Three years to the day after the assassination of Rafik Hariri, the Lebanese former Prime Minister murdered because he had become the flag-bearer of resistance to Syria's 29-year menacing presence, a vast sorrowing crowd in Beirut honoured his memory. Five miles away in the southern suburb dominated by Hezbollah, Syria's proxy in Lebanon, another almost equally large crowd heard its leaders declare “open war” against Israel and swear to revenge the “martyr's” death of Imad Mughnieh, the head of Hezbollah's secretive “Jihadi Council” who for more than two decades tore a path of bloodshed from Lebanon to Saudi Arabia, Kuwait to Buenos Aires. He was wanted for some of the worst atrocities in the history of Islamist terrorism, including kidnappings, hijackings and murder by torture as well as the twin Beirut truck bombs that killed 241 US Marines and 58 French paratroops in 1983.

It was highly significant that Mughnieh met his end, killed by a car bomb, in Damascus; and that Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei sent condolences hailing Mughnieh as a “great man”. As so often, the drama played out on the tense streets of Beirut, but the script had been written in Damascus and Tehran. These two highly charged events, in a country that for months has been politically paralysed and, once again, is perilously close to civil war, drew attention to Lebanon's extreme fragility. But both memorial and funeral also point towards Syria, the country deliberately and cynically instigating and perpetuating that fragility, and to Iran, Hezbollah's banker.

Walid Jumblatt, the leader of Lebanon's Druze community, swore yesterday that the Lebanese would never let Hezbollah deliver his country back into “the Iranian-Syrian black evil world” of intrigue and armed treachery. His defiance responded to Lebanese fears that Syria is engineering, through violence, the renewal of its hegemony over their country. Mr Hariri's son held out the hand of reconciliation to Hezbollah; it is not in Syria's interest for the gesture to be accepted.

Bashir Assad, “elected” to succeed his father Hafez as Syrian dictator with 97.99 per cent of the popular vote, denies involvement in the murder of Mr Hariri and other anti-Syrian Lebanese figures. But copious evidence gathered by the UN and now being examined and processed in a guarded Lebanese courtroom, implicates members of his immediate inner circle in Mr Hariri's death. Mr Assad refuses to prove good faith by co-operating fully with the UN investigators.

He has also repeatedly denied that Syria harbours terrorists. That lie stands exposed. Mughnieh met his end in the well-policed streets of the well-heeled Kfar Soussa suburb of Damascus. Syria was harbouring the terrorist who ranked second only to Osama bin Laden on Western most-wanted lists, just as it has continued to allow al-Qaeda recruits to infiltrate Iraq from its territory. He could not conceivably have been there without the knowledge, and protection, of Syria's ruthless and numerous security services.

Did President Assad also know? Behind a façade of unassailability, he is weak. Syrians who hoped that he would modernise the country and break with Syria's self-appointed role as Middle Eastern spoiler have been disappointed. Mr Assad is a prisoner in his father's prison; and as a consequence of his weakness, of will or of power or of both, Damascus continues to release the poison that paralyses the Middle East.