(Dobbs) “You forget, my friend, this is the Middle East.”
Now, the war between Israel and Hezbollah is at the heart of the Iran-U.S. war.
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Oddly, Beirut, which is more than a thousand miles from the Iranian capital of Tehran, is in the middle of the war between Iran and the United States. And Lebanon’s beautiful seaside capital might be an inescapable sticking point in efforts to bring the war to an end.
That’s because the Iranian-funded Hezbollah controls southern Beirut. The Lebanese government has no presence. I’ve been there and Hezbollah is so entrenched that even the traffic cops wear the insignia of the terror group’s flag and not that of their nation.
In its war to wipe out Hezbollah, Israel has threatened to attack them there. Iran’s negotiators almost two weeks ago said that if that happens, they will cut off their indirect talks with the United States aimed at ending the war. The president of Lebanon meanwhile says Iran is using his country as a “bargaining chip.” But he has no power in the equation.
As people were fond of saying when I covered the region and was baffled by the logic, “You forget, my friend, this is the Middle East.”
Beirut always has been an enigma. Before the 15-year-long Lebanese civil war, even during the civil war, it was considered the Paris of the Middle East. If you lived there, sometimes you had to run through fields of snipers across a no-man’s-land downtown that separated mostly-Christian East Beirut from mostly-Muslim West Beirut. Sometimes you risked being kidnapped by a rival clan. Sometimes you risked car bombs. Yet I never saw the people of Beirut broken by the dangers and threats that would break most of the rest of us. That climate of instability and insecurity simply became the fabric of life.
One example: one night some fellow journalists and I went to dine in a restaurant in downtown Beirut. Just after we walked in, one of the country’s major warlords came in with his entourage and took a big table. As we were finishing, they were finishing, and the warlord’s driver and bodyguard were told to go outside and start the car. Not a minute later, an explosion rocked all of us and we ran to the street and the car and the two men who had just gotten in were incinerated. Then, everyone walked back inside and finished their dinners.
Another: a camera crew and I were angling for a good vantage point in the hills above Beirut’s airport to watch a battle for the airport unfold below us. I spotted a house sitting on a cliff and told the crew to stay put while I zig-zagged my way to the front door and knocked. A woman answered. Her hair was in curlers. Here were these battles raging in front of her house and in the valley on its back side, and I couldn’t help thinking, she was making herself beautiful for what? She let us in and while the crew was recording the airport battle, I asked her about the curlers because believe me, she wasn’t going anywhere that night. What she told me was, “If we let the war stop us from living our lives, we have lost.”
A final example. On one trip to Beirut, my assignment was to try to find an American who had worked for the CIA but had gone rogue and now was selling arms to some of the city’s militias. After a couple of days of digging, I made contact with his second-in-command, another American, and we arranged to meet at a coffee shop. We rendezvoused there the next morning, but we hardly had time to establish our identities to each other when two thugs came thundering in with machine guns over their shoulders and marched straight to our table and without a word, grabbed this guy under both shoulders and pulled him over our table which went crashing to the floor and dragged him out screaming. When I finally collected my nerves, I looked up and every other customer was looking down. The principle in Beirut was, “I see nothing, I hear nothing, I say nothing.”
That is how the people stayed resilient. That was Beirut.
As we moved around the city in those days, we always wondered whether we were passing close to the makeshift prisons where several western hostages were held. Associated Press correspondent Terry Anderson, American University of Beirut dean Tom Sutherland, even an envoy for the Archbishop of Canterbury, Terry Waite, who traveled to Beirut to try to win freedom for those hostages and others but ended up being held as a hostage himself. He was a prisoner for four years, Sutherland for nearly six-and-a-half years, Anderson for closer to seven. Sutherland later told me that in his 2,353 days as a captive, he never once saw the sun.
Then there were the bombings. In April of 1983, a suicide bomber got close to the U.S. embassy and lit a fuse and killed 32 Lebanese citizens, 17 Americans, and 14 others. A new, far more fortified embassy had to be built. Six months later, another suicide bomber drove an explosives-laden truck into the barracks of the United States Marines who had been brought in as peacekeepers. 241 of them were killed. I got there not long after and could still see places where some poor souls were shaving in the morning when the truck bomb blew up.
That too was Beirut.
Many years have passed and while much of the city was rebuilt, it was never free of heartache. Israel attacked Palestinians in their camps there. Yasser Arafat’s PLO established a beachhead there until a split in his organization saw an even more radical armed wing chase him and his wing out.
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And for more than forty years now, there has been Hezbollah. One day in the early 1980s, a crew and I were driving from Beirut to Damascus, which are only about 70 miles apart. Passing through the Beqaa Valley, we stopped to eat in the ancient city of Baalbek. In the center of the town square, a man was addressing a small crowd of men, holding out a machine gun for the men to see. But he wasn’t speaking Arabic. He was speaking Farsi, the language of Iran, then a translator repeated it in Arabic. What he was telling the crowd was how to use the weapon.
What we learned when I asked the translator was, we were seeing the birth of Hezbollah in Lebanon. It was a nascent group, a new proxy for Iran, established to fight Israel.
Life comes full circle.
Now, the war between Israel and Hezbollah is at the heart of the Iran-U.S. war. Although ceasefires have been announced, Israel still attacks Hezbollah and Hezbollah still attacks Israel. Just this weekend, soldiers on both sides have died. If they won’t agree to make peace, there is a chance that Iran and the United States won’t either.