A joke went around Beirut during the summer of 2006, as the taunting and touchbacks between Israel and Lebanon finally set off the spark of war, involving a notoriously swish section of the city called Achrafieh, a neighborhood whose idle doyennes are known for their opulent dress and fondness for facelifts. When Israeli General Dan Halutz, in the throes of an escalating duel of war drums, threatened to “turn Lebanon’s clock back twenty years,” so the joke goes, it was the best news the women of Achrafieh had heard in decades. Tack on a few more and we’ll talk.

As it turns out, the Lebanese may be able to turn back that clock all on their own. Nearly three years have passed since the final ceasefire with Israel was brokered in the Levant, and though the bombing stopped and the bodies were returned, Lebanon’s latest in a long line of violent conflicts left the country in a state of suspension, perhaps even reversal. The country’s recent spiritual, economic, and political crisis, however, was already in progress when the Israeli tanks rolled in and might be sourced back to the cataclysmic blast that killed former prime minister Rafik Hariri on Valentine’s Day 2005. Three years later, evidence of the explosion, which killed twenty-two others and gouged a fifteen-foot crater into the ground, still blights one of Beirut’s loveliest spots, its Mediterranean promenade. The stretch of the seaside corniche where Hariri’s assassination took place looks only recently repaved; the water mains still regularly erupt, dousing the decimated buildings on either side of the street with Beirut’s version of a fire hydrant’s jubilant summer spray. One of the more spectacular markers in a city liberally engraved with its history of suffering, Beirut seems both unprepared and unwilling to contend with what the site represents.

That most consequential breed of dreamer—the kind with resources—Hariri symbolized a hope for peace in Lebanon, the seat of his most extravagant dream yet. Having chosen the mountainous, coastal country of his birth as a pseudo-retirement destination in the mid-1980s, despite the minor buzz-kill of a raging civil war, in the ensuing decades Hariri threw his sizable financial lot and professional acumen into restoring Lebanon. Derided for the ruthlessness that made him a billionaire and accused of seeking little more than glory—a political parvenu coasting on his fat bankroll and steamrolling charisma—Hariri was a Sunni Muslim, a nouveau Saudi who had left Lebanon to make it big in construction. His tenacity eventually earned him a loyal electoral base, however, and he was elected prime minister twice, from 1992–1998 and 2000–2004.

In 2004, Hariri resigned in protest over a Syrian power play to extend then-president Èmile Lahoud’s term beyond its legal limit, a move that soured his previously tolerant relations with Syria, Lebanon’s neighbor and occupier. There is every indication that at the time of his death Hariri was plotting, with the aggression that won the hearts of his people and assured his death, for the withdrawal of Syrian troops, who had entered Lebanon in 1976, shortly after the onset of the civil war. The Syrian occupation lasted, on and off, for almost thirty years; they finally succumbed to global pressure and left in 2005—two and half months after Hariri’s blood ran through Ain-Mreisse.

Though the effects of the civil war are on every corner and every face, citizens of Beirut rarely refer to it directly; talk of war—if not politics—is almost superstitiously avoided, or effaced with dry humor. The Achrafieh joke was one of several offered to me, during a recent trip to Lebanon’s capital, as an example of the mordant, melancholy wit that has become as natural to the Lebanese as the olives, parsley, and radishes that prelude their traditional meals. “You have to laugh,” I was told, “Or else . . ” The ellipsis, in fact, gets closer than a hundred thousand words to capturing the terrible potentiality paralyzing Lebanon, which recently went six, ominously freighted months without a president and is sinking into the worst economic depression since the civil war. “As if they were the result of some natural calamity rather than a man-made catastrophe,” journalist Robert Fisk wrote, the Lebanese refer to the fifteen years of civil war as al-hawadess, or “the events.” The post-war attempt to rebuild the country’s infrastructure was ardent but somewhat cosmetic; that recovery has been further waylaid by the inexorable rise of Hezbollah, “the party of God,” now not just a war-baiting Shia militia but a recognized political party.

Hezbollah is the latest in the country’s long line of party crashers: Having filled its sociopolitical dance card with some of civilization’s greatest empires—Phoenician, Persian, Roman, Byzantine, Arab—Lebanon was under near-consistent Ottoman rule from the sixteenth century until 1920, when the French, one of the Allied countries divvying up the Middle East after World War I, assumed control. The Lebanese took advantage of France’s own occupation in 1943 to finally gain independence, but not before the French had developed a “confessionalist” democracy, which attempted to represent the country’s major religious groups (there are eighteen recognized) by population, mandating a Maronite Christian president, Sunni prime minister, Shia speaker of parliament, and Orthodox Christian deputy prime minister. This sort of extravagantly utopian conception of power-sharing was confirmed by a National Pact when the French went home; it actually worked fairly well, until it didn’t. Until the fact that Lebanon has not had an official census since 1932, largely out of fear of tipping the power balance in the growing Muslim population’s favor, became outrageous. Until April 13, 1975, to be exact.

