"This is not Norway here, and it is not Denmark." - Former president and Christian militia leader Bashir Gemayel during Lebanon's civil war.

The car bomb that killed Rafik Hariri was the first, not the last, in the country's new era.

There have been four more in the last two weeks - three in Christian East Beirut and one in the Christian port city of Jounieh. Restaurants are putting up road blocks. Shopping malls are deserted. Sidewalk cafes are almost empty. The UN headquarters is sand-bagged. My hotel is eerily silent. Permits are now required to enter the Parliament building. Lebanese soldiers armed with machine-guns are stationed on every corner of the strikingly beautiful Nejmeh Square (also known as the Plaza d'Etoile).

I took a taxi to Jim Hake's hotel to meet him for breakfast and was stopped at the driveway by soldiers who opened the trunk, the hood, and all the doors. They searched under the car with mirrors for explosives strapped to the chassis. It was somehow both soothing and alarming at the same time.

A sign taped to the elevator doors in my hotel lobby: "Due to the security situation we no longer allow food deliveries from outside the hotel. Thank you for understanding." And thanks for making me feel so much better.

But being here is not as scary as you might think.

New York City after the terror attacks on September 11 was a lot more frightening. No one has recently killed 3,000 people here in Beirut. The city is densely populated, but it would take ten hijacked airplanes - or a mechanized ground invasion from Syria - to inflict that level of damage. It is not going to happen.

On the contrary, the post-Hariri car bombs are more like those Europeans have come to expect from the Irish Republican Army and the Basque ETA. They seem deliberately planted so they won't kill anyone. What's happening here is an old school terrorist campaign, markedly unlike Al Qaeda's new mass-murdering terrorist onslaughts. The attacks seem cleverly calibrated to frighten people into submission without provoking yet another, stronger, anti-Syrian backlash.

"If the Syrians kill people with car bombs," one Lebanese told me, "they will be lynched in the streets."

The siege is, most likely, Syrian psychological warfare. The democratic opposition thinks that it's brilliant. "If Syria can show evidence that their evacuation from the country leads to chaos and ethnic sectarian warfare," one of their principal leaders said, "they think they will be invited to stay."

Crafting counter-measures against this kind of "divide and rule" propaganda is one of the most important challenges for Lebanon's opposition. So far they've tackled it brilliantly.