"During lunchtime if you place food on the table, by the time you've finished eating, we can take over," boasted one grizzled Hezbollah fighter patrolling the capital's famous Hamra Street.
He identified himself only by the nickname Zam-Zam. He held what he described as an Israeli-made M-16 assault rifle equipped with a night-vision scope and a laser sight.
"It was an insult for us to fight these people," he said of Sunni militia loyal to the government. "We fight great armies."
However, few observers expect Hezbollah to try to take over Lebanon or even continue to police West Beirut, especially areas long dominated by its political rivals.
The group's fighters avoided storming government buildings such as the Grand Serail, the gracious Ottoman-era palace that houses the prime minister.
Instead, the offensive was an "object lesson" meant to demonstrate the group's ability to quickly subdue its domestic rivals without exposing its arsenal of heavy weapons meant to target Israel in a potential war, said Augustus Richard Norton, author of Hezbollah: A Short History and a scholar at Boston University.
The current conflict was triggered when the government challenged Hezbollah's autonomy Tuesday by outlawing the group's strategically important fiber-optic communications network.
Hezbollah fighters responded by pushing into the heart of the capital from their strongholds in South Beirut and southern Lebanon, an escalation in the continuing Lebanese political crisis that seemed to catch the Siniora administration by surprise.
"They see the government as at least hurting them in their plans to rebuild their weapons and make their great designs for the region," said Oussama Safa, director of the Lebanese Center for Policy Studies, a think tank. "They cannot afford a bit of uncertainty about the future of their weapons."
Borzou Daragahi and Raed Rafei write for the Los Angeles Times.
