Lebanese security forces arrested the former information minister of Lebanon and close ally of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad on Thursday. Michel Samaha, who served as minister of information under the late Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri, was detained on what appears to be suspicion of being involved in a plot to detonate a number of explosives near the Lebanese-Syrian border.

Lebanon's Daily Star reported that Samaha was awakened in the middle of the night by police from the Internal Security Forces branch of information, who proceeded to raid his house and remove several items, including his wife's car. This prompted a flurry of speculation by local media outlets that he had been involved in an assassination plot against a member of parliament, while other news organizations claimed that Samaha had been arrested for collaborating with Israel. However, Lebanese Prime Minister Najib Mikati, who is a member of the Hezbollah-backed March 8 alliance, made a statement denying that Samaha's arrest was linked to espionage.

According to the Daily Star, 20 "highly effective" remote bombs were found in several areas of Northern Lebanon. They were diffused and brought to Beirut by explosive experts.

The Guardian reported that in 2007, Samaha was put on a White House list of Lebanese and Syrian figures working to undermine the pro-Western March 14-dominated government that was ruling at the time.

The war in Syria has been bleeding into northern Lebanon in recent months, with a number of skirmishes taking place between Syrian and Lebanese security forces as well as cross-border shelling. The Syrian government has accused towns in the north of Lebanon of harboring rebels..

However, the March 8 coalition of the Lebanese government has remained a staunch supporter of Assad's embattled regime. In contrast, the March 14 party has been extremely vocal in its espousal of the Syrian opposition's cause.

Samaha's arrest highlights the deep division that permeates the Lebanese government, especially where Syria is concerned.

Off shore, and generally off the radar, a fight is heating up between Israel and Lebanon over who controls a valuable piece of the Mediterranean that is known to have two major gas fields possibly worth billions of dollars. As always, when it comes to border issues between these two nations, the rhetoric has become heated -- and there's the fear that this could signal the next big clash between Israel and Hezbollah. Hezbollah's deputy secretary general Sheikh Naim Qassem minced no words, saying today the group "will remain vigilant in order to regain its full rights, whatever it takes."

Israel's rhetoric has been equally heated. Last year, Deputy Prime Minister Uzi Landau said Israel "would not hesitate to use our force and strength to protect...international maritime law."

Qassem's comments today were in response to Israel, which on Sunday issued a map that it plans on submitting to the United Nations. Lebanon says, though, that the Israeli map encroaches on their territory by more than 1,500 square kilometers. Last year, Lebanon submitted a map of their own to the world body -- hoping for mediation.

Israeli officials say Hezbollah, boosted by its new political clout, is trying to pick a fight with Israel as a pretext for continuing their conflict.

But Hezbollah says that Israel is trying to snatch valuable territory and that it won't be "frightened by" Israeli threats.

A resolution is tricky. There is a lot of money at stake for the two resource-poor countries -- maybe up to $90 billion worth of gas. Hezbollah's position is not dissimilar from the previous Western-backed government led by Saad Hariri, which also accused Israel of taking part of its offshore territory.

So, who actually controls what? The only internationally recognized border between Lebanon and Israel -- the blue line -- was drawn up in 2000 by the United Nations, following the Israeli withdraw from southern Lebanon.

But trying to extend that into the sea isn't so simple. Israel says it drew a straight line out from shore to demarcate the sea border. But Lebanon says the angle Israel used gives it more territory than it should have, since it's drawn too far north. The territory extends to water controlled by Cyprus (both Israel and Lebanon have separate agreements with that country).  

International law says countries that share sea borders have to reach bilateral agreements on how to demarcate them. But that's not so easy, given Israel and Lebanon are still technically in a state of war.

Israel would seem to have an advantage, legally -- since it has already staked its claim and is exploring the fields, experts say.