There was a pattern to the way Lebanon’s fissures blew into fault lines, and that pattern is repeating now; it’s a process with consequences most of Beirut’s citizens—who refer to Hariri’s assassination, with typical obfuscation, as “the earthquake”—can’t bear to contemplate, much less name. The city was locked down in anticipation of the presidential election scheduled for the next day. I asked if they thought the twelfth time might be the charm.

The bombings and high profile assassinations rose in number and severity over the course of 2007—a Christian legislator was killed in September and an Army general in December; Syria-backed Hezbollah was blamed in both cases—and the election for a new president had been delayed eleven times since Émile Lahoud left office in November. The entire country seemed suspended with dread, wondering if the next shot fired in Beirut, the next explosion in the street, would be the one that sent Lebanon tumbling. The twelfth attempt at a presidential election was scheduled for January 12, 2008, several days after my arrival in the capital.

“Everything in Lebanon is beautiful,” Carlo assured me, before turning away and adding: “Except the politics.” I had spotted him—short, compact, and dressed for a trendy wine bar rather than a trans-Atlantic flight—in the endless check-in line in New York, but it wasn’t until we were changing planes in Jordan, twelve hours and several crushing cinematic offerings later, that he introduced himself.

Carlo fell comfortably into the role of personal escort as we were led through the airport by a strutting airline clerk. “You don’t speak Arabic?” he asked, and I said I did not, but could make do in French. More than fifty years after the brief but penetrative French mandate ended, the language still gilds the Lebanese vernacular; unluckily for me, most are loath to use it for more than “hello,” “good-bye,” and “thank you very much indeed.”

Carlo moved to New York when the war broke out in 2006; his wife was now seven months pregnant. I asked him how often he returned to Beirut and his voice went flat: “I don’t.” His dad was ill, he explained. It was clear that this would be the last time Carlo saw his father, and the trip was a burden.

While brokering the retrieval of my baggage from our original flight, Carlo asked me a question that, though it became quite familiar, I was never able to answer to anyone’s satisfaction: “Why Beirut?” I told him I had come to explore, that I had a standing interest in the city and a couple of weeks free, which was true enough. His brown eyes flickered, unsold. He asked where I was staying and I mentioned the hotel I picked because it looked clean and was by the sea. Then, a final and ultimate question: “Is anyone waiting for you?” I told him no, and Carlo’s expression of confusion and dismay was positively infectious. It was hardly Beirut’s fault. No one was waiting for me in general.

Beirut is not a walking city. Neither is it a driving city, nor particularly a public transportation city. When I asked the hotel concierge for the best way to get to the famously re-built downtown area, also the site of the National Parliament, she said, “Walk along the shore for a while, and eventually . .  you’ll want to turn right.” I held, hoping this is just a quirky opener. “Ask someone on the street,” she continued, then offered the koan that would wrap up every such mystical interaction: “You can’t get lost.”

Indeed, I could. The problem with getting lost in Beirut is that looking lost is tantamount to looking suspicious. There are few people in the streets, fewer still who are alone; within seconds of setting out I knew that neither strolling nor stopping were viable options in the city. The idea, security-wise, is to slow down the cars—with zigzagging barricades that prevent vehicles from tossing a bomb and zooming away—and speed up the people. Private guards patrol the front of nearly every building, and the Lebanese Army is out in force on most corners. There is only hustling, with your head down.

When I finally found the downtown—a peanut butter-hued, art deco enclave studded with crumblingly authentic mosques and churches—only soldiers roamed the area. A maze of barricades and riotous spirals of razor wire made reaching a destination mere steps away a triumph of will and logistics. Turning down a new block meant another search of your bag and your person by another young man with a long, elegantly snouted automatic rifle strapped across his back. High fashion shops lined the radial streets surrounding the clock tower in Nijmeh Square, but they were shuttered. There was a mean wind whipping in off the Mediterranean, and I had seen fewer than a dozen civilians in over an hour. I ended up on a wide, wildly trafficked avenue, where I was finally granted a full vantage of the imperious el-Amin mosque, which Hariri was building at the time of his death and where he and his seven bodyguards are now laid to rest. I pulled out my camera to take a picture of the blue and gold structure, its minarets twisting high into Beirut’s ragged skyline, and felt the nearby soldiers tweak to me, settling their focus.

“Nowhere is Beirut’s resilience more apparent than in its reconstructed city center. In 1990, Downtown was in shambles, a deserted no man’s land, a ghost town.” This from the 2006 tourist guide I picked up later that afternoon, stumbling out of that same ghost town. I had stopped at the Virgin Megastore—found on all tourist maps of Beirut—because it was adjacent to Martyrs’ Square, the memorial I had been courting hopelessly, lined as it was by an intimidating show of barricades and wire. The Virgin Megastore is a four-floor behemoth and was, despite all appearances, open. I know there are four floors because I traveled—in escalator slo-mo—to each one, trying to find someone who would take my ten dollars for Lebanon 2006: Official General Tourism Guide.

