Lebanon is falling apart on its 70th birthday

It’s Lebanon’s birthday this month — 70 years since independence — but no one’s really in the mood to party. Our first birthday present last week came in the form of two suicide bombers belonging to the Al Qaeda-affiliated Abdullah Azzam Brigades who detonated their payloads at the Iranian embassy in Beirut killing 26 people.

Bombings are nothing new to the Lebanese – after all two presidents, a former prime minister and a handful of MPs have all gone up in smoke in the past 30 years – but this attack underscored the inescapable truth that the country’s chronically feeble institutions are slowly but surely being eroded by the political, social and economic fallout of the Syrian civil war, while covert Sunni support for the Syrian opposition and Hezbollah’s reckless intervention on behalf of the Assad regime, threatens to plunge the country into all out sectarian violence. Lebanon is falling apart

With its wheeler dealer reputation and its ability to party like Pompeii,  Lebanon has always flattered to deceive.