Lebanon's Monty Hall Problem

Newsweek's Christopher Dickey gets some anonymous woolgathering from an "especially frank strategic thinker, who's quite close to the Israeli government." The Strategist lays out three grim possibilities for the future of the tiny republic:

1. Lebanon collapses, everybody who can flee flees, and the Shiites remain, presumably making Hassan Nasrallah the Caliph of Lebanon in the process;

2. Lebanon becomes Kosovo, pacified indefinitely by an international force;

3. Syria comes back in to quiet things down.

For all we know the Strategist could be Carrot Top, so these possibilities could all amount to bupkes. If these were the only three on the table, though, I'd say the second worst is the most likely to fly: Syria comes back in and re-establishes the dominion it never completely lost. Option 1 is sufficiently horrendous that I don't think it will be allowed, by either the state actors or the Maronites and Druze within Lebanon, to play out. Option 2 stalls on the rhetorical question, "Who in their right mind is willing to commit troops to Lebanon?"

Syria, of course, is always ready to do just that, and Israel has both a revealed preference for stability in its bordering states and a habit of outsourcing the management of Lebanon. For Israeli security, pre-Cedar-Revolutionary Lebanon was preferable to today's Lebanon. That having been said, I'd doubt any of these three options will end up coming to pass.

Also of interest, a real Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead tale from the annals of Israel-Syrian back-channel negotiations:

The Strategist also discerns indications that Assad has decided to reject Hizbullah requests for re-supply, but, typically, without actually saying no to Nasrallah. According to the Strategist, at the start of the war Israel sent a message to Syria through third parties saying that Israel did not intend to widen the conflict so long as Syria did not send fresh arms shipments to Hizbullah. Any trucks going into Lebanon would have to remain uncovered so their contents could be seen from the air. While NEWSWEEK could not confirm this independently, subsequent events do lend credence to this account. In the first week of fighting, Syria sent a military convoy down the road to Lebanon--three big tractor-trailers of a kind often used by the Syrians as tank-transports and for other heavy weapons. All three had canvas covers, and Israel duly destroyed them. (Video footage taken from the air of trucks being blasted as they crossed the border was subsequently released by the Israelis.) Not a peep from Syria.

The Israeli supposition is that Assad deliberately sent the trailers, knowing they would be destroyed, to demonstrate to Hizbullah's leaders that he was willing to re-supply them but, alas, could not.

Now there's a death with meaning. How'd you like to be the truck driver who helped send that convoluted message?

Monty Hall Problem explained.