"They will come to my house first . . . they will not reach your apartment." Well, I don't really want an armoured door on my home.

But have things deteriorated this far in Beirut? I pondered what to say to Mustafa. I could not repeat the latest mantra of the late Tony Blair that he had "a sense of possibilities".

All of us in Lebanon have a "sense of possibilities" right now . . . and they are all bad. The Lebanese army . . . still fighting its way into the Palestinian Nahr el-Bared refugee camp in the north more than a month after the minister of defence announced total victory over the army's Fatah al-Islam opponents . . . is about the only institution still working in this country.

Friday morning's Beirut newspapers carried frontpage pictures of Lebanese soldiers all making 'victory' signs to photographers.

But victory over whom? Day after day, the US airforce C-130s arrive at Beirut's Rafiq Hariri International Airport . . . named after the man whose assassination on 14 February detonated the latest tragedy of Lebanon . . .

with their cargoes of weapons for the Lebanese army. Would that they had arrived a year ago, many say, when Israel was destroying much of Lebanon. But of course, a year ago, the American C-130s were arriving in Israel with weapons to be used against Lebanon, including cluster munitions which have contaminated 36.6 million sq m of Lebanon.

The UN reports that 23 Lebanese civilians have been killed by these wretched weapons since last year's war, and 203 wounded. In a truly pitiful remark, the UN secretary general stated last month: "Despite a number of attempts by UN senior officials to obtain information regarding the firing data of cluster munitions utilised [sic] during last summer's conflict, Israel has yet to provide this critical data." To which my reaction is:

why not ask Washington? Surely a UN official could take the Amtrak out of New York and pick up the figures from the Pentagon?

But it is all much worse than this. The Lebanese army has been reporting to the UN a whole series of violations of its country's sovereignty, from Israelis to new Palestinian militant bases inside Lebanese territory.

Take the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command and Fatah Intifada, two institutions much loved of Damascus. According to the Lebanese authorities, the PFLP-GC has set up camps in Jubayla and Ain el-Bayda, while in Ossaya the PFLP-GC has installed eight rocket launchers pointing towards Rayak airbase, from which the Lebanese airforce has been flying Kiowa helicopters to the Nahr el-Bared siege. Other Palestinian units have been reinforcing positions at Wadi al-Asswad, Balta, Helwa and Deir al-Achayer. Under UN resolutions, Palestinians outside the refugee camps should have been totally disarmed.

UN reports to New York are of the deepest pessimism. The Blue Line is "tense and fragile". Hezbollah continues to monitor the UN peacekeeping army's activities. Needless to say, the Syrians have protested their innocence and even asked for European technology to help prevent arms smuggling from Lebanon into Syria. Let me repeat this:

from Lebanon into Syria. Yet another UN report says arms continue to flow in the other direction and tribal and family ties between the authorities in Lebanon and Syria make smuggling easy.

And now the latest UN report on the enquiry into Hariri's assassination talks of the "deterioration in the political and security environment". The UN cops have produced confidential reports of 2,400 pages into Hariri's murder and other bombings in Lebanon.

The UN believes the man who claimed in a video that he was to kill himself in the suicide bombing was murdered and another man, apparently non-Lebanese, drove the truck containing the 1,800kg of explosives that killed Hariri. The UN knows he was aged 20 to 25, had short dark hair, lived in "an urban environment" for the first 10 years of his earthly life and in the country for the rest.

And the UN has discovered much, much more. But the news is all bad. Across the Middle East, it is all bad. This is not a time for a "sense of possibilities". My landlord is right.

Weld on the iron door.