"A victim of his own lies..."

"... his country was delivered, at least symbolically, to the very movement that stands accused of killing his father on the Beirut seafront in 2005.

Betrayed, he called himself after the choice of Hezbollah, Najib Miqati, was named as the prime minister designate on Tuesday. A victim of his own lies, say his foes, who engineered his ouster by bringing down his government this month. Perhaps it was both, in a place one politician called “a chemical equation, not a country.”...

Tuesday was a climax of sorts in a crisis that began with the collapse of Mr. Hariri’s 14-month-old national unity government but really has its origins in his father’s assassination, which cemented the country’s division along questions of ideology, sect and class. Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, preached reconciliation on Tuesday, while accusing his foes in Lebanon of stabbing the party in the back. As thuggish as they were angry, Mr. Hariri’s supporters took to the streets, where they burned a van belonging to journalists, pulled up the curb to throw rocks at cars and set barricades on fire to block streets....

To Mr. Hariri’s foes, he suffers when compared with the men around him. Some hold him up against President Bashar al-Assad, the son of another Arab leader who has emerged forcefully as his own strongman in Syria. More often, he is measured by the standards of his father, whom Mr. Hariri mentioned 11 times in the speech last week when declaring his intention to run again for prime minister. His father’s picture hangs everywhere, showcasing the skeptical leer of someone looking for leverage in a deal he knows he can close. Mr. Hariri is somnolent, famous in political circles for saying few words.

It was almost a refrain that his father would have never let events unfold as they did in this confrontation. A friend turned adversary, Walid Jumblatt, the Druse politician whose votes proved crucial in electing Mr. Miqati, said Mr. Hariri had failed “to see the realities on the ground.”...

That deal is at the crux of his demise. He and Hezbollah, along with their allies, were negotiating a compromise on the tribunal, whose indictments are expected to be issued within two months. Hezbollah has denounced the tribunal as a tool of the United States and Israel and demanded that the Lebanese government end its cooperation.Mr. Jumblatt said Mr. Hariri had agreed to do so, days before the indictments were handed to a judge in The Hague. “I told him, ‘What should I say to the president, to Bashar?’ He said, ‘Yes, I do accept.’ ” In the end, though, he said, Mr. Hariri did not.

“They will never trust Saad again,” said Sarkis Naoum, a columnist here....

Mr. Hariri was forced to apologize to men he considered friends for mentioning them in off-color testimony to the tribunal that somehow managed to find its way on to a Lebanese television station. (He did not apologize to some others, whom he called prostitutes, tools and stooges.) He fought a war of words with politicians described by one of their own “as men who were political animals when their mothers were still nursing them.”...

..........he suggested there might still be negotiations ahead on some quintessentially Levantine deal that would bring him into Mr. Miqati’s government.

“I have to sit with allies and decide what is the final decision,” he said..."