The pressure will come from Hezbollah and its allies who will argue that the Lebanese Shiite movement, as a "legitimate resistance group," should be allowed to retain its current status and more importantly, to hold onto their guns. The term "guns" is used very loosely in this context, as in effect the "guns' in question include 155mm artillery, tanks, mortars and tens of thousands of rockets.

There is a single solution to the problem of Hezbollah's weapons. They must be handed over to the government or else Lebanon risks repeating an appalling event of history.

Today it's Doha. Hopefully, the Doha conference will manage to accomplish what previous conferences did not.

A little more than a decade ago it was Taif, the conference that put an end to the civil war that left Hezbollah with its weapons.

This brings to mind other names tied to other agreements dealing with other armed groups that never held: the Cairo Accords, the Melkart Understanding, and others that came in between. We refer of course to Lebanon's past problems in dealing with the armed Palestinian presence during the late 1960s, 70s, and 80s.

After every major clash between the Palestinian guerrillas and the Lebanese came a round of talks, i.e. the Cairo Accords in November 1969, which allowed the Palestinian resistance to retain its weapons and become a de facto state within the state. This was followed up with the Melkart Understanding in May 1973. None of these agreements solved the underlying problem, which was the fact that the Palestinian fighters in Lebanon behaved like they had legitimate autonomy.

Now history is about to repeat itself except that now Hezbollah has replaced the Palestinians. The Lebanese Shiite movement also seems to be repeating the very same mistakes committed by the Palestine Liberation Organization and its off-shoot groups during their Lebanon sojourn.

The insistence by Hezbollah of maintaining its microwave telecommunications network that connects Beirut with the south and the western Bekaa, despite its illegality, follows closely the behavior of the Palestinian armed groups prior to their expulsion in summer 1982.

To avoid having the country fall into a similar predicament in 2008 as it did in 1969 by accepting the Cairo Accords the Siniora government must under no circumstances let itself be led into signing a new version of the "Cairo Accords" only to regret it later.

Hezbollah must be convinced that its future lies in joining political debate to help rebuild Lebanon. It must accept to transform itself into a purely political party and to hand over to the Lebanese army all its heavy weapons.

Having experienced the nefarious effects of groups behaving outside the law, the Lebanese must not be led into making the same mistake again. History must not repeat itself.