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. . . "This is more and more becoming a Sunni-Shi'a conflict. It really does feel like Iraq," said journalist Nir Rosen in a conference call with analysts and reporters at the New American Foundation.

"Sunni militias, backed by the Future Movement, formed over the last year, and have been a complete failure, perhaps because they were fighting for money. They just disappeared and caused a great sense of betrayal and shock among Sunnis," said Rosen, adding that the perceived victimisation of Sunnis had instigated more radical circles in Tripoli to fight against the "apostate Shi'a", that they appeared "eager to start this battle", according to Rosen. . .

Rosen, who is currently in Beirut and accompanied Shi'a Amal fighters as they battled on the streets, described Hezbollah fighters acting "hand in hand" with the army on the commercial strip of Hamra Street in West Beirut. Most of the targets captured by Hezbollah and their allies were subsequently turned over to the army. "They are not trying to change the demographic balance in Beirut, it is to make a show of force to let rival militias know [Hezbollah] could have a real political coup," said Rosen. "Hezbollah's main concern is to keep weapons; it doesn't have much interest in running things in Lebanon." . . .

"Lebanon, in the post Hariri period, is not in any really meaningful sense a democracy. It is a political order rooted in the distribution of political assets along sectarian lines, and the patterns of distribution are way out of whack with demographic reality, particularly with regard to the Shi'a," said Flynt Leverett, once a senior specialist on the Middle East for the Bush administration's National Security Council.

Leverett described the Lebanese political arena as a "sideshow" when compared to the Bush administration's real strategic interests in the region. Washington champions hollow talk about "democracy" as a bulwark against radical influences, he said, but in reality the policy -- what he called the "height of strategic malpractice" -- only serves as an excuse for the U.S. not to diplomatically engage with the countries it must: Iran and Syria.

"[It was a mistake] to latch on to this so-called March 14th coalition -- Cedar Revolution -- in Lebanon and to decide to use it as a fulcrum for trying to leverage various U.S. policy objectives," said Leverett. "What we have done here is basically what we did in the 1980s. We picked a group of Western-oriented Lebanese political actors whom we liked because they kind of looked like us and talked like us," he said. "We decided to array them against people who have real street cred; the results then were disastrous, and I think the results now are proving to be very bad." . . .