To Hell in a Handbasket?

A chilling essay by Raja at the Lebanese Bloggers:

The Syrians feel pretty secure about Hizballah’s ability to hold its own against these waves of protest and fury. So they do what they need to, to gain any sort of advantage on the international playing field. Their message to the powers that seek to remove Lebanon from the Syrian orbit is obvious:

You see your precious little Lebanon… your example of democracy in the middle east… your prized example of religious co-existence (both christian-muslim and sunni-shi’a); I can light it up with the push of a button. And if you don’t talk to me… if you don’t deal with the Syrian state as the guarantor of peace in Lebanon, that’s exactly what I’ll do.
[…]
In such a tense and gridlocked situation, where all the major local parties are so intransigent towards each other, something is gonna have to give. An appropriate analogy would be two major tectonic plates pushing against each other incessantly until, at some point in time, all hell breaks loose – think of the Indian Ocean tsunami.

Read the whole thing.