Word: beirutization
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They stood out like glistening white beacons against the green countryside, their silver warheads gleaming lethally in the sunshine. Beside the main highway from Beirut to Damascus, a dozen of them were poised on a gentle, flower-strewn ridge that overlooks the verdant Bekaa Valley in eastern Lebanon. Farther to the north, outside the airbase at Riyaq where Israeli Phantoms shot down two Syrian helicopters two weeks ago, another dozen were perched on newly dug mounds of earth. These were Syria's Soviet-made SA-6 missiles, one of the most potent antiaircraft weapons in the Syrian armory...
...meantime the White House dispatched Philip Habib, a widely respected career diplomat who had retired in 1978, to mediate with the various parties. Habib promptly got a firsthand view of what the argument was all about. Since Beirut Airport was still closed as a result of shellings last month, he was forced to fly to Damascus and drive to Beirut. His route, as it turned out, took him right past the missile installations along the highway. Once in the Lebanese capital, he huddled with Lebanon's President Elias Sarkis before going on to Damascus and Jerusalem for similar discussions...
From Damascus, the official news agency, SANA, reported that Syria was staging war games on its own territory to show that its forces were "continuously ready to confront Israel at any time." Rumors that Syria had sent some 4,000 of its peace-keeping forces south of the Beirut-Damascus highway, however, were refuted by U.N. and U.S. observers...
...response to these attacks, and to heavy artillery duels with the Israeli-backed Christian forces under the command of Major Sa'ad Haddad, Palestine Liberation Organization Chief Yasser Arafat ordered Palestinian guerrilla forces to go on full alert. At midweek, he summoned Arab ambassadors in Beirut to describe Israel's actions in southern Lebanon as "systematic genocide against the Palestinian and Lebanese people...
Although Lebanon's President Elias Sarkis succeeded late in the week in obtaining yet another cease-fire in Beirut and Zahle, observers saw little hope for any lasting peace. Said a high-ranking U.N. official: "Everybody believes he is fighting for survival. That, coupled with intense emotionalism and the abundance of weaponry in all hands, tends to make the situation totally uncontrollable." A U.S. State Department expert echoed that bleak assessment: "Lebanon has become a cockpit of warfare, mainly because of the non-Lebanese. We have been in touch with all the parties, but we are very pessimistic...