The prime minister has resigned, there’s no government to speak of, there are further street battles in Tripoli, the threat of more kidnappings. Lebanon, as we used to say in the civil war, returns to normal. And in some ways, it’s true. Lebanon is always living through the greatest crisis since the last greatest crisis. But the current drama is a little more serious.

Najib Mikati – one of the world’s richest politicians as well as prime minister of one of the world’s smallest countries – resigned because his government had become unworkable and the country’s MPs had failed to draw up a new election law. Trade unions had been striking across Lebanon – even closing the international airport for several hours – to demand higher salaries. Mikati gave way on this, one of his very final acts, but he cannot have been a happy man.

After all, living next door to a civil war is not an easy task, not least when Syrian jets bomb two houses inside Lebanese territory. The Israelis invade Lebanon’s airspace every day without a whimper from Washington but the Syrian aggression had the United States thundering its fury at Damascus. Lebanon is not bound by sanctions against Syria so its government had adopted a policy of ‘dissociation’, a snob title for the necessary neutrality which the country must adopt to prevent its own Sunnis and Shias and Christians being drawn into the battles over the border. The Sunni-Alawite conflict in Tripoli – in which six people died, including a Lebanese soldier – cannot be allowed to spread to other parts of the country. Tripoli is, by chance, Mikati’s home town.

But the ‘dissociation’ hasn’t worked very well. For a start, the pro-Syrian foreign minister infuriated the Gulf Arabs by demanding that the Arab League restore Syria’s seat in the chamber. The same minister, needless to say, wasn’t too quick to condemn Syria’s air raid. A Sunni sheikh in Sidon – along with Sunnis living nearer the border – has prevented gasoline trucks from driving to Syria where some of their fuel is probably used by Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s army. We don’t know this, of course, but it’s a fair bet. Now the government has used oil tankers to take the fuel up the coast to the port of Latakia, which is comparatively free of the civil war consuming the rest of Syria.

A nation in which the president must always be a Maronite Christian, the prime minister a Sunni, the speaker of parliament a Shia, cannot work

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