Hospitals in Lebanon are packed with people whose hands and eyes have been dealt serious injuries. The streets, meanwhile, are fraught with panic about which communication device might explode nex t.

The decades-long presence of Hezbollah, a terrorist organization that is much better armed than the Lebanese Army and does not answer to the Lebanese government — and the discovery that Iran’s ambassador to Lebanon reportedly carries a Hezbollah pager — makes a sad mockery of the notion of Lebanese sovereignty.