Hanf dates Aoun's dissolution, by Decree 420, to 4 November, with elections set for January 1990; Traboulsi places it in September 1989. Raymond Eddé held the decree constitutional; Georges Vedel, the French jurist consulted by Speaker Husseini, found that an interim government could not dissolve parliament.

On 5 November, Hanf says, 58 deputies met at the Qlayaat air base, seven kilometres from the Syrian border, 25 of them flown from Paris on Rafic Hariri's private plane. They returned Hussein Husseini as speaker, voted on Taif and chose René Moawad as president: 35 votes on the first ballot, 52 with 6 abstentions on the second. That evening demonstrators broke into the Bkerke patriarchate and made Patriarch Sfeir kiss a portrait of Aoun.

Aoun, Hanf writes, warned that any Christian deputy joining a Moawad-Hoss government would lose the right to live in the 'free areas'. When bombs hit the homes of many Christian deputies after the election, his condemnation was half-hearted: he voiced 'understanding for the anger of the people'.

Moawad had been president for seventeen days. Hanf puts the dead at fourteen, including the president; de Clerck and Malsagne say he died with 23 other people. Fisk describes a remote-controlled charge of 250 kg of explosives concealed in a disused shop, and watched bulldozers clear the rubble within hours.

Hanf: Elias Hrawi, the only candidate, won on the second ballot with 47 votes of the 53 deputies present, 5 abstaining, under Syrian protection; at the same sitting parliament gave itself four more years. Speaker Husseini had gone to Damascus on the night of 22 November. Traboulsi's chronology places the election on 22 November.

Hanf sees the cabinet as falling short of Taif's national unity government, since Michel Sassine stayed in Paris and Kataeb leader Georges Saadé wavered.

The crowds began gathering at Baabda as soon as Hrawi gave Aoun his ultimatum, according to Hanf the day after the election. The sit-in lasted weeks. Fisk saw the Syrian army move hundreds of tanks and guns into the mountains above Beirut in early December. Emile Lahoud was named army commander on 28 November (de Clerck and Malsagne).

The books place the renewed Amal-Hezbollah fighting of December 1989 in Iqlim al-Touffah, east of Sidon. Hanf says it started after Hezbollah fighters from the Bekaa crossed the zone held by the South Lebanon Army.

Hanf: the army's counter-offensive of 6 February 1990 reached the coast near Antelias and took Dbayeh, home to Lebanese Forces barracks and the militia's finance department.

Totals for the whole army-Lebanese Forces war differ. De Clerck and Malsagne count over 1,500 victims, fighters and civilians, and say the first three weeks claimed more than the six months of the 1989 war against Syria; the army alone lost 21 officers and 221 soldiers, about 100,000 people moved elsewhere in Lebanon and close to 200,000 went abroad. Hanf estimates about 1,000 dead and 3,500 wounded; Picard 1,000 dead and 3,000 wounded for January-July; Fisk 'well over a thousand' dead in Beirut from end January to end May.

Colonel Paul Fares declared himself head of a 'neutral army' on 10 February 1990, as a Lebanese Forces push on the army's Kleiat mountain position stalled (Hanf).

Hanf: after the army took Ain al-Rummaneh on 16 February 1990, having attacked the eastern suburbs on the 11th, the Lebanese Forces fell back to Ashrafieh through West Beirut. A Reuters reporter with the troops said it was 'like an earthquake had hit it'.

Aoun lost almost all his helicopters when the Lebanese Forces, as a diversion, besieged the Adma base in Kisrawan; the outnumbered commandos held out until a deal let them leave armed (Hanf).

Hanf notes the blockade had little support even outside the enclave, as civilians rather than Aoun's soldiers bore it. On 28 September 1990, he records, Lahoud's troops tightened it by taking every checkpoint around Aoun's area; Aoun's followers protested daily there and at Baabda.

Sources differ on dates. Picard has Damascus and Tehran imposing an Amal–Hezbollah ceasefire on 6 November 1990; de Clerck and Malsagne date the inter-Shi'i accord signed in Damascus to 9 November and, with Aoun's fall, treat it as formally ending the 'civil' war. Hanf says both movements withdrew their fighters from Iqlim al-Tuffah after drawn-out Syrian and Iranian mediation. That final round began in December 1989 (de Clerck and Malsagne, Confluences) or, in Hezbollah's official version, in July 1990, with an Amal siege of nearly 100 days.

Hanf: the militias were ordered out of Beirut on 17 November 1990, as army units deployed across the capital under a security plan cleared in advance with Syria. Amal (to the south) and the PSP (to the Chouf) left at once, Hezbollah three days later. The Lebanese Forces first set conditions; their pull-out, opened by a military parade on 23 November, ended by 3 December.

Hanf: on 4 December 1990 soldiers started clearing the Green Line barricades, the Lebanese Forces having left Beirut on 3 December except for 300 men at their Karantina headquarters and in the port.

Hanf says 300 Lebanese Forces militiamen stayed at Karantina and the port after the December 1990 withdrawal, and dates the army's entry into the Fifth Basin and other militia ports to 11 March 1991.

Hanf: Omar Karami was asked on 20 December 1990 to form a government after Hoss quit on the 19th; Hrawi had settled its make-up with the Syrians in Damascus on 15 December, excluding Hoss and Speaker Husseini.

Hanf lists the parties left out of the Karami cabinet of 24 December 1990: Hezbollah, the National Liberals, Aoun's supporters and the Communists. With 30 ministers it was Lebanon's largest. Berri, Jumblatt, Geagea, Hobeika, Suleiman Frangieh, Abdallah el-Amin and Assad Hardan, seven militia chiefs, joined as ministers of state without portfolio. After the Lebanese Forces protested at its make-up, Geagea urged the Christian ministers to resign; only his two colleagues followed. It won confidence on 9 January 1991.