Life never seems to get easier for Lebanon. Civil war gave way to Syrian occupation and war between Israel and Hezbollah in the south. Israel left, only to come back in a devastating and bloody war in 2006. Syrian troops withdrew in 2005, only after the assassination of a former Prime Minister. The Lebanese Army blasted its way through Palestinian refugee camps trying to root out Islamist groups in 2007, and Hezbollah came within an inch of toppling the entire Lebanese state in 2008.

Then the Syrian Civil War came, and this time is was Syria sucking Lebanon into its internal conflicts, not the other way around. Hezbollah fighters have flooded east to help prop up the regime of Bashar al-Assad, and indeed have been bearing the brunt of the fighting around Damascus and along the Lebanese border. Meanwhile, groups like the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Shams (ISIS) and the Al-Qaeda aligned Jabhat an-Nusra have moved west into Lebanon, looking to grab a foothold there. Fighting broke out in August between the Lebanese Army and both groups in the Arsal area of the Bekaa Valley and, although a fragile truce is in place, a number of soldiers and policemen remain as prisoners of the terrorist groups.

A Lebanese soldier rides a tank near Arsal. (Reuters/Hassan Abdallah)

Spillover from the civil war has not been contained, though, and has spread to major cities along the coast. Shi’a neighborhoods in South Beirut, Hezbollah’s heartland, have been attacked with a number of bombings. June 2013 saw street fighting in Sidon between the Army (and Hezbollah, partnering with the Army as it was later discovered) and fighters loyal to hard-line cleric Sheikh Ahmad Assir, who was joined by Nusra, Fatah al-Islam, and Jund al-Sham, the latter two being the same foes that were the target of the 2007 war. Tripoli, long the site of sectarian violence between Sunnis and Alawites, has been rocked in past weeks by fierce combat between Army units and various Islamist groups, including Nusra again. ISIS, far from being tied down by its actions in Syria and Iraq, has been hard at work trying to establish an Emirate in Lebanon.

Refugees from Syria, though, threaten to break Lebanon entirely. The Lebanese government can’t provide reliable electricity for the country’s capital, yet is now being forced to care for a refugee population from over the border that is estimated to reach over 1.5 million by the end of the year. This means that, combined with the around 450,000 Palestinian refugees registered with the UN Relief and Works Agency, there will be just about 1 refugee in the country for every 3 actual Lebanese citizens. Lebanon’s estimated population is around 5.9 million, estimated being the key word because there hasn’t been an actual census since the French colonial authorities performed one in 1932.

Not that the Lebanese government could perform a census if it wanted to, though. For that, Lebanon would need a government, and that is something it doesn’t really have.

Sure, Lebanon has a Prime Minister with an accompanying cabinet, not to mention a parliament. However, the country continues to go without a President, the position being vacant ever since Michel Sleiman stepped down at the end of his term in May. The President is chosen by Parliament, and must be a Maronite Christian under the terms of thethe National Pact, made when Lebanon was just emerging from French rule (it also stipulates that the Prime Minister must be a Sunni, the Speaker of the Parliament a Shi’ite, and the Chief of the General Staff a Druze), but there a veritable dearth of candidates.

The battle lines have been drawn between Samir Gaegea, supported by the anti-Assad March 14 parliamentary bloc, and Michel Aoun, who is supported by the Hezbollah backed, pro-Assad March 8 bloc. In a way that is classic Lebanon, they both fought on the same side of the Lebanese Civil War at one point, against Syria and its proxies.

Samir Gaegea (The Daily Star/Aldo Ayoub, HO)

The presidency is not the only problem, though; parliament is long overdue for elections. Originally scheduled to take place in June 2013, the elections were postponed while the two blocs wrangled over proposed changes to electoral laws. The government of current Prime Minister Tammam Salam, ostensibly an independent technocratic cabinet, was partly put in place to shepherd Lebanon to new elections, but a year has gone by with neither side looking likely to budge. November 5th saw parliament have to extend its term again, this time due to the battle over the presidency. Under the constitution, the President must name a new Prime Minister and ask for the formation of a government. Salam is caretaker President, but having elections with no actual President would throw Lebanese politics into even further political chaos, and so there’s no point in having elections.

It’s a political system that continues to not work. What’s left then?

The Lebanese Armed Forces are often spoken of as the only state institution that anyone has any sort of respect for. Saudi Arabia and France signed an arms deal on November 4th to provide Lebanon with weapons and equipment worth $3 billion, which will breathe some much needed life into the military. Facing threats from across the border in Syria and domestically, the military desperately needs the modern equipment the French will be sending, along with the training that both the United States and French have been providing.

How much good will it do, though? The Lebanese military is often spoken of grandly as the guarantor of security and unity for the country, but that’s not completely true. It remains only able to work effectively if the country is unified (or at least somewhat cohesive) behind it. In that way, then, it’s not so much the guarantor of unity as much as it is dependent on it.

Any cracks in Lebanese society will be reflected in the military. So long as it is pointed at what are perceived as foreign enemies, like Jabhat an-Nusra, it can rely to a certain degree on the Lebanese people and politicians to be behind it. The conflict between Hezbollah forces and March 14 bloc-affiliated militias in 2008 showed, though, that the Lebanese Armed Forces are only as much of a guarantor of security and unity as the political powers in the country allow them to be.

The wounds of the Lebanese Civil War, ended almost 25 years ago, have still not healed. There is no national unity, which begs the question of what unity the military is supposed to be a guarantor of. Lebanese politicians, and the citizens that elect them, are unwilling to make real changes for the good of Lebanon.

Hezbollah’s role cannot be forgotten. It was Hezbollah that caused the war with Israel in 2006, devastating the country’s south. It was Hezbollah that used its arms against other Lebanese citizens in 2008. It was Hezbollah that brought the Syrian Civil War’s violence home by joining the fighting there.

Max Weber said it first, and it’s been repeated many times since then, that a monopoly on the use of force is the most important characteristic of a state. Lebanon’s government doesn’t have that, and Hezbollah remains the most capable military force in the country. There’s nothing the government can do about it either. It failed to rein in Palestinian militants in the late 1960s, and it would probably break apart if it actually moved against Hezbollah. The only reason the Shi’ite group hasn’t gone ahead and done away with the state as it is today is because they don’t want the responsibility and obligations that come with being the government.

Lebanon will continue to limp along, though, hobbled by its own people’s inability to conceptualize a national character over their sectarian identities. No President, a parliament that won’t see an election for the foreseeable future, and a military that can’t do much more than put out fires that politicians can eventually agree on their having to be put out.

Life won’t be getting easier for the country any time soon, and the Lebanese need to start accepting blame for that.

Garrett Khoury, a graduate of the George Washington University’s Elliot School of International Affairs and an MA Candidate at Tel Aviv University, is the Director of Research and Content for The Eastern Project. Garrett has previously worked with The Israel Project in Jerusalem and The American Task Force on the Western Sahara in Washington, DC.

Title Photo: A Lebanese soldier in Tripoli. Credit: REUTERS/MOHAMED AZAKIR