Word: chamoun
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Street Fighters. In Lebanon, the original source of disagreement-the possibility that President Chamoun might change the constitution to win a second six-year term-was no longer an issue. But still the Moslem rebels in arms against him continued their sporadic resistance. Reportedly reinforced by fedayeen infiltrators from the Gaza Strip, rebel forces attacked a Beirut police station, looted it of arms and ammunition before army troops drove them out in one of the few real actions of the month-old crisis...
...barricaded mansion in Beirut's Moslem quarter. Two days later street fighting broke out again; an estimated five persons were killed in Beirut and Tripoli. Next day His Beatitude Paul Meouchi, onetime Los Angeles parish priest who is now patriarch of the Maronite Roman Catholic sect to which Chamoun and most Lebanese Christians belong, said in a press conference that the President should "take a trip" abroad and turn over power to Army Chief Brigadier General Fuad Shehab. Otherwise, he warned, the half-Christian, half-Moslem republic of Lebanon might see its civil war turn into a disastrous religious...
Second Thoughts. As the crisis lengthened, the usefulness of all-out U.S. aid to Chamoun's regime became more and more questionable. The U.S. police gear and tanks arriving by plane and ship seemed unlikely to promote order where order finally depends on a balance between religious, social and political forces none of which is strong enough to dominate the country...
Secretary Dulles publicly supported Chamoun by saying that the Lebanese regime had "what seems to us to be serious evidence" of Nasserite interference in its affairs; but the State Department privately hoped that the Lebanese government would not press its complaint before the U.N. asking investigation of United Arab Republic subversion. Cairo, Moscow and half the Middle East press were crying "American intervention." Two of Chamoun's Moslem ministers resigned in protest at what they called a "betraying" appeal to outsiders against a fellow Arab state...
...week's end Beirut reported that Chamoun himself was showing some disposition to call off his U.N. complaint and accept a peacemaking government headed by his fellow Maronite, Army Chief Shehab. If so, the fundamental U.S. objective of maintaining an independent Lebanon, in delicate Moslem-Christian balance, would be better served than by widening the chaos. In the turbulent world of the Middle East, an ally may sometimes help its friends more by not making them too conspicuously dependent on its help...