israel, the U.S." Indeed, from the north to the south, the litany of Lebanon’s woes reads like a primer on the problems of the Middle East. Access the full article>>