“This is not Norway here, and it is not Denmark.” -- Lebanese Christian militia leader Bashir Gemayel.
Last month I made a terrible mistake.
A reader from Lake Oswego -- a suburb of my city of Portland -- emailed and asked if he thought he should take his wife and children to Lebanon on their next vacation. I said sure. Just stay out of the Hezbollah areas along the border with Israel and in the suburbs south of Beirut. And make sure your kids understand that Lebanese drivers are considerably more reckless than drivers in Oregon, that they should be more careful than usual when crossing the street.
Needless to say, this was absolutely awful advice.
My friend Sean LaFreniere - who drove with me to Northern Iraq on a whim -- was scheduled to be with me in Beirut right now. (I am at home and he is now blogging from Tunisia and Turkey.) He was slightly nervous, but I told him he did not need to worry. Lebanon could become a dangerous country again. There are warning signs to watch out for, I said, and I told him what they were. At the time (and this was only a few weeks ago) those warning signs were not yet flashing red. Who would have thought war could engulf the whole country, and not just the border, in one day with no warning?
I kept my eye on the country, even so, because potential medium-term trouble was quietly brewing. Many Lebanese Christians, Sunnis, and Druze were getting so impatient with the impasse over Hezbollah’s weapons they threatened to reconstitute their own armed militias that were disbanded after the war. Peaceful and diplomatic negotiation over Hezbollah’s role in a sovereign rather than schismatic Lebanon was not going to last very much longer. Once the rest of Lebanon armed itself against Hezbollah, a balance of terror would reign that could explode into war without any warning. That was the danger. That was the nightmare. That’s why Hezbollah had not been disarmed.
You ask, "Who would have thought war could engulf the whole country, and not just the border, in one day with no warning?"
I ask you, who could not have thought such a thing possible, given the recent history of the region. I actually laughed out loud in disbelief when I read an interview at LA Times of a 27-yr old UCLA grad student at the American University of Beirut... she was quoted as saying, "The Middle East was never like this."
It's too easy to pay attention to the good things, the positive things, to wear American-style rose-colored glasses and think "kumbaya they're all getting along." Even during the bloodiest days of the Civil War, a Phalangist could sit down and have tea with an Amal follower or a Communist or a PFLP rep one day, then do his best to turn the other three into pink mist the next. Same as it ever was. Nothing personal, really. A couple of years of peace and rebuilding aren't the same as a generation of non-partisan prosperity, education, and open borders.