Word: easts
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...first year working in Lebanon, I met with an American official at a café in East Beirut. Embassy officials can't easily leave their compound, on a hill outside the city, thanks to security procedures that treat this normally fun-loving Mediterranean country as if it were Iraq or Sudan. That's because the previous embassy was destroyed by a suicide car bombing in 1983, an attack that the U.S. blames on Hizballah, the Shi'ite Muslim Party of God that had been formed a year earlier to resist the Israeli invasion of Lebanon. But this café meeting...
...only way to de-fang Hizballah is to address the issue that motivated the creation of the group: the Middle East conflict itself. As long as Arabs are at war with Israel, one group or another will find a way to infiltrate Lebanon's fragmented society to create a front line against Israel. But if the U.S. pushes Israel to address Lebanese grievances, if Israel engages its neighbors in a sincere peace process, then Hizballah will have less and less justification to exist as an independent armed entity. Indeed, as a step towards decommissioning its arms, Hizballah could even become...
...Israel Obama, Unsettled President Obama's hopes of delivering important Israeli concessions to Arab leaders during his landmark Middle East trip dimmed after Israel demurred on his call for a halt to the expansion of Jewish settlements into Palestinian territories. Despite repeated U.S. calls for a freeze on new construction, settlers justify expansion as a way to accommodate the "natural growth" of their communities, shipping in trailer homes, building illegal houses and bulldozing new roads to connect them...
...transform the Iranian image of America and "make it easier to explain your policies and get more of a hearing" from Tehran, Ross told me last July. "Iran's almost reflexive suspicion of the U.S. would be removed. That's not insignificant." (See pictures of Bush in the Middle East...
...West Bank settlers identified by the U.S. President as an obstacle to Middle East peace were expecting Bibi Netanyahu to support their cherished dream of an Israel stretching from the Jordan to the Mediterranean Sea, they were disappointed on Sunday night. The right-wing leader instead took a sharp and unexpected lurch to the center and said he would support a two-state solution, meaning something called Palestine is a step closer to being inked onto their 3,000-year-old biblical...