What Next, Lebanon?

"If they try to impose it by violence, the war will grow even more intense and wider," Atwi said.

"Violence won't lead to anything," Jiha added. "It will only create more war. Mark my words."

Hezbollah as Kingmaker?

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Lanky and world-weary, Jumblatt offered a gloomy view of Lebanon's predicament. "We are stuck between the Israeli hammer and the Syrian and Iranian anvil," he said.

From the start of the conflict, he has insisted that Hezbollah was acting at the behest of its allies, Iran and Syria, each country with its own agenda -- Iran to protect its nuclear program, Syria to reassert itself in the region and avoid an international tribunal investigating its possible involvement in Hariri's death. Jumblatt's charges have angered Hezbollah leaders, who have addressed them specifically. "This victory will be an incentive to strengthen our national unity," Nasrallah said Saturday.

Jumblatt said he saw not unity, but division. He didn't believe Hezbollah would disarm, despite its endorsing a Lebanese plan for a cease-fire that suggested it might do so. He was blunt in saying the government had no power to force it to do so. He dismissed talk by others of another civil war; his militia was blamed for its own share of atrocities in the last conflict. But, he said, "I do fear for the future of Lebanon."

"Either we will have a state able to establish its control over the country or we will have a state comparable to what is happening in Palestine," he said, "a reduced weakened state and a strong militia beside the Lebanese army that decides war and peace at any time and has its schedule decided by the Iranians and the Syrians." He called it "a kind of coup d'etat."

"I don't see a state of Lebanon surviving with a militia next to an army. That's it," he said.

So far, the leaders of Lebanon's factions have struck a united front in the face of Israel's attacks. Unlike in the civil war, no one has openly endorsed Israeli and American aims, though in private, many have hoped the conflict would force Hezbollah's disarmament. But the careful positions are in part to keep credibility and nationalist credentials for jockeying in what follows the war.

Many fear that even if strife doesn't erupt again, a Hezbollah considered victorious would become a kingmaker in politics.

"Hezbollah would be able, for instance, to impose its favorite choice of president of the republic, put a veto on candidates for becoming members of the government, and so on," said Melhem Chaoul, a sociologist and professor at the Lebanese University in Beirut. "We would have a semi-totalitarian state in the form of a consensual democracy."

And not all share Jumblatt's assurance a new civil war won't erupt. "We're all very worried about that," said a Sunni minister, who asked that his name not be used.