Syrian Vice President Farouk al-Sharaa once said of Damascus’ close-but-ambivalent ties to Iran: “You don’t always have to love the woman you are sleeping with.”

Syria is certainly not the only country in the region where the perfect is the enemy of the good. In Lebanon, too, the formation of a new 24-member “cabinet of national interest” is proof positive of the continuing value of the hesitant political cohabitation of Lebanon’s rivals.

Security is at the heart of Prime Minister Tammam Salam’s national agenda. And central to this challenge is the role of the “resistance” arms of Hezbollah, whose forces have ballooned from 3,000 in 2006 to 20,000-30,000 today, including a core of 5,000 on full-time active duty, according to Aram Nerguizian, a senior fellow at Washington’s Center for Strategic and International Studies.

In the July 2008 ministerial statement of an earlier cabinet headed by Fouad Siniora, the legitimacy of Hezbollah’s arsenal was recognized as part of the trilateral foundation of “people, army and resistance,” whose task it was “to liberate or retrieve the Shebaa Farms, Kfarshouba Hills and the Lebanese part of the occupied Ghajar village, to defend Lebanon in the face of any offense and to hold on to its water rights through all available and legitimate means.”