Paris Churning

If Lebanon is again turning into a dreary battleground where Americans dare not tread, there will be one bright spot: This time we won't have to listen to tired wheezing about how Beirut was the Paris of the Middle East before the trouble started. In the 12 years since the Lebanese civil war ground to a halt, the republic has cycled through periods of hope, stagnation, creeping statism, and political flatulence. Serial Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, now on his way to France to beg for money, is a shade (though a particularly robust shade) of his early nineties self—the energetic billionaire and gentleman politician who was set to raise up a new country of innovative public/private contracting, ingathering of émigrés, and cellular networks. Contemporary Lebanon's partial reconstruction is a massive improvement on what was left standing in 1991, but it's also a disappointing reminder of how high 1991's hopes were in the first place.

The murder of nurse/missionary Bonnie Penner (whose marriage name has been variously spelled as Witherall, Whiterall and Weatherall) punctuates a decade in which one of the few bright spots is that no Americans had been killed. (Theoretically, U.S. citizens were barred from Lebanon until 1997 by a widely ignored travel ban.) It also signals a rise in what, for lack of a better word (really!), can be called "anti-Americanism" in the republic. Following sporadic efforts to organize a boycott against American and American-seeming fast food joints (an anti-U.S. boycott that, needless to say, has not included American cell phones, Windows XP, or any of the other Yankee poisons without which Lebanon could comfortably revert to its agrarian roots), triple bombings early this month damaged two Pizza Huts and a Winners restaurant. Expressions of discontent with the United States are more frequent and more vehement in both private conversation and the media. (Savor this exercise in less-than-Swiftian satire in the local birdcage liner As-Safir.) Complainants refer to the familiar catalogue of gripes—Palestine, Iraq, Coca-Cola's fabled donations to Israel.

This is not to situate Penner's murder too solidly within the context of international anti-Americanism, or international anything else. All politics is local, and Lebanon's is more local than most. Sidon, where Penner's hospital is located, is a decidedly non-cosmopolitan town, one of the few in Lebanon to impose blue laws, where the main attraction is a poorly maintained crusader castle—in sum, an unwelcoming place for an Evangelical mission. In a striking reassertion of high church/low church animosity, the local Roman Catholic archbishop ungraciously marked Penner's death by telling The New York Times, "We don't accept this kind of preaching. We reject it totally." Beyond some general observations about the rising intolerance of Sunni zealots and the jeopardy of Lebanon's Christian community (always more alarming to Christians who live outside the country than it is to those on the ground), Penner's death may hold no lessons for the increasingly murky struggle against international terrorism.

Ditto the fast food bombings, which were apparently designed to avoid casualties, and which police are now tying to an ad hoc group of Palestinians. (The student/activist boycott group inevitably and lamely condemned the bombings for hurting "true and overt calls" for the boycott of US goods.)

One of the bombing suspects, however, is purportedly connected to the bloody New Years 2000 battle between Lebanese army regulars and terrorists in the town of Kfar Habou. The New Years clash has taken on mythic significance in Lebanon. The terrorist group has been linked, with varying degrees of plausibility, to the bin Laden network, and Lebanese officials have cited the incident, with somewhat more plausibility, as evidence that Lebanon was an early protagonist in the war on terrorism. The internationalization of all local struggles is Lebanon's unlucky position in the world. Through long periods of its history the country has served as a punching bag for its two neighbors, a place where every local fight is an invitation to foreign thieves and aggressors. The Penner murder is a sad and, one hopes, isolated reminder that (despite a steady imposition of state mandates and restrictions in all areas) few structural safeguards exist to keep this from happening again. Paris hasn't had these types of headaches for a long time.