Unmeasured demographic and ideological shifts, not instability, tore Lebanon apart
Evidence
As a result, in Lebanon and in other places, experts failed to understand that much of what truly mattered about postcolonial states could not easily be herded under the rubric of “stability.” In Lebanon it was precisely those devastatingly mobile forces the experts had never documented or had consistently underestimated — social dislocations, demographic shifts such as the emergence of the Shi’a population, confessional loyalties, ideological currents — that tore the country apart so savagely. — Edward W. Said, Covering Islam, 141