Here's at least one good thing that happened in the midst of yesterday's sectarian madness in Beirut. The Lebanese army got involved. When the quarrel between Sunni students and Shia students that broke out at Beirut Arab University turned into full-scale street fighting, the Lebanese army began sealing off surrounding neighborhoods. They made arrests. They disarmed many of the gangs moving in to join battle. And for the first time since 1996 (when Israel bombed the country in Operation Grapes of Wrath) they declared a curfew.

That was in marked contract to Tuesday's general strike when the army stood and watched as the Hizballah-led opposition set up barricades to shut down Beirut. The concern was that if they were seen to be taking sides in the country's political crisis, they would risk splitting the army along sectarian lines, as happened during the 1975-1990 Civil War. But by doing nothing on Tuesday, they opened the door for pro-government gangs to take the law into their own hands.

So there's still hope that Lebanon will avoid more mass unrest, especially if yesterday's riot pushes the rival sides in the political crisis back to the bargaining table. The country is so deeply -- and so evenly -- divided in their support of or their antagonism towards Prime Minster Fouad Siniora's Westernized government that for weeks many observers have been saying that it will take some tragedy or explosion to bring the country's leaders to their senses.

This could be that opportunity. Because the violence didn't occur as a result of a planned opposition protest, Hizballah-leader Hassan Nasrallah has enough face-saving room to return to talks without accepting responsibility for the chaos. He could play the statesman in order to avoid more of the same.

But the opposition in general and Nasrallah in particular will be ultimately responsible for any violence that occurs if the opposition continues its street campaign to topple the government. Their claims of democratic legitimacy, and it's use of the term "civil disobedience" to describe their actions, became void the day they prevented people from driving on the roads of their own country.

The concern now is Ashura, the Muslim holiday held especially dear by Shia, as it marks the day their ancestors were massacred by the armies of the Sunni Caliph in Karbala in Iraq in the seventh century. Tempers tend to flare on Ashura -- which is celebrated among Lebanon's young Shia men by ritually beating and cutting themselves. Earlier in the week, opposition leaders had said that the next stage of the street protests will take place sometime before Ashura, which is on Monday. If they stick to that schedule, it could be 1975 all over again in Lebanon.

By Andrew Lee Butters/Beirut

After some background interviews in the Middle East this week, I'm now becoming persuaded that Condi Rice is cranking up the first serious peace initiative since Bill Clinton left office six long years ago. She spent four days in the region last week and won agreement by Israeli Prime Minister Olmert and Palestinian President Abbas to hold exploratory talks with her next month on the endgame rather than merely on security issues. It won't be easy, but she deserves support for trying. If she hasn't learned that the U.S. has to play with a full deck in dealing with Israelis and Palestinians, however, then she won't get anywhere.
In his Haaretz article yesterday, Akiva Eldar had an anecdote which, if true, indicates that Clinton blamed Arafat for the "failure" of the Camp David peace talks in 2000 because Barak asked him to do so for political reasons--i.e., Barak needed to escape blame and put the onus on Arafat so it would help Barak's re-election as prime minister. Eldar says he heard the anecdote from Palestinian negotiator Saab Erekat, who says he got it from Clinton himself in 2004.
Though his book The Missing Peace postulates that Camp David failed because of Arafat, Clinton's mediator Dennis Ross oddly fails to mention that Clinton broke what Ross termed an unfortunate promise made to Arafat prior to the summit that he would not be blamed if it failed to produce agreement. In his meticulous 840-page account, Ross glosses over the fact that Clinton did indeed blame Arafat immediately after the summit--in a White House press conference, when he praised Barak more than Arafat, and then more directly in an interview with Israeli television soon thereafter. Privately, Ross notes in The Missing Peace, he and Clinton regarded Arafat as "the skunk of the party."
Ross explains in his book that he felt Barak needed to be praised for domestic political reasons and, echoing what Clinton reportedly told Erekat in 2004, Clinton felt it was important to shore up Barak to keep the peace process alive. Ross doesn't say so, but it was a fatal mistake not to have had the same concerns about shoring up Arafat politically as well, given Arafat's well-documented struggle against Arab and Palestinian forces, from regimes that tried to kill him to potent Islamic fundamentalist opponents like Hamas.
In his desire to help Barak by making Arafat the skunk, Clinton effectively encouraged Arafat to take his own political cover in his old role as revolutionary rather than his new role as peacemaker. That certainly did nothing to prevent the intifadeh that was unleashed two months later, which was indicative of widespread Palestinian frustration with the lack of results from Arafat's peace efforts. Barely a year after Arafat's death in 2004, of course, Hamas swept his Fatah party from power. In Ross's logic, however, it's all Arafat's fault because he irrationally refused to agree to what Ross wanted him to according to Ross's preferred time-table. Palestinian public sentiment is irrelevant to the outcome, apparently, as are broken presidential promises. In prepping for the new peace talks, Rice and her team should check out accounts of what happened other than Ross's self-serving tome, such as Yossi Beilin's The Path to Geneva and Clayton E. Swisher's The Truth About Camp David.
Eldar, by the way, mentions the blame-Arafat story in a column about Clinton's wife Hillary, who the Jewish left, Eldar says, accuses of a "flip-flopping attitude toward the Israeli-Arab conflict." Eldar recalls that while Hillary once upset the Jewish establishment for comments supporting a Palestinian state, she became cooler to the Palestinian cause when she ran for the U.S. Senate. "Senator Clinton stirred longings for First Lady Hillary" among her friends on the Jewish left, Eldar says.

--By Scott MacLeod/Cairo