That's why Lebanon is asking the United Nations to step in. Though, as with everything when it comes to that world body, the process is sure to take a long time, if it's ever resolved. In the meantime, there will be more heated rhetoric. This weekend, Israel's Vice Prime Minister Moshe Ya'alon, compared the sea dispute to Shebaa Farms, the tiny area that Lebanon and Israel both claim and have led to flare-ups in the past. Given what's at stake in terms of mineral wealth, and the history of the border -- whether it stays at just heated rhetoric, or escalates to something more significant, is a question that has to be considered.

For the past two and a half years, Lebanese politics was played much like a game of touch football. That is, it operated within the confines of a strictly defined set of rules: It didn't always make for the most compelling sport, but at least nobody got hurt. This was the legacy of the May 2008 Doha Agreement, which gave Lebanon's Hezbollah-led opposition veto power in the new national unity government.

But it's unity no more. The rival coalitions finally faced an issue where no compromise was possible: The Special Tribunal for Lebanon, which was established by the U.N. Security Council to prosecute those behind the 2005 assassination of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, is expected to soon issue indictments implicating Hezbollah members in the crime. Prime Minister Saad Hariri, his son, has staunchly resisted Hezbollah's attempts to pressure him to disavow the court. Today, Lebanon's opposition cabinet ministers resigned in protest, forcing the collapse of Hariri's government.

The new rules of Lebanese politics will make for a full-contact contest worthy of the NFL. The parties now begin what promises to be a protracted process to form a new government. The opposition will likely try to pressure Hariri by raising alternative candidates for prime minister. However, any other potential premier would be hard-pressed to help Hezbollah undermine the tribunal's credibility.

"As the son of the slain leader -- with Hezbollah looking for some form of absolution or some way of getting itself off the hook [for the Special Tribunal's indictments] -- Saad Hariri is in a particular position to do that much more so than anyone else," noted Mona Yacoubian, the director of the United States Institute of Peace's Lebanon Working Group.

Few expect the situation to quickly devolve into violence -- the more likely scenario is long-term government paralysis, punctuated by rival political demonstrations organized to show the various factions' popular support. In other words, the country appears poised to return to the political deadlock that existed in 2006, after Shiite cabinet ministers resigned in an earlier attempt to prevent the Lebanese government from lending its support to the international tribunal.

On the bright side, Lebanese political parties are making an effort to prevent the situation from turning into a sectarian turf battle between the Shiite and Sunni communities. Reached for comment, a delegation from Hariri's predominantly Sunni Future Movement declined to comment. A Hezbollah official also said that his party had decided to not make any further statements for the next two days on the matter. By staying above the fray for the time being, the parties are trying to keep this as a dispute between two political blocs, rather than turn it into a dispute between rival sects.

That has left the political field open to Lebanon's Christian parties, which are divided between the two sides. "Any democratic means [to achieve the opposition's goals] are allowed; this is what the opposition has committed to," a senior official of Gen. Michel Aoun's Free Patriotic Movement, the largest Christian party in the opposition, told me. "If there is a need for street protests, why not?"

Labor Minister Boutros Harb, a Hariri loyalist, shot back that "this government will be under the obligation to continue running the current affairs of the ministries" until another cabinet is formed. He also criticized Aoun, saying that his ambition to be president was "a big part of the problem" currently facing the country.

By the standards of Lebanese rhetoric, this is still relatively tame -- Druze leader Walid Jumblatt once referred to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad as an "ape" and a "murderer," but now counts himself among Assad's allies. Lebanon still hasn't returned to that level of vitriol -- but the rules that ensured its politics were kept within certain boundaries have now been broken, and nobody can be quite sure where the game is headed next.

The old saw goes that history repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce. Omar Bakri seems to have leapfrogged over that first step.

The radical Sunni Islamist sheikh, who fled to Lebanon after being banned from Britain in 2005, was just sentenced to life in prison by a Lebanese court on charges of inciting murder. Bakri was tried in absentia, and has 15 days to appeal the verdict before being arrested.

Sheikh Omar currently lives in Lebanon's northern city of Tripoli and, as it happens, hasn't changed his phone number in three years. "I will never, ever give myself up to any non-Islamic court," he told FP. "They have no evidence, not a shred of proof."

