Hezbollah plays its sway in Lebanon.

Byline: Liz Sly

Mar. 21--BEIRUT -- A smart new highway whisks travelers from downtown Beirut to the Shiite-dominated southern suburbs, now just a few minutes away but still a world apart from the glitzy city center where Lebanon's middle-class revolutionaries are sustaining their anti-government protests.

The contrast is immediately apparent. Here the streets are more crowded, the cars older and shabbier; many women are modestly veiled or cloaked in long black chadors and the stern portraits of turbaned Shiite clerics gaze down from huge billboards.

This is the other face of Lebanon: poor, socially conservative and loyal, for the most part, to Hezbollah, a group funded by Iran and branded by the U.S. as a terrorist organization.

It also is a group that claims the support of a majority of Lebanon's largest community, that maintains the country's only private army and that evidently cannot be ignored as Lebanon gropes its way toward a new political accommodation in the wake of the protests against Syria's presence in Lebanon.

"Lebanon's situation cannot stay stable without dealing with Hezbollah as a political party," said Nizar Hamzeh, a political scientist at the American University of Beirut. "If Shiites are not part of the Lebanese formula, the situation…