Lebanon and Syria: Peering into the abyss SADLY for the Lebanese, it was a familiar scene. The car bomb that gutted a quiet residential street in their capital, Beirut, on October 19th, killing a senior policeman and seven others, fits into a series of political murders that stretches back to the country's civil war in 1975-90. Most victims have had one thing in common, particularly in recent years: they angered the regime that runs neighbouring Syria, as well as its powerful allies inside Lebanon. As Syria's president, Bashar Assad, fights for survival in a conflict that increasingly looks like the vicious warfare between Lebanon's sectarian militias a generation ago, many Lebanese have feared that the bloodshed would eventually spill across their meekly defended border. A deep polarisation adds to the sense of doom. The fragile ruling coalition, in which Hizbullah, Lebanon's Shia party-cum-militia, is the strongest component, has struggled to appear neutral over Syria. But whereas some Sunni Lebanese factions back the Syrian rebels with arms and money, other factions, most notably Hizbullah, lend emphatic support to the embattled Assad regime. The Beirut bombing underlines the precariousness of Lebanon's politics, inspiring worries of a slide into renewed civil war as well as more recent memories of an uprising against Syrian influence. In that instance, in 2005, an even bigger car bomb, which killed Lebanon's then leading Sunni politician, Rafik Hariri, and 22 others, sparked mass protests that swept pro-Syrian parties from power and forced Syria to withdraw the 15,000 "peacekeepers" it has kept in Lebanon since the 1970s. Yet neither a repetition of that revolutionary precedent nor a decline into wider civil strife appears likely just now. This time, again, an angry crowd gathered in Beirut's Martyrs" Square for the emotional funeral of Brigadier-General Wissam Hassan, who as the quietly efficient head of Lebanon's equivalent of the FBI had been seen as a champion of Sunni interests within the Lebanese state. Rioting erupted in Sunni areas, along with sectarian skirmishes that claimed ten lives. Politicians from the anti-Syrian March 14th coalition, which three years ago lost the hold on power it had gained in 2005, demanded that the current government resign. They have boycotted both parliament and an informal national dialogue that was meant to be a forum for settling differences. But Lebanon has changed a great deal since 2005. The initial euphoria of that uprising has relapsed into widespread disgust with the country's corrupt, ever-bickering and sect-bound politicians. The March 14th movement, whose leadership was ravaged by assassinations in 2005-08, now lacks clout on the street. Its weak figurehead, Mr Hariri's son Saad, lives in Paris for his own safety. The Islamist radicals and Christian chauvinists among his allies have alienated much of Lebanon's liberal mainstream. Whereas Lebanon's national flag was the symbol of the 2005 "Cedar Revolution," disparate party banners, including Sunni jihadist and Syrian rebel flags, dominated the recent protests. At the same time, Lebanon's army, which along with the central bank is one of the country's few effective national institutions, has become stronger. It moved speedily to contain unrest, particularly in the largely Sunni port city of Tripoli, where a small religious Alawite community, seen as aligned to Syria's Alawite-dominated regime, lives under virtual siege. The army warned that it would act decisively "to prevent Lebanon being transformed again into a place for a settling of regional scores, and to prevent the assassination of the martyr Wissam Hassan being used to assassinate a whole country." Many Lebanese privately agree with the March 14th leaders, who have accused Syria directly, and Hizbullah indirectly, of responsibility for the Beirut bombing. General Hassan's police unit provided key evidence to a UN tribunal that has indicted Hizbullah members for the murders of the elder Mr Hariri and others; his top lieutenant in that investigation was also killed by a car bomb, in 2008. In August General Hassan's men entrapped a senior pro-Syrian politician, Michel Samaha, allegedly in the act of transporting explosives from the Syrian capital, Damascus, to his flat in Beirut. Leaked transcripts from his interrogation suggest that the bombs, supplied personally by Syria's intelligence chief, had been intended to target Lebanese Christian leaders, hoping to stoke sectarian rage. Within Syria, similar efforts are being made. The slide towards ever greater violence has an increasingly sectarian flavour. Nonetheless, the UN has tried to negotiate a ceasefire for a religious holiday shared by both the Sunni-majority rebels and Alawite-dominated loyalists. The two sides have given lukewarm endorsements. The regime has an overwhelming advantage in firepower but its troops lack esprit. The opposition tenaciously holds ground and has disrupted regime supply lines across the country but is fragmented and unable to sustain large offensives. The result is a death toll now close to 200 a day. Hafez Assad, who ruled Syria for three decades before bequeathing the presidency to his son Bashar in 2000, once called Syria and Lebanon "one people in two countries." Long after being carved from the Ottoman empire by France, the two neighbours, one a rigid socialist dictatorship, the other a messy capitalist semi-democracy, and both of them combustible sectarian cocktails, remain uncomfortably intertwined. For now, though, the Lebanese may consider themselves relatively lucky to be suffering only the occasional bloodbath, rather than Syria's unremitting full-scale slaughter.