Bakri also said that he has an escape plan. "If worse comes to worse, I will go to Beirut and ask Hezbollah for protection," he said. He added that he was planning to leave for Beirut tonight to discuss with Hezbollah the terms of any protection that they would be willing to offer him.

This may all sound very nefarious, but it's actually rather difficult to take seriously. Bakri likes to talk a big game -- particularly to Western journalists in nice Beirut cafes -- about his admiration for Osama bin Laden, but his actual influence among Sunni youth in Tripoli is suspect. Given his vocal statements, it was inevitable that a Lebanese court would eventually pin charges on him, but among the many cause of instability in the country, Bakri is small potatoes.

Bakri insisted that Hezbollah would be willing to ensure his safety because he shared their anti-Israel and anti-American bona fides. Perhaps, but I'm not so sure. The Party of God is allowed to operate outside the normal rules of society because many Lebanese think it serves as a necessary defense against the threat posed by Israel and their other enemies. Many Lebanese are already chafing at Hezbollah's current impunity; if the party extends their security umbrella to a loudmouth with no obvious constituency, it will make the status quo even more difficult to justify.

Bakri and Hezbollah may share some political views, but there is one important difference -- only one of them is able to put their words into action.

All eyes in the Middle East are on Iran, but it may be Lebanon that is closer to war. On Sunday, the former head of Lebanese General Security, Gen. Jamil al-Sayyed, announced that he had been informed by his lawyer that a Damascus court had issued arrest warrants for 33 figures for misleading the international tribunal charged with bringing the killers of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri to justice. One of those individuals was a former chief investigator of the U.N.-led investigation itself, Detlev Mehlis. But in comments to Foreign Policy, Mehlis poured cold water over the truth of Sayyed's claims, and suggested that he has no intention of backing down from his work in Lebanon.

Sayyed has a particular axe to grind in this case: He was imprisoned for over four years on suspicion of being involved in Hariri's killing. And the man partially responsible for putting him behind bars was none other than Mehlis, who asked Lebanese authorities to arrest him along with three other pro-Syrian generals.

"I should mention that I am not aware of any investigation against myself and members of my previous UNIIIC-team anywhere in the world," Mehlis said. "I realize that Mr. Sayyed has brought up the story of an arrest warrant, just as he brought up the story of a French arrest warrant a year ago, and I do not believe a word of what he is saying. "

The Syrian government has so far yet to confirm whether an arrest warrant has been issued. But even if one has, Mehlis left little doubt about the opinion of such a document. "If indeed there is a Syrian arrest warrant, it would be baseless, illegal, and politically motivated, without any practical implications," he said.

As the showdown over the tribunal heats up, Mehlis's work has been fiercely attacked by the court's critics in an attempt to discredit the entire enterprise. As Syria and Hezbollah attempt to use their increased leverage within Lebanon to scuttle the court entirely, there is no doubt that such condemnations will continue. The only real question is whether anyone will speak out against them.

Sure, there are plenty of people who have it worse than billionaire Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri. But as someone whose government is marginalized in large parts of Lebanon, whose interests are ignored internationally, and who -- if the history of his country and his family is any guide -- faces good odds of meeting a violent death, there are also plenty of people who have it better than Sheikh Saad. The latest headache came today, with the news that the Lebanese army had opened fire on Israeli jets flying over the country.

This isn't a novel development: Israeli warplanes have continued to violate  Lebanese airspace since the 2006 war, and the Lebanese army continues to periodically fire at them, and miss. But for Hariri, who attended his first U.N. Security Council meeting today and spent Monday and Tuesday in Washington, where U.S. military assistance to Lebanon was on the docket, the timing couldn't be worse.

It's a no-win situation. If Hariri wants to keep military aid flowing to Lebanon, he needs to convince U.S. lawmakers that a strengthened Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF) will contribute to regional peace. That just became harder. And Hariri can't simply order the army not to target Israeli planes -- he's still trying to build bridges to Syria and Hezbollah, and his own Sunni community wouldn't stand for it. As with Hassan Nasrallah's fire-and-brimstone speech yesterday, the prime minister keeps finding the spotlight wrested away from him during his big trip.

