Beirut bomb shows strategy of chaos

With the killing of the Lebanese opposition figure Mohamad Chatah, the low-level war might be about to break into open conflict.

Within hours of the Beirut car bomb on Friday that killed the Lebanese opposition figure Mohamad Chatah, blame was being levelled at Hizbollah. The movement is certainly a tempting target: already accused of killing Rafiq Hariri in 2005, the group is known to target its opponents and, in Mr Chatah, had an ex-minister and close adviser to Saad Hariri – former prime minister himself and son of Rafiq – who was a relentless critic of the group. Indeed, Mr Chatah had tweeted against the group just hours before his death.
The politics of Lebanon, however, are murky, and there are plenty of others, inside and outside the country, who could equally be blamed. Hizbollah, for their part, swiftly condemned his killing.
Hizbollah are in a difficult situation. In the years after their 2006 war with Israel – which, depending on your source, was either a "divine victory" or an unexpected stalemate – their stock in Lebanon was high. They could, with some legitimacy, claim to be the first Arab group to have pushed back Israel since the 1973 war. Their claim to be a force for all Lebanese, not merely the Shia community from which they draw their strength and recruits, could be believed.
Yet after their entry into the Syrian conflict, on the side of the Assad regime, it became clearer that they were, as their critics had always contended, the sharp tip of the Iranian spear. With so much of their financing, training and weapons coming from Iran, Hizbollah would always be beholden to Tehran. Indeed, in the killing of Mr Chatah can be discerned something of the strategy of chaos that the Iranians played so expertly in Iraq after the ill-fated US invasion. By keeping both the Americans and Iraqis at loggerheads, Iran was able to expand its power across the country. Something similar could be in the offing for Lebanon. Hizbollah have been targeted in their Beirut strongholds over the past few months. They may be seeking to take the conflict back into central Beirut, so that opposition to the group fragments.
The idea that the Syrian conflict would not spillover into Lebanon was always fanciful. It did so with the influx of refugees and it is doing so with the low-level war against pro- and anti-Assad supporters in the country. But with the killing of Mr Chatah, the low-level war might be about to break into open conflict.