Beirut International Airport was a Weekly Reader current-events quiz made manifest. Here was the Amal in force. There was a blown-up Royal Jordanian passenger plane. And right at our wingtip was the pirated TWA jet. Somewhere off in the snakes-and-ladders maze of the Shiite neighborhoods, thirty-six American tourists were in a pickle. The whole scene set me to thinking about the villainy of human motivation, mostly my own. I mean, I was delighted for the excuse to be back in Lebanon. I like to hang around places where human nature is at its most baffling.
Lebanon sits on the thin neck of the Fertile Crescent, an arable strip no more than forty miles wide that joins the great basins of Mesopotamia and the Nile. From this flinder of sparsely watered top spoil come our alphabet, our religion, and, in the form of the first agriculture, our civilization itself. Who holds “The Mountain,” as the Lebanese call it, stands athwart the trade routes of Africa and Asia, controls the eastern Mediterranean, and has a grip on the remote-control garage-door opener to Europe or something like that. No fan of social chaos can help but thrill to tread ground fought over by Canaanites, Egyptians, Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Arabs, Turks, French, British, more Arabs, and occasional U.S. Marines. It’s been a five-thousand-year tag-team match, and, what’s more, the crazy oafs are still in the ring. Philistines, Nazarenes, Israelites, peoples of the great Syrian desert, and strange firinghi European interlopers are, to this very day, tossing half nelsons on each other and flailing away with rabbit punches and illegal flying dropkicks.
A friend had sent one of Lebanon’s innumerable “fixers” to meet me at the airport. “Mr. Bisgee! Mr. Bisgee!” (“P.J.” is quite beyond the Arab tongue.) This sweaty, amiable little man shoved me in front of fifty people at passport control, dragooned a porter, fended off a bribery touch from a Lebanese army officer, whisked me uninspected through customs, and put me in a chauffeured car. The Lebanese understand trouble. That is, they understand the only understandable thing about it. There’s always a buck to be made when trouble’s afoot.
Six months ago nearly all American newsmen were pulled out of Lebanon. Terrorism was one reason, but so was the lack of a “hometown hook.” The only other Americans left in the country were seven obscure kidnap victims and some embassy duffs. Neither group lent itself to vibrant coverage. So what if man’s fate might depend on the ugly events hereabouts? Stateside coverage dwindled to a few paragraphs in the international “Deaths Elsewhere” column. Now, however, Hostages II was playing, and scribblers, Nikon hounds, tape jockeys, and talking heads were in from the ends of the earth. The Lebanese middlemen couldn’t have been happier if the Marines had invaded, and they might just yet.
I checked into the Summerland Hotel on the seafront in Beirut’s south suburbs. The Summerland is a great three-sided, four-tiered resort complex with shopping center, health club, sauna, restaurants, and a beauty salon. In the Summerland’s center court are three swimming pools, a spiral water slide, an artificial grotto with waterfall, a small-boat harbor, and a private beach. Two acres of deck chairs were covered with tan bodies. The smooth Arab girls wearing makeup poolside looked to have been teleported from a Westchester country club.
This doesn’t match your mental picture of Beirut. But Beirut doesn’t match any mental picture of anything. After ten years of polygonal civil war and invasions and air strikes by Syrians, Israelis, and multilateral peace-keeping forces, the place still isn’t as squalid as some cities that have never been hit by anything but government social programs. There are zones of manic destruction, of course. The Green Line looks like an antinuke-benefit-concert album cover. The Bois de Pins, planted in the 1600s, has taken so many rocket attacks that it’s a forest of phone poles. Hotel Row along the Corniche was destroyed in the first year of warfare. The best hotel, the St. George, is a burned hulk. But its bar is still open and people water-ski from the beach there in all but the worst of the fighting. “What about snipers?” I once asked someone. He said, “Oh, most of the snipers have automatic weapons. They aren’t very accurate.”
Everywhere there are chips and chucks out of buildings and buildings missing entirely, but there are also cranes and construction gangs and masons and plasterers. Maybe nowhere else has a city been built and destroyed at the same time. Electricity is intermittent and the garbage hasn’t been collected since the late 1970s, but the shops are full of all the world’s imports. And with no trade quotas or import duties or government to enforce them if they existed, goods are cheap. Not an hour passes without gunfire or explosion, but the traffic jams are filled with Mercedes sedans.