Today's essay from Pierre Tristam is a report on the run-up to a bright new shiny Lebanese civil war with some speculation on who's NOT responsible for the latest political assassination:

"Israel? That’s the default favorite for anything that goes wrong in Lebanon, especially when it’s garlanded in blood. That’s where logic and common sense miscarry down the sewer pipes of anti-Semitism. Israeli policy under Olmert has been a grab-bag of blunders, some of them murderous (namely, the escalation of the Lebanon war into a nasty, brutish and short homage to war crimes), but assassinating a Gemayel and further destabilizing a Lebanon on the verge of a Hezbollah breakdown is the last thing Israel wants or needs. In Israel’s compulsion to repeat well-treaded trails, it was more likely to be working its back channels to prepare another bed in which to lay with the anti-Syrian opposition, and with the likes of Pierre Gemayel as one of its Lebanese concubines.

This isn’t to be critical: a little concubinage between Israel and Lebanon isn’t in and of itself anything to sneeze at if stability and a measure of democracy is the end result, and if it puts up a buffer to the barbaric-regressive likes of Hezbollah and Syria, especially since Lebanon has been Syria’s crack whore for thirty years. One would much rather be an Israeli whore, where whoring has its medical and retirement benefits, plus a good vacation package, than a Syrian-Hezbollah whore, in which case the whoring—in good modern-Muslim tradition—is both servitude and punishment. But back to who not to blame: Israel, then, is out."