Word: lebanons
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...obvious question about the deal was whether it had any connection with the release of two American hostages in Lebanon last month or the prospect of future releases. Washington and Tehran both said no, and it seems the U.S. will receive far more in payments -- $105 million, vs. only about $400,000 for Tehran. Some $3.5 billion in Iranian assets remain frozen...
Charles Glass, an American journalist with Lebanese roots, watched the U.S. Navy off Beirut in 1983 and concluded that, like the Genoese and Pisan fleets aiding the Crusaders eight centuries earlier, it would soon sail home in ignorance and frustration. Lebanon and neighboring Syria, Israel, Jordan and Iraq, he argues, are "tribes with flags" rather than nations. Try as big powers might to control them with armies, navies and imported ideologies, the ties of "family, village, tribe and sect" have been much tougher...
This format perhaps flowed from Glass's view that the people of the Levant, like peace in Lebanon, cannot be neatly packaged; thus the only way to convey any true sense of them is to transmit their stories at length and in profusion. The result is a huge number of trees, many lovely, that never become a forest. Interlocutors both fascinating and tedious, mundane sight- seeing jaunts and profound observations, telling vignettes and pointless collections of detail are all jumbled together in a work too long by half. Good questions are posed but not answered. Glass himself remains strangely opaque...
...called the "no-deal deal." This includes his vague thanks, subtle pressure on Israel to release Shi'ite prisoners, hints that $1 billion of frozen Iranian assets will be freed faster. The U.S. will increase its efforts to learn the fate of four Iranians who disappeared in Lebanon in 1982. There is more imagery and body language in all of that than there is substance...
Many American Jews believe that since Israel's disastrous 1982 invasion of Lebanon, a succession of governments has been moving the country away from the liberal, democratic vision of its Zionist founders. "There is alarm and anxiety about Israel's well-being," says Leon Wieseltier, a scholar of Israeli politics and American Jewry. "Some of the heat has gone out of the light. It's the result of the intifadeh, but also it is the result of the paralysis and pettiness of Israeli politics...