The territorial issues surrounding the village of Ghajar are probably understood well by only a few hundred Americans -- and, truth be told, the village's history is not known all that much better in Lebanon. Nevertheless, there have been three stories on Ghajar in major U.S. publications in the past week: The Wall Street Journal released their article last Friday, the New York Times published their piece today -- and, of course, Foreign Policy produced the best article on Ghajar, which we put out last night.

This is curious because Israel administers the village as a military zone -- foreign correspondents need the IDF's permission to enter the village, and are escorted by the Israelis as they do their reporting. It is one of those issues where Israel is able to shape pretty easily what media accounts, if any, come out of the area.

So, why would the Israelis open the floodgates to Ghajar reporting at this time? As you'd know by reading our article, Israel is currently in negotiations with the United Nations and Lebanon over returning the northern part of the village to Lebanese sovereignty, while the area would be administered by soldiers from the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL). Those talks have currently hit a few snags: Israel is leery of the precedent set by a deal which would place Israeli citizens under international control. By letting reporters interview the village residents, who oppose the deal because they want to be reintegrated with Syria, not Lebanon, the Israelis could be attempting to gin up public pressure which will give them a reason to drag their feet further on negotiations.

Robert Worth has a great piece in today's New York Times on Salah Ezzedine, the billion-dollar pyramid schemer being called "Lebanon's Bernie Madoff". Ezzedine seemed to use his close ties to Hezbollah to rope in Shiite investors, not dissimilar from the way Maddof preyed on eldery Jewish investors:

Many of the investors — mostly Shiites living in Beirut and southern villages like this one — say those party links were the reason they chose to risk their hard-earned savings with a man who offered 40 and 50 percent profits but never showed any paperwork.

The scandal has embarrassed the party, which prides itself on a reputation for honesty and selfless piety. It has also illustrated the way many of Lebanon’s Shiites, despite their ascent from near feudal poverty just a few decades ago, remain in some ways a nation apart. Their residual distrust of mainstream Lebanese institutions, which helped fuel Hezbollah’s rise as a virtual state within a state, also appears to have made them vulnerable to Mr. Ezzedine’s schemes.

The big question now is whether the scandal will be a blow to Hezbollah's credibility, or whether the party can use the same trust Ezzedein preyed on to lay the blame on the usual suspects:

Mustafa Fneish, a wizened 54-year-old taxi driver in Mahroub, said he invested $10,000 with Mr. Ezzedine and had received an 80 percent profit on his investment, or $8,000. When asked whether he had received the principal back, he looked confused, and said no.

“All this happened because of the United States and Israel,” Mr. Fneish added, echoing a refrain that springs easily to people’s minds here. “When they discovered that Ezzedine was close to Hezbollah, they ruined him.”

So, it turns out that Lebanon's ruling pro-Western coalition managed to hang on to power, defeating a rival coalition that includes Hezbollah.

The editors over at HuffPo appear to credit this development to Obama's Thursday speech, blaring these headlines:

The Obama Effect? Pro-Western Majority Declares Victory Over Hezbollah In Lebanon

Early Test Of President's Efforts To Forge Middle East Peace

I hate to burst the bubble, but there's simply no evidence yet that Obama had any impact on the outcome. As Paul Salem explained Friday for FP, there were plenty of indications - such as the fact that it only ran 11 candidates -- that Hezbollah didn't really want to win and give up its cozy seat in the opposition. And further, it was Hezbollah's coalition partner, the mostly Christian Free Patriotic Movement, that seems to have underperformed expectations. In any case, the AP story on HuffPo flatly declares, "Obama's speech did not resonate in the election campaign."

Nor should we breathe a sigh of relief just yet. Now comes the ugly business of negotiating ministries, and it's likely that Hezbollah (whose power is measured in more than just parliamentary seats) will again demand a veto in a cabinet of "national unity" -- to the extent that such a thing exists in fractured Lebanon. It could be months of agonizing negotiations before a new government is formed.

