Will it hold together?

摘要

"Whe lurch from crisis to crisis, with superficial calms in between. But the crises are coming closer and could soon merge into a single, all-consuming crisis." So warned Muhammad Shatah last month. Two weeks later, on December 27th, Lebanon's 62-year-old former finance minister and ambassador to Washington was dead, killed along with seven others when a remote-controlled bomb punched a fireball into his passing car. Around the site of the blast in Beirut's central business district and across other posh parts of Lebanon's capital, construction cranes loom amid a ceaseless racket of pile-drivers. Such relentless industry testifies to Lebanon's resilience, despite the proximity of the bloodbath across the Syrian border, barely an hour's drive from Beirut. More than 1m Syrians have already fled to safety here; they may now make up a quarter of Lebanon's population, previously 4m. Syrians now man the building crews, just as Syrian flight capital and war profits largely keep housing prices high.