LAWRENCE LEFT SYRIA A STUDENT and returned a conqueror, at the head of the Arab Revolt in World War I. Following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, Syria and Lebanon became French mandates, and since both attained independence in the 1940s, the two countries have been entangled in a bitter dance, partners in a bad marriage, each defined by the other. Syria has the plains, Lebanon the mountains; Syria the quiet uniformity of a terrorized population, Lebanon the raucous politics of balkanized factions ready to slit one another's throats. Syria, with its impoverished millions, has the big battalions; little Lebanon, with just under four million people, has the capitalism, the ski resorts, the wine, and the forests. Whatever happens to Damascus will also, most likely, happen to Beirut. So I took a detour.

The man who did the most to instigate the still unfolding divorce between Syria and Lebanon was Walid Jumblatt, clan chieftain and warlord of the Druze, an esoteric Islamic sect scattered through Syria, Israel, and especially southern Lebanon. I found the warlord at sunset in his fortified château in the Druze stronghold of Moukhtara, in the high, stony Shouf Mountains, an hour from the Syrian border. Druze guards with pistols frisked me with practiced ease as Jumblatt waited, talking on his cell phone. In his late fifties, he wore faded jeans and a collar-length fringe of long ringlets that tumbled down from his chrome dome. Surely he is the only warlord in the world who dresses like Frank Zappa, parties with Joe Cocker, and looks like Mr. Magoo.

The Druze were perhaps the only political winners in Lebanon's 15-year civil war. Just to review, Christians and Muslims slaughtered each other (1975), the Syrians invaded with 40,000 men ('76), the Sunnis and Shiites fought each other (throughout), the Israelis invaded ('78), there was a depraved free-for-all ('79–'81), followed by a Beirut bombing of U.S. Marines ('83), the return of the Israelis ('84), and daily-shifting alliances and all-out wars between the Druze, Shiites, and Sunnis, with endless rounds of backstabbing among the Palestinians, Christians, Druze, French, and Americans. The two things to remember are that everybody ran out of ammunition in 1990, and that 1975 is now the name of a chic Beirut nightclub with fake bullet holes and sandbags for chairs.

Since the friend of my enemy's enemy is the enemy of my friend's friend, Jumblatt combined the battlefield prowess of the Druze with a fleet sense for when to abandon an alliance. A longtime ally of the Syrians, he'd been the loudest in calling for their ouster, even before the Hariri assassination, and had ridden the 2005 Cedar Revolution to a position as one of the most powerful men in Parliament.

Jumblatt led me inside to sofas in his vaulted office, where we were joined by his five-month-old puppy, a shar-pei named Oscar who gnawed on a coffee table. Following a time-honored Druze doctrine of takia, or protective dissimulation, my host pretended he didn't know who killed Prime Minister Hariri.

"Except rumors, I have no idea," he said, not bothering to conceal a wry smile. "In Lebanon you can hear all kinds of gossip. Lebanese people know everything." He did blame the Syrian government for decades of crude political manipulation. The crimes were ongoing: Since Hariri's death, a dozen Lebanese critics of Syria had been dispatched, one by one, with blocks of plastic explosives. The latest attack had occurred just two nights earlier: Not long after a popular journalist had attacked Syria on television, she turned the key on her Land Rover and it blew up.

Jumblatt's office was a temple to warlord kitsch. A onetime client of the Soviets, he had a fabulous collection of their dress uniforms and vast canvases depicting the Red Army, along with velvet cases of Soviet, Lebanese, and Ottoman military insignia and medals. Since his father and grandfather were both assassinated, Jumblatt also kept a rack of six beautiful sniper rifles—and an artillery-spotting scope aimed over the valley below. When he stepped out to take a call, I inspected the vertical file folders on his desk. They were stuffed with pistols. Five semiautomatics, each sitting on a stack of five clips.

As the firepower hinted, Jumblatt was pessimistic. "The new Lebanon will be like the old Lebanon," he warned. "Same old troubles. We will see. It depends on American policy." He feared that the "neocon disaster" in Iraq would spill over into Syria. Any collapse would affect vulnerable, poorly balanced Lebanon.

Jumblatt led me back outside, past a huge marble sarcophagus. "Roman," he said. "I got this in the time of looting, the eighties. I paid $10,000. Very cheap." During the civil war, when half the antiquities in Lebanon were being sold abroad, Jumblatt had bought a priceless array of mosaics, which were now on display at an Ottoman palace across the valley. Joe Cocker played a good show there a few years ago, the warlord noted with satisfaction.

As we said goodbye, Jumblatt urged me not to miss Lebanon's famous cedar forests. King Solomon's temple was made from these strong, fragrant trees. There were only two stands of the old-growth giants left, one right here in the al-Shouf Cedar Nature Reserve.

Like his father, Jumblatt had ordered the Druze to plant cedars, three million young trees now growing inside special reserves up and down the mountain range. Although the cedars grow slowly, they can drive their roots down through the cracks in solid rock. Any man who plants three million trees can't be a total pessimist.