The good news, of course, is that the Hezbollah-FPM coalition didn't win, which could have led to ugly recriminations, or worse, if the ruling Sunni-Druze-Christian alliance didn't accept the results. But I don't think we can chalk these results up to any "Obama effect" just yet, if ever.

UPDATE: Elias Muhanna weighs in:

Far more decisive, in my opinion, seems to have been: (1) the high turnout of Sunnis in Zahle — many of whom came from abroad — coupled with a low turnout of Christians; (2) strong feelings of antipathy towards Hizbullah by the Christians of Beirut who voted decisively for March 14th’s list in the district of Achrafieh; (3) some rare rhetorical blunders by Nasrallah in the past couple of weeks, calling the events of May 7th “a glorious day” for the resistance.

JOSEPH BARRAK/AFP/Getty Images

Two weeks before Lebanese Parliamentary elections, Der Spiegel has released a blockbuster report contending that U.N. investigators for the Special Tribunal for Lebanon have acquired new evidence implicating Hezbollah in the 2005 assassination which took the life of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri.

The piece reports that Lebanese security forces discovered that the mobile phones used by Hariri's assassins were often in close proximity to another network of phones, all belonging to members of Hezbollah's powerful militia.  The investigators received another break, the article claims, when one of Hariri's killers used his "hot" phone to call his girlfriend, allowing him to be identified as Abd al-Majid Ghamlush, a Hezbollah member who had completed training courses in Iran.

There are good reasons to be skeptical of this story. First, the entire piece is based on the claims of one anonymous source. The timing is also suspicious, with the news breaking just as Lebanon prepares for Parliamentary elections which pit Hezbollah and Saad Hariri's Future Movement. The story could simply be intended as one of the most macabre voter mobilization effort in recent memory, stoking the anger of the predominantly Sunni Future Movement in order to draw them to the polls. Nor is the author's explanation for Hezbollah's motivations in killing Hariri particularly convincing. For what it's worth, Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah denounced Der Spiegel's claims yesterday as an "Israeli accusation."

Hezbollah has been known to overreach -- most recently, with the revelations of a Hezbollah cell operating in Egypt. Involvement in Hariri's assassination, however, would be Hezbollah's most spectacular overestimation of their domestic position in history. While the Special Tribunal for Lebanon has officially remained mum on its findings, whenever the court reveals what it has uncovered in the past four years of investigation into Hariri's murder, it promises to have a significant impact across the Middle East.

MAHMOUD ZAYAT/AFP/Getty Images

A bulldozer crushes pirated CDs and DVDs at a parking lot in the Beirut suburb of Kfarshima on Feb. 24. The Lebanese Intellectual Property Unit affiliated with the judicial police forces destroyed about 100,000 pirated CDs and DVDs confiscated from Lebanese vendors and traders. Soaring piracy of CDs, DVDs, business software, and cable networks has devastated the cinema, video, and related industries in Lebanon. More than half of the CDs, DVDs, and software sold in Lebanon are copies, according to the International Intellectual Property Alliance, a private-sector coalition that represents U.S.-based copyright industries.

Meanwhile, check out question 6 of the latest FP quiz: What percentage of the world's music downloads are illegal?

• Peruvian slot machines
• The bottles of Indonesia

I argued a few days ago that Hezbollah has no interest in provoking a war with Israel over the situation in Gaza. But that doesn't mean they aren't at risk of getting one. At least three rockets were launched from South Lebanon into Israel this morning, landing near the town of Nahariyeh.

The rockets were likely fired by Palestinian militant organizations based in the refugee camps, not Hezbollah. Still, the rockets put Hezbollah in an awkward position. Hassan Nasrallah, after announcing that his group "will not abandon the fight or our weapons," cannot easily condemn the rocket attacks. Note that Hezbollah's initial denial of responsibility for the rocket attacks did not come from the group itself, but from Tarek Mitri, the government Information Minister. Nasrallah may not want a war, but he has placed himself in a position where he cannot oppose one.

