Will the citizens of Lebanon continue to accept ever so patiently the ever-growing discomforts of its domestic cold war? Will the Lebanese finally realize that their sectarian coexistence has for the most part been a sham, an ongoing domestic cold war under the guise of a phony civil peace that needs serious tweaking lest it collapses into civil strife?

To be more specific: Can anything prevent Lebanon's domestic cold war from tipping into a full-scale civil war when one sectarian group, namely Hezbollah, keeps on wanting to bully the other communities into a set of domestic and regional policies that do not coincide with the interests and aspirations of the others?

Given the deep political and sectarian fault lines and the fact that Hezbollah and its Shiite followers have already established a state-within-a-state, why not simply let Lebanon embrace more fully its Switzerland-of-the-Middle description by creating the Confederation of Lebanon, or let the Shiites have their separate state and leave the rest of the country alone?

Let's face it, the alternative seems to be either a continuously fractious and ungovernable Lebanon, an apocalyptic civil strife, or...unsurprisingly, Greater Syria! Neither, I believe, is the palatable solution that most Lebanese want.

So why not call a spade a spade and declare this whole sectarian coexistence, especially with the Shiites, for what it has been, a sham, and be pragmatic about the whole process, making the best of a lousy political, social and sectarian situation...

Having said that, I am not sure reason, political pragmatism and the Switzerland-of-the-Middle East political solution will prevail at the end of the day, given vigorous Syrian and possibly Shia opposition. In that case, it is hard to rule out that civil war will not re-revisit Lebanon anytime soon. There seems to be so far a regional and perhaps some national official taboo about the confederation solution, as if what was created by colonialist powers is sacrosanct and people's present aspirations are less valid than colonialist legacy! There are also practical problems of sectarian borderlines and fairness to minorities
within a canton to consider. So it won't be surprising that before reaching this confederation solution (assuming the Syrians or regional and international powers will allow it), Lebanon might have to experience another seismic jolt before realizing there is no other choice but to divvy up the land along largely sectarian lines, with hopefully basic rights guaranteed to minorities within each canton .

My guarded skepticism regarding a too smug optimism that this cold war will remain cold indefinitely is also due to the country's intractable political travails, its contentious and wobbly balancing act between pro-USA/Western camp and pro-Syrian/Iranian camp, and in particular the serial assassinations of prominent figures that go unabated, not to mention any future mass murders with powerful explosives planted within one community or another.

One day, one of those assassinations or killings will be one too many. At that point the increasingly fractious and fractured country will be ripe for tipping into another civil strife or perhaps (if reason prevails above unctuous phoniness) a new political order, confederation or even simple
partition, anything but the recurring hell and uncertainties of a shaky and fake coexistence that periodically leads, or threatens to lead, to internecine warfare!

The alternative to the pragmatic and realist political solution would most likely be a country once more bled to the bone and ripe for Syria's picking.

The guessing game at this point might be: Which assassination will be the tipping point, either to political and sectarian realism and pragmatism leading to peaceful confederalism or partition, or to more conflicts, destruction and collective suicide? Which assassination or tragic event will be the final nail to the coffin of an unbearable situation? Which assassination will be Lebanon's 1914 Sarajevo or the 1975 Ain-el-Remmaneh civil war spark? Imagine if those "phantom" killers or hired hands murder Hassan Nasrallah, or Saad Hariri, or Walid Joumblatt, or Samir Geagea; or if they start targeting civilians from various communities with massive car bombs or explosives. Which of these assassinations will be the final straw that will unleash the destructive fury of pent-up frustrations and Lebanon's barely dormant sectarian volcano?

Does it make sense then to want to save the country's unity by destroying it? Why insist on uniting a country that hardly wants to be united? How can one keep a country united when two major groups (Shias versus practically everyone else) are so divided on practically every major national interest
issue?

In a way, though, the sectarian violence in Iraq might have given governments and people in the Arab region some pause. They might start thinking that it may not be such a bad idea to undo the damage of colonialists who carved states by cramming into one country different ethnic groups divided by long-simmmering animosities. In such deeply divided states, oftentimes the only way to have civil peace has been for one community to dominate and tyrannize the others.

Perhaps people in the region are realizing more clearly nowadays - with the unfolding events in Iraq - that in countries where people identify with their religion and their clan more so than with the abstract notion of nation-state, in countries where the idea of state-church separation is quite alien and remote, where religion is etched more deeply into one's identity than one's supra-religious nationality, then perhaps the idea of confederation or federation or even partition is not really as bad as it sounds, and could actually be a good thing to turn back the damages brought by colonialist nation-state builders and engineers with little understanding or little concern for the deeper aspirations of the people
they governed.

While "Lebanonization" used to describe the fate of a country dissolving along sectarian fault lines or devolving into a Hobbesian state of nature where life is nasty, brutish and short, maybe one will take one's pragmatic and sectarian cue from what is going on in Iraq and see the new "Lebanonization" or "Iraqization" to mean that confederalism or even plain partition for some Middle Eastern nation-states riven by sectarian fault lines may be the wisest alternative to living in the hell of recurrent sectarian strife punctuating the uncertainties of internal cold wars.

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