The Lord Of No Man's Land: A Guided Tour Through Lebanon's Ceasless War.

"There is only one way to win a war in Lebanon" observes Uri Avnery, "and that's to avoid it!" TSAHAL (IDF for some) learned nothing from previous incursions into its Northern neighbor's territory, launched yet another war and failed to achieve ALL but one of its goals: It kidnaped Hassan Nasrallah, but not "THE HN", but a hapless grocer from the Baalbeck region.

Charles glass goes and finds Walid Jumblatt, the highly mercurial warlord, and sees in him the best "case study to help diagnose whatever pathology kept Lebanon in near constant crisis." Jumblatt who's calculated efforts to undermine Hezballah (and its allies) have taken him to Washington, where he sought the US's "direct intervention", complained that "the decision of war and peace is that of the Lebanese state" and not Hezbollah's or any other militia's. But when the PLO operated from within Lebanon, he adamantly backed Yassir Arafat's right to make this very decision." Glass's piece fizzles near the end, but hey, you're stuck reading parts of it.
Here are some excerpts:

"... Lebanon contends that it is the most modern of Arab states, ... yet a close look at the career of Walid [urnblatt alone reveals how little the country has changed since Ottoman times,when local beys, pashas, and sheikhs delivered their communities like Chicago ward heelers to some dominant outside power in order to gain an advantage over a shifting field of local rivals. Consequently,Lebanon's political system is one of the Arab world's most inefficient and convoluted. Certainly any country that was, say, devising its foreign policy toward Lebanon, would do well to examine a figure long at the center of this political morass... "

" ... I wanted to ask about the recent war and Jumblatt's challenge to
Hezbollah, but he was preoccupied with Washington. Was Condoleezza Rice more influential than Dick Cheney? How could he persuade the Bush Administration to help depose Lebanon's pro-Syrian president, Emile Lahoud, weed out Syrian moles in Lebanon's army and intelligence services, and overthrow the regime in Syria? Having abandoned his Syrian partnership in 2004, ]umblatt was without an outside backer to match Hezbollah's friends in Damascus and Tehran. Israel was obviously not an option. The only viable counterweight, then, was the United States. He didn't seem to mind that Washington had supported the Israeli invasion or that most Lebanese were opposed to its war in Iraq. When I asked how he could turn to a power that, in 1983, had shelled Druze villages in the Chouf Mountains from the battleship New Jersey, all he did was shrug, as if to say, "This is Lebanon. What do you expect? ..."

In Damascus, "we had a good friend, Hikmet Shihabi, the chief
of staff," he explained. "And I convinced Hikmet slowly to convey messages to
Hafez al-Assad that I need weapons, that I need to be trained." Syria provided
Jumblatt with arms and trained his militia. Through the Soviet Union's
ambassador in Beirut, Druze fighters also went to Russia for military
instruction. Walid estimated that the Russians supplied him, over the years,
with some $500 million worth of weapons, ammunition, and training. They even let Walid open a restaurant in Moscow. And thus Walid found himself becoming an enemy not only of the Maronites but of Israel and the United States as well..."

Walid Jumblatt "... forbade the singing of Lebanon's national anthem in
Chouf schools, and he banned Lebanon's cedar-tree flag. By the fall of 1986,
Jumblatt's militia controlled west Beirut jointly with the Shiite Muslim Amal
militia of Nabih Berri. When Jumblatt ordered all Lebanese flags there removed,
the Amal militia refused. Of all the wars within the war that is Lebanon, none
has been more pointless than the "War of the Two Flags" that then erupted in
November 1986. Much of the fighting, conveniently for the international press,
took place close to its favorite bar in the Commodore
Hotel..."

"...The Soviets, after all, had armed his militia when he and the other
Lebanese leftists had fought for Palestine. Now Jumblatt was condemning
Hezbollah for doing what he had done: challenging Israel. Why did he apply one
standard to the PLO and another to Hezbollah?..."