Today's rockets lightly injured two Israelis. Though the IDF responded with mortar fire, they seem ready to shrug off the event as a minor incident. But if a subsequent attack hits a school or a hospital and the casualties are in the dozens, Israeli retaliation might be far more severe. And that could very easily drag Hezbollah into a conflict, whether they want one or not. The rockets being fired are primitive, unguided devices -- whether they hit military targets, unpopulated areas, or civilian neighborhoods is simply the luck of the draw. Cruelly, the fate of many innocent people in Lebanon largely depends on where these rockets happen to land.

Photo: ANWAR AMRO/AFP/Getty Images

The explosive events that regularly occur in Lebanon tend to obscure, rather than reveal, the balance of power in the country. Analysts have a habit of taking the latest news as proof that the country is completely dominated by America and its allies, or by Syria's proxies in Lebanon.

By far the worst example of this is former Middle East correspondent Thanassis Cambanis, who pontificated recently in the Middle East Bulletin that, "Hezbollah, Syria and Iran are stronger in Lebanon that any point in the last decade." Cambanis went on to argue that this new balance of power required the United States to reconcile itself to negotiations with those sympathetic to Hezbollah.

Are Hezbollah and Syria really stronger than at any point in the last 10 years? Syrian troops occupied Lebanon until 2005. Until that time, all of the country's major Christian leaders were either in exile for their anti-Syrian views, or imprisoned. The Sunni and Druze political leaders were uniformly loyal to Syria, an alliance these Lebanese politicians broke in 2005 and one that has never been revived. The Syrians strong-armed Lebanese parliamentarians into accepting their hand-picked choice for president in 1998, and then into unconstitutionally extending his term in 2004. The main thing we learn from Cambanis's analysis is that he doesn’t have the first clue about recent Lebanese history.

Hezbollah recently won an important victory against the government through an armed invasion of Sunni areas of Beirut. But they were fighting against attempts by the Lebanese government to rein in their autonomy -- a fact that Lebanese parties had assented to quietly until just a few years ago, out of fear of the power of Syria and its allies. Syria occupied Lebanon for 25 years, and it was never reasonable to assume that all Syrian influence would be eradicated immediately. A little perspective shows that, rather than being in ascendance, Syria and Hezbollah's clout in Lebanon is close to its historical low, and the balance of power is not nearly as grim as some would have us believe.

Twenty-five years ago this week, a truck laden with explosives crashed through the security gate surrounding the compound housing the U.S. Marine presence in Beirut. The suicide bomber drove straight into the lobby of the Marine barracks and detonated explosives equivalent to 12,000 pounds of TNT. The force of the explosion collapsed the building, killing 241 American servicemen.

The bombing entered the 2008 U.S. presidential campaign when John McCain bragged that he stood up to President Ronald Reagan in opposing the deployment of the Marines to Beirut because he believed "that a few hundred Marines in a situation like that could not successfully carry out any kind of peacekeeping mission."

The American "peacekeeping" in Lebanon failed because the United States never realized that there can be no such thing as peacekeepers in a country where there is no peace to keep. The Marines equated peacekeeping with supporting President Amin Gemayel, himself one of the major sectarian players in the civil war. But the more that the United States propped up Gemayel, the more they were pushed into conflict with Lebanese Druze and Muslim groups. To this day, the Marine barracks bombing remains a reminder of the dangers of getting involved in other people's wars, even with the best of intentions.

The repercussions of the attack continue to this day, both for the United States and Lebanon. The Marines did not step on Lebanese soil again for more than two decades, when they returned to help Americans evacuate during the 2006 Hezbollah-Israel war.

For the Lebanese, the truck bombing marked the birth of a new form of assymetrical warfare, where small insurgency groups began to discover the weapons that would allow them to take on a militarily advanced superpower like the United States. The Marine barracks bombing was the mother of future terrorist attacks, from the World Trade Center attacks to suicide bombings in Iraq and Afghanistan, that have shaped warfare for the past generation.