Fears of outsourcing the "Lebanese mess" to Damascus ...

'The Lebanon that Israel seeks'

In the National/ here

".... Assuming the Scuds have been deployed, the key question becomes one of command and control. Hizbollah wants a weapon that petrifies Israeli society, Syria a tool to restore parity, and Iran a deterrent against a potential Israeli attack on its nuclear installations.

For Israel, the challenge is not a minor one. Hizbollah has proven very skilled at hiding and using missiles, although deploying several 13-metre Scuds in a time of war would not go undetected by Israeli airplanes and drones.

There is another dimension to the crisis: the extent to which the Lebanese state has become peripheral....

But the next conflict would certainly involve more than just Hizbollah. Its assertion that the dichotomy between the state and the muqawama (resistance) protects the country would be tested the hard way. Indeed, an unpleasant lesson Israel drew from the 2006 war and the Shiite militia’s political dominance since then is that limiting the pain to Hizbollah and its constituency does not work. The next round may witness attacks on critical infrastructure, government buildings and Lebanese military facilities. That would draw the entire country into the conflict, but once again without any national consensus on why to fight or what to fight for.....

Ultimately, the real victim of a war fuelled by the missile crisis would be Lebanon. It faces massive destruction by Israel, civil conflict if Hizbollah goes after its domestic opponents and possibly a return of Syrian forces if the world once again outsources the Lebanese mess to Damascus. It happened in 1976, and it could happen again.