People are being shot and killed again in Beirut. You’ve probably read about it.
Or more likely… you probably haven’t.
Because Lebanon, abutting the Mediterranean and once admired as the Switzerland of the Middle East before being torn apart by a 15-year-long civil war between its many religious and ethnic factions, just doesn’t get much attention any more.
During the war, the nation was important enough that President Reagan sent in the Marines as peacekeepers, which I covered. But the peace didn’t hold. A truck bomb killed 63 people at the U.S. embassy and a suicide bomber drove his truck into the peacekeepers’ barracks near Beirut’s airport and killed 241 of them. I covered that too. It made me wonder, will this war ever end?
Yet today, with so many more recent conflicts, who even remembers?
—The war ripped Beirut apart—
But whether we remember or not, whether we notice or not, Lebanon has been in a slow crawl toward more chaos, and the repercussions go beyond its borders. Potentially even as far as ours.
Its neighbor Syria has been half destroyed in a savage civil war, pouring refugees into Lebanon. Hezbollah, a terrorist group and ally of Iran, fully controls the southern half of Lebanon and is a powerful player in its politics. Eighteen different ethnic and religious sects in the nation are often at odds, from Shiites to Sunnis, from Christians to Druze, and still have militias with itchy trigger fingers. And then there was last year’s devastating chemical explosion at Beirut’s port. In a country already unraveling, it killed some 220 people, caused an estimated $15-billion in damage, and made about 300,000 people homeless.
But those are just statistics.
In a guest essay last month in The New York Times, Lebanese writer Lina Mounzer put a face on those figures. Lamenting the Lebanese currency’s cascading loss of value, she wrote, “I long for the simplest pleasures: gathering with family on Sundays for elaborate meals that are unaffordable now; driving down the coast to see a friend, instead of saving my gas for emergencies; going out for a drink in Beirut’s Mar Mikhael strip without counting how many of my old haunts have shut down.”
—The safety of normal life is threatened, again—
Every few days, she says, “There’s a new low to get used to.” Electricity is seldom and spotty. Her computer and router run out of juice by noon. Stores haven’t just run short of cooking gas, they’ve run short of bottled water, in a capital where tap water never was to be trusted. With no fuel for refrigeration at her supermarket, “the meat, cheese, and freezer sections are all empty.” People beg for medicines on social media. At gas stations suffering severely short supplies, gunfights have broken out.
There was a time when this calamity seemed unimaginable because when the civil war ended some 30 years ago, life did get better. Not just because people were not getting shelled and shot any more, but because of the invincible spirit I saw there during the war. As Lina Mounzer wrote, “There was shelling but there was also glamour, a zest for life like an electric current.”
—An electric current even where electricity had disappeared—
Here’s how that current coursed through the nation.
One morning, while covering a battle for Beirut’s airport, I ran with a camera crew to a house which looked like its back balcony might be a good vantage point. We banged hard on the door and a woman answered. Her country was collapsing around her, bullets were hitting her home, it could be suicidal to even step outside, yet there she stood at the front door, made up and dressed up as if she was going out that night to a fancy dress ball.
One afternoon, I was sitting side-by-side with a man in a coffee shop, negotiating to get to his boss who was selling arms to several of Beirut’s merciless militias, when thugs came in and without a word, pulled him up and over our table and dragged him screaming out the door, overturning the table and sending china crashing to the floor. No one else even looked up. They went on sipping their coffee.
One night, dining at a gourmet restaurant downtown, they seated us at a table right next to the leader of one of the militias that relentlessly fought for power over the nation. Only moments after he and his coterie got up and walked to their car at the curb, a bomb blew up under the hood and incinerated them all. But inside the restaurant, despite the broken glass, they never stopped serving.
A zest for life, a zest for normal, like an electric current.
So they rebuilt Beirut after the war, better than it was before. I went back and shot a documentary about it. Savagery was replaced by stability. Rubble was replaced by renovation. Terrorism was replaced by tourism. It was the rebirth of the Switzerland of the Middle East. The mayor of Beirut told me, “We would like to feel and think and act on the following basis: the war was a big mistake by all, the war is gone forever.”
—During Beirut’s rebirth—
If only. If Lebanon isn’t being bombarded any more by artillery shells, it is being bombarded by shortages. In a report in June on the country’s collapsing economy, the World Bank said, “The economic and financial crisis is likely to rank in the top 10, possibly top 3, most severe crises episodes globally since the mid-nineteenth century.”
The Switzerland of the Middle East is going dark. Again.
Back in the ‘70s and ‘80s, we’d have to race in zig-zag patterns across the so-called Green Line, the no-man’s land that separated the Muslim side of the city from the Christian side, to dodge snipers’ bullets from the war-battered buildings above us. Yet the last time I was there, they not only had reconstructed the Green Line as the heart of Beirut’s social life, but they’d built a magnificent new mosque right next door to the headquarters of the Christian Maronite Church.
Life was good.
—Switzerland of the Middle East again?—
So now, when I read that snipers once again are firing from the rooftops of Beirut, it gives me the shivers. Because if a battered economy or religious rivalries or political stalemates don’t lead to a civil war, an embattled population might.
And in a world where everything is interconnected, from economics to information, from culturalism to terrorism, that’s where it could come to us. It can’t be good when the electric current goes out.
Which is why, if you haven’t read about what’s happening right now in Lebanon, you probably should.
For almost five decades Greg Dobbs has been a correspondent for two television networks, a political columnist for The Denver Post and syndicated columnist for Scripps newspapers, a moderator on Rocky Mountain PBS, and author of two books, including one about the life of a foreign correspondent called “Life in the Wrong Lane.” He has covered presidencies and politics at home and international crises around the globe, from Afghanistan to South Africa, from Iran to Egypt, from the Soviet Union to Saudi Arabia, from Vietnam to Venezuela, from Libya to Liberia, from Panama to Poland. Dobbs has won three Emmys, and the Distinguished Service Award from the Society of Professional Journalists.
Thanks for the article. The story of Lebanon is a sad one. Its history is a reflection on how fragile stability can be, it use to be a tourist destination that was noted for its beauty. We should look at Lebanon's and remember that peace and beauty are not givens, they are earned and must be protected. The United States is not immune to what has happened in Lebanon. What we see happening here, now, should give Americans pause. We could be a Hyperthyroidic version of Lebanon. Our divisiveness, fear and hatred is tearing apart the fabric of republic and we could become a Lebanon.
I like to remember Beirut as it was, one of the beautiful cosmopolitan cities of the world.