BEIRUT — For a glimpse into Lebanon's precarious, death-tinged mood, consider the words of two young men. Each hails from an extreme end of this nation's gaping political and religious divide. And both say they are willing to die fighting for power.
Electronics student Shadi Akouri, a 23-year-old Christian, says he would "pay in blood" for control of the Lebanese government. "Hezbollah has arms and [is] making clear [it] wants this. OK, we want it too. If their intention is to fight, we'll fight. If you don't defend yourself, what is the point of existence?"
Across town, 18-year-old Hezbollah supporter Mohammed Haidar also said he was willing to give up his life. "When you want to change the government, people always die," said Haidar, a Shiite Muslim who says the U.S.-backed Lebanese government is illegitimate. "I will be on the front lines. Why? Because I want to build a country where we can hold our heads up because we are Shia."
As recently as last year, many Lebanese emphatically stated that there would never be another civil war, that their nation had suffered enough, killed enough, paid enough. They had learned a bitter lesson during a conflict that erupted among religious groups in the mid-1970s and raged until 1990.
Since the civil war, talk of religious sects had almost been considered taboo, at least in public. It was common to hear people complain about the Shiite Muslim party Hezbollah, but not the Shiites; the powerful Sunni Hariri family, but not the Sunnis.
When Christians, Sunnis and members of the Druze sect united to demand Syria's ouster in 2005, many Lebanese rejoiced in the notion that, at last, patriotism was about to overcome religious divisions.
But with Shiite Hezbollah making a hard play for greater power, and with Sunni-Shiite warfare in Iraq exacerbating religious friction throughout the region, conventional wisdom among Lebanese elites has become bleak. On both sides, a tone of wary negotiation has been replaced by hardened faces and fiery pledges to risk death to ensure that their own vision of Lebanon, and their faction's political power, prevails.
On the street, politics are openly laced with religious prejudice. Christians and Sunnis fret about being overrun by Shiites. There is tension among rival Christian factions over Maronite Catholic Michel Aoun's affiliation with Hezbollah, which is seen by other Christians as a betrayal of his sect. Acute animosity has flared between Shiites and Sunnis, fed by the civil war in Iraq.
