The presence of a private army, however small, still felt comforting a few days later when we visited Samir Geagea (pronounced jaja), one of the leading Maronite leaders, at his equally fortified headquarters in the mountains further north. Geagea's redoubt, a bleak modernist block from which you could see the coast, seemed to echo in its barrenness the cell in which the Lebanese Forces leader spent 11 years during Syria's rule of Lebanon. During his imprisonment, the former medical student-turned-warlord-turned-democratic politician immersed himself in the world's mystical spiritual traditions and emerged an austere devotee of the Desert Fathers. His security, like Jumblatt's, actually seemed much more impressive than that of the Prime Minister, Fuad Siniora, even though Siniora's office in Beirut was besieged for months by Hizbollah a couple of years ago.

Geagea is not a feudal or hereditary leader of his party, though like Jumblatt and so many other leaders here (but unlike Rafik Hariri or his son and successor Saad) he has blood on his hands from the civil war. Some of the worst fighting his men took part in was against fellow Christians led by Michel Aoun. You can still see scars of it in East Beirut. The Christian infighting mirrored the Palestinian-on-Palestinian fighting in Tripoli and the war between the Shias of Amal and those of Hizbollah. Many of the worst massacres of the civil war period - and there were many, even though Westerners tend to have heard only of those at Sabra and Chatila - were carried out by former or future allies.