Newly elected Lebanese President Michel Suleiman reviews the honour guard upon his arrival at the presidential palace. (Hussein Malla/Associated Press)

"A house divided against itself cannot stand." These were the words of Abraham Lincoln in 1858, a short three years before the American Civil War. Lincoln was referring to the division between free and slave states, but the aphorism is perhaps a more fitting description of modern-day Lebanon.

In place of the Mason-Dixie line are religious fissures between the country's Shia, Sunni, Druze and Christian communities, all vestiges of the Ottoman empire. And just as in America, these schisms led to war. However, while the Lebanese Civil War was much less bloody in the years from 1975 to 1990 when compared to America's four-year internecine massacre; the country's labyrinthine political landscape and unfortunate distinction as the boxing ring for the region's proxy bouts would mean a less durable and lasting peace; a peace that this month faced its greatest challenge in 18 years.

Sunday's election of Gen. Michel Suleiman may have filled a presidency left vacant for six months and allowed the legislature to convene for the first time in over a year, but the 81 deaths in May, the country's deadliest domestic flare-up since the civil war, may not be the final casualties of Lebanon's internal strife.

This recent outbreak of violence can most directly be traced back to the events of 2005. The February assassination of former prime minister Rafik Hariri ahead of spring elections created an upswell of sympathy for Hariri's pro-western coalition of Sunnis, Druze and conservative Christians (dubbed the March 14th Coalition after the date of a large anti-Syrian demonstration) and precipitated the withdrawal of Syrian forces who had ostensibly been maintaining stability in Lebanon since the end of the civil war. While the March 14th Coalition won a majority in the post-Syrian government, Hezbollah, an Iranian and Syrian-backed militant group representing Lebanon's populous and aggrieved Shia community, also managed to secure itself six cabinet seats.

(CBC)

This precarious government, touted by U.S. President George W. Bush as a democratic example for other Middle Eastern states to emulate, was then rocked by the Israeli war of 2006. Twelve hundred Lebanese people were left dead and another 100,000 homeless. Despite provoking the war, Hezbollah emerged from the smoke and the debris as the Arab world's David versus the Goliath of Israel and the United States, leaving Prime Minister Fouad Siniora's March 14 government in a vulnerable position.

By November 2006, Hezbollah sought to transform its newfound popularity into political power by way of a veto majority in the government cabinet. It is thought that Hezbollah covets the cabinet veto as a means of shielding both its Syrian patron from the international criminal tribunal investigating the Hariri assassination and itself from UN Security Council Resolution 1559 calling for its own disarming. Hezbollah, a product of the civil war, continues to stylize itself as Lebanon's sole resistance to foreign aggression, namely Israel and their continued occupation of Shebaa Farms, an area of disputed land located on the border between Lebanon and Golan Heights, and as such must remain armed for the sake of the country.

Not surprisingly, the popularly-elected Siniora government rebuffed the request of Hezbollah and its pro-Syrian opposition alliance of Shia and Christian parties. As an act of defiance, the opposition withdrew its six Shia members and with the co-operation of the legislature's Shia speaker, essentially brought Lebanon's government to its knees for the next 18 months as a bombing campaign slowly whittled down the March 14 majority.

Despite mediation attempts by both the European Union and the Arab League, a state of suspended animation fell upon the country's government institutions for the succeeding year and a half.

Perhaps sensing that a new White House administration would be more willing to make concessions on Lebanon in exchange for Iranian and Syrian co-operation in Iraq, Siniora broke the stalemate on May 6 when he declared the Shia militia's telecommunication network illegal and removed a Hezbollah sympathizer from overseeing airport security. Instead of driving a wedge between Christians and Shias in the opposition alliance, Siniora's gambit provoked a demonstration of Hezbollah's ability to quickly mobilize and strike nearly anywhere in the country, and in doing so highlighted ineptitude of the Lebanese Armed Forces (despite $250 million US in assistance since 2006).

After going back on their word by turning their sights on their fellow Lebanese and seizing most of the Sunni Muslim's traditional stronghold of West Beirut, Hezbollah's guerilla forces showed restraint, stopping short of overthrowing the government. An all-out coup would have compromised the group's resistance-myth, without which the Shia militia carries little relevancy.

Fortunately, a deal was struck on May 21 in Qatar under the auspices of the Arab League, when Suleiman took the presidency, Hezbollah got its veto and election reform laws were passed to the benefit of Hezbollah's Christian opposition partners in the upcoming 2009 elections.

Little, however, was resolved related to Hezbollah's weapons caches, and with the tribunal on Hariri's death quickly approaching, the government's greatest challenges are not yet behind it. In fact, this month's events might have even added to the country's burden. Despite recent hostilities, Lebanon has been a bastion of tolerance and calm in the Middle East since the end of the civil war. But both the country's Sunnis and Shias are all too aware that even modest sectarian violence could send Lebanon the way of Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, where Muslim-on-Muslim suicide bombings are a daily affair. And while the dust may be settling between the March 14th Coalition and the Shia militia, tensions are sure to be rising between their respective patrons in Washington and particularly Tehran, which is loath to put itself into a conflict situation with the wider Sunni Arab world, as it struggles to cast its involvement with nuclear technology and Iraq in a benign light.

For the moment, to borrow from another Illinois senator who might also take the presidency, Lebanon has succeeded in building a more perfect union, however tenuous it might be.