A fearfully light coffin is carried to a Beirut grave. Who will be next?

How well the Lebanese do funerals. "Who's next?" one of the posters asked beside the cortege of Jibran Tueni, journalist, editor, opposition MP, man-about-town, another young life lost to Lebanon; and, of course, we were all asking the same question.

The military band with its pompous trumpets, the sweating police with their poppy-red berets, the bossy soldiers who hopelessly tried to console the crowds, all were used to this routine. Was it so long ago that I had stood in this same Place de l'Etoile for the body of George Hawi, the old, murdered ex-Communist leader, to be anointed in the same Greek Orthodox church?

And yet when Tueni's coffin arrived - was it possible to find anything of him to put inside after Monday's devastating car bomb? - the band played the Last Post and the Lebanese national anthem with painful remorse and the poppy-red policemen snapped to attention and the soldiers too, and the red roses and yellow flowers thumped onto the lid of the coffin. Yes, the Lebanese know how to do funerals.

"Such a beautiful day," a young Lebanese woman said. "Always we have beautiful days for funerals - to remind us of the youthfulness of those we are burying. Just when they reach their years of achievement, they are cut down." Indeed they are. Ghassan Tueni, the great father and owner of An-Nahar - the newspaper his son edited - was fêted by the crowds who clapped as if this was a birthday rather than a deathday. And there was Walid Jumblatt, pleading with his supporters not to shout their hatred of President Bashar Assad of Syria. "Out with Bashar - he's a shit," they chanted. For 10 minutes, Jumblatt lectured them. They must stop these words. They must remember whom they were burying. To little avail.

Do the Lebanese realise what paths they are now walking? Fouad Siniora emerged from the parliament building opposite the church of Jibran Tueni's funeral. Siniora is Lebanon's smart young prime minister - and brave young prime minister in these dark days - and he threw his arms into the air like a prize-fighter. How the crowd roared their approval. How they applauded when that dreadfully light coffin moved past them. Like so many Arabs across the Middle East, they had lost their fear.

It is a wondrous thing to see, but also a frightening thing. For who will suffer next? Who's next? Walid? Fouad? Outside the parliament, Hizbollah's MPs appeared and were duly booed. Because they still support Syria? Or because they declined to help Walid Jumblatt when he pleaded for their leader's protection from Syria on a television phone-in at the weekend?

And there are other, disturbing questions. Repeatedly, the US ambassador to Beirut has warned Syria it must not create violence in Lebanon. But it seems to have no effect. And it was America, let us remember, which preposterously told the courageous Fouad Siniora - before he was prime minister - that he was banned from the US for having made a trivial contribution to a Hizbollah charity four years ago. So the Prime Minister - trained in the US as an economist, no more true-blue supporter of American values can you find - still cannot apparently fly to New York. But then again, these days any bolt-hole will do.