Word: lebanon
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...soldiers, far short of the 2,000 to 4,000 troops the U.N. hoped for. The opposition Socialist Party was in rare agreement with U.S. President George W. Bush in suggesting that France should pony up more troops. As the first part of its modest offering deployed in Lebanon over the weekend, French officials bristled at the suggestion that Paris wasn't pulling its weight. A French general commands the existing 2,000-strong unifil force, which has been monitoring conflict along the border since 1978, and the French government says it is ready to keep that command through February...
...doesn't improve, it's going to be failure. I don't believe interventionism is the way to deal with rising Islamic revolution. We're seen in the Middle East as an imperial power propping up corrupt regimes and giving Israel the wherewithal to do what they did to Lebanon. The President is widely reviled...
...last week was cross a bridge. The Qasmiya Bridge lies 30 miles south of Beirut, at the main crossing point over the Litani River on the coastal road from Sidon. The bridge was destroyed by an Israeli air strike on July 12, the first day of the war in Lebanon. Working furiously for 48 hours, army engineers finished rebuilding the bridge just a few hours before the first tractor trailer carrying armored vehicles rumbled over. The bridge bowed but held, and Lebanon's army soon took symbolic possession of territory it hasn't controlled since the 1960s...
...tobacco-farm country around Tibnine, a hill town about 10 miles from the Israeli border, is like a slide show of destruction--scorched earth, leveled homes, torched gas stations--shot in a gray scale of cement dust and summer haze. While refugees have flooded back into other areas of Lebanon, only the brave or desperate have returned to these parts, which are still strewed with unexploded bombs, many of them from antipersonnel cluster munitions. "There are thousands of these out there," says a Lebanese military intelligence officer in Tibnine as he holds up a defused cluster bomb...
...rebuilding effort is shaping up as a proxy battle for influence in the Middle East. Oil-rich Sunni Arabs who are worried about the rise of Hizballah and other militant Shi'ite groups in Iran and Iraq don't want to lose Lebanon. (Many of them have summer homes here.) The Saudis have already provided $1 billion in emergency funds to Lebanon's central banks and an additional $500 million in reconstruction aid to the Lebanese government. The rebuilding frenzy could provide an opportunity for the U.S. to improve its tarnished reputation with the Lebanese people...