ABSTRACT
Chapter 8 examined the paralysis of Lebanon’s one-sided cabinet and the impact of the Syrian crisis on the country. Hizbullah, the Lebanese Shi’a political party, and Sunni radical groups from Tripoli and elsewhere took sides in the escalating conflict in Syria that became a costly and desperate sectarian struggle between the Alawite-dominated regime of President Asad and the Sunni majority. Syria’s conflict generated all kinds of problems, which in the long term had every chance of causing instability. Lebanon barely functioned in light of the sectarian tension between the Sunni and Shi’a communities and the old power-sharing arrangements proved ineffective to regulate internal conflict. However, the system survived against all the odds in the regional environment, mainly because the 8 and 14 March camps were determined to prevent sectarian violence and keen to maintain a measure of stability. But ‘that resilience [became] an excuse for a dysfuntionality and laissez-faire attitude by its political class that could ultimately prove the country’s undoing’.1
