Lebanon cries victory, but is it too soon?

By Robert Fisk

"The victory of the Lebanese army at the Nahr el-Bared refugee camp – the killing of up to 100 al-Qa'ida-type insurgents at the cost of 163 Lebanese soldiers and 42 civilians – is being greeted in the country with "trumpetings" and "hootings" worthy of the country's greatest poet, Khalil Gibran........

But Gibran, whose Garden of the Prophet was published in 1934, warned that we should "Pity the nation that... boasts not except among its ruins... whose art is the art of patching and mimicking..." And, after 106 days of fighting, the ruins of Nahr el-Bared are a sea of Dresden-like walls and collapsed slums, of booby-traps and unexploded bombs.

The Lebanese government has promised to rebuild the whole fandango. The Palestinians are the brothers of the Lebanese, they say – and what other Arab government would be so generous after the carnage of the past four months? But everyone is asking where the next battle will begin......."