Not new, but dumb. It's stupid to be in bed with the people that murdered your father and your friends.
To be fair, isn't that how Lebanon's government is designed to work, what with the specifications on "If the President is a Christian, the deputies must be X and X" and all that? Wasn't it designed to stop ethnic fighting by forcing ethnicities/religions to work together?
The president has to be a Christian and the PM has to be a Muslim. Lebanon is an example of why trying to artificially create a homogenous ethno-religious nation state is futile because you're eventually confronted with long-term population growth trends (I'm looking at you, Israel). Lebanon was created to serve as the de facto state of Maronite Catholics in the Levant, and was about 2/3 to 3/4 Christian when it became independent. The French didn't anticipate (i) the tendency for Christians to emigrate to other countries; (ii) the tendency for Muslims to reproduce at a higher rate than Christians; (iii) the establishment of Israel and the expulsion from there of many Muslims who wound up decamping to southern Lebanon.
It's unfortunate that it's such a tiny country because it really does just need to be split apart Yugoslavian-style. Create an independent Beirut that is basically a secular, internationalist city-state along the lines of Hong Kong or Singapore. Turn Southern Lebanon into a Shi'ite rump state that Israel and Iran can treat as their personal proxy battleground. Give the rest of the country and its Sunni population to Syria.