After that, I ate a pound of almonds, tore my pants on an errant coil of wire and declared myself defeated by Beirut in Round One. I had been searching throughout the afternoon for an outlet adaptor for my computer, continuing a saga begun the night before, when a marvelously timid young woman made five separate trips to my room, each time bearing a new contraption that fit neither my machine nor the hotel’s outlets. Adapt, adaptor, adaptive; I was sure I had packed the fucking thing. I made one last try, ducking into a tiny cell phone shack on the way home. The skinny kid manning the goods was just about to tell me he was sorry when I noticed exactly what I needed, stray and unpackaged, sitting on a shelf under the counter, between his phone and his lighter. “That?” he said, tossing it to me, “You can have that, I don’t even know what it is.”

“People are going to think you’re a spy,” Rafael said. “Are you not a spy?”

We were in the Prague Café on the American University of Beirut campus, close to Hamra street. It was a Friday afternoon and the place was packed with smoke and really good-looking people. Written in white chalk on a small board hung behind the bar was the dictum of the day: “When a woman has a nervous breakdown she goes shopping. When a man has a nervous breakdown he invades a country.” Rafael was a friend of Felicia—herself a stranger, a journalist friend of a friend home visiting from Dubai, where she had taken a reporting post several months ago.

Rafael works for an environmental group and recently had been escorted away from the US Embassy, where he had gone to take pictures of the water birds—unheard of in the city—drawn in by the large pools that collected in front of the building after a heavy rain. He only got a few snaps in before the guards descended. Everything was in lockdown in anticipation of the presidential election scheduled for the next day. I asked if they believed the election would be held this time.

Rafael equated Lebanon’s political détente with the other dark force currently gripping his life: a punishing divorce. What he had realized, he said, was that the nature of the split with his wife—the communication breakdown, alienation, and rapidly degrading standards of protocol—was almost identical to that tearing Lebanon asunder. “It’s all about power,” he said, his eyes rounding. “It’s not about who’s right or what’s best or some deep belief—you lose sight of all that, and it becomes about who has more control, who comes out on top. Who did what years and years ago and who has to pay.” Felicia and I sipped and fiddled at our drinks and Rafael sat back: “Power.”

It’s hard to talk about anything else when you’re breaking up. Try—and be amazed at the backroads your brain will traverse to get back to where it wants to be. Everyone in Beirut talks politics, all the time: it’s like history’s longest break-up between the world’s most promising couple, argued by the Middle East’s greediest lawyers and contingent on the custody of several million traumatized children, who will grow into needy adults with trust issues and a tendency to freak out other countries in bed.

Gathering himself from his chair, Rafael took his leave with the briefest of Beirut synopses: “Everyone thinks everyone is a spy,” he said. “And they might as well line the whole city with razor wire.”

Hezbollah emerged in 1982, a pet militia of the Ayatollah Khomeini. They trained under Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard to fight the Israeli invasion of southern Lebanon, which had left between twelve and nineteen thousand Lebanese dead, many of them Shiites. Led by secretary-general Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah since 1992, Hezbollah is cited as a terrorist organization by both Canada and the United States, while most of Europe recognizes them as a legitimate resistance movement. Before September 11, 2001, Hezbollah was responsible for the deaths of more American citizens than any other Islamic group (including a 1983 truck bombing in Beirut that killed 241 Marines), and yet in 2005 the United States showed signs of capitulating to the United Nations’ attempts to smooth Hezbollah’s way into mainstream Lebanese politics. Some suggest that the US is too depleted by Iraq and Afghanistan to risk toying with the puppets of Syria and Iran; all militias but Hezbollah were forced to disarm at the end of the civil war, and with over $100 million in annual funding from Iran, as well as a flourishing network of black market business and intelligence, they have ballooned, right under our noses, into the world’s premier terror network. Even al Qaeda looks to Hezbollah for training and advice, perhaps in how to use the kidnapping and torture of foreigners—particularly Americans—to their greatest advantage.

Having successfully ended the Israeli occupation of Lebanon in 2000, and winning the support of 87 percent of the Lebanese population during the war he essentially started in 2006, Nasrallah knew a raging gravy-train when he saw it. He has leveraged that momentum into Hezbollah’s increasing influence as a political party; they won 14 of Lebanon’s 128 parliamentary seats in 2005 and have forged opposition alliances with both Amal, another Shia faction, and the largest Christian bloc in parliament, led by former military commander Michel Aoun. In a 1985 manifesto Hezbollah laid down its agenda: to eject Western colonialism from the country, bring the Phalangists to justice for the atrocities committed during the civil war, eradicate the “Jewish entity” of Israel, and bring the Islamic revolution lockstepping through Lebanon.

Nasrallah, born and raised in Beirut, has stood down on that last claim of late, but the recent political crisis, fueled by Hezbollah’s demand for veto power in the cabinet, has rendered the party both as strong and as divisive as it has ever been. In 2007, Lebanon was ranked 28th on the Failed State Index—after Pakistan and North Korea but before Kenya and Moldova—and rose to 18th by the end of 2008. It’s a stalemate in the parliament, with none of the parties able to agree on a national unity government for Lebanon, each group stubbornly holding onto their bids for prevalence, for power, while the people pay the price in the streets, withstanding bombings and staging increasingly violent protests for resolution. The cabinet is unwilling, in other words, to stay together for the kids. They won’t even share custody.