Anderson’s kidnapping, on March 16 that year, had been the end of the endgame for the U.S. press in Beirut, and for most U.S. diplomats there. I’ll never know just how close I came to suffering the same fate. But I do know that I saw that car cruising the seaside corniche and the battle-scarred downtown of Sidon after the Israeli Army withdrew from part of South Lebanon at the start of 1985. Terry’s liberation, after seven years of suffering, had released us all from survivor’s guilt. But some still are bitter. “Can you believe we risked our lives for that place?” a diplomat had asked me over dinner before my trip back this month.
The new airport is a gleaming monument to modernity. The last time I was in this spot it was June and July of 1985, to cover hijackers who held a TWA airliner, killed a U.S. Navy diver and threw his body on the tarmac. The old jitters are back the moment I clear immigration. Before I can start to relax I need a few days of hearing from old friends that I no longer must go everywhere with a driver or stay in at night. And as the fear lifts, I find I can finally enjoy a city once famous for its hang-loose ambiance. The freedom to move on foot is exhilarating. The city is no longer divided by a Muslim-Christian confrontation line–and you no longer need a collection of militia press cards to get safely from one zone to another.
After a couple of days, I check out of my five-star hotel in the freshly rebuilt downtown. Actually, I am run out: the fancy hotels are overbooked with Kuwaitis and other gulf Arabs, celebrating the end of the Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca (and, say hotel staff, getting upwind of a possible conflagration in Iraq). Children hog the computer and high-end prostitutes patrol the lounges. I check into a cheap but friendly three-star in Hamra and start to hit the streets.
The tables are turned. There’s really only one conversation–the threat of Al Qaeda terrorism in the United States and the approaching hurricane in Iraq. The big problems now are somebody else’s. “Nine-eleven was pure Hollywood!” observes a newspaper publisher. The Lebanese see New York City the way Americans saw Beirut after a truck bomb took down the U.S. Marine headquarters. Plenty of American accents can be heard in coffee shops surrounding the American University of Beirut–emptied of expats in the ’80s after the college president was assassinated in an ambush. Tens of thousands of Americans have visited since a travel ban expired in 1997.
Today Americans clearly are making friends in Beirut. “Yo, wassup?” sings out one Lebanese teenager–hardly the greeting a middle-aged white pedestrian might expect. One night at the Bits ’n’ Bytes Internet cafe, a 10 a.m.-4 a.m. business off Hamra Street that becomes my HQ, the staff clusters around the telephone. They’ve just seen the news bulletin about a propane explosion on Staten Island–and they phone to make sure that a New York friend has survived. Just the way friends and families used to think that anything that went bump in Beirut must jar us–when, in fact, we were at home on the balcony, drinking duty-free Veuve Clicquot.
Radicalism has become commonplace. Members of Hizbullah, the Iranian-backed Party of God that takes credit for suicide-bombing Israel out of Lebanon, now sit in the Lebanese parliament. The party has a press officer who keeps regular office hours–don’t bother to try to schedule a meeting on the weekend–and a TV station whose motto could be, “All provocation, all the time.” But the people on the street remain a wonderful mix. Cruising the corniche with a journalist friend, we pass two women in the head-to-toe chadors of the ultraconservative Muslim. “Here, we have everything now, he says: “Chadors, G-strings, maybe even a G-string under a chador.” In the mainly Shiite southern suburbs, huge portraits of the Ayatollah Khomenei and other Islamist figures dominate some intersections. But a tout outside a dimly lighted bar in Hamra proposes, “You f–k?”
Dubai may have stolen Beirut’s once-thriving import-export business, but Beirut remains unrivaled in the Mideast as a marketplace for ideas. The newspapers are the region’s most unrestrained–free even to make up facts on occasion. “We’re more free than many places in Europe–because of the libel laws there,” says one editor. Representatives of the Iraqi opposition, from fundamentalist Shiites to Kurdish factions, operate without restriction. A close aide to Uday Hussein, much-reviled son of the Iraqi president, shops in Beirut for jewels over the holiday before driving back to Baghdad via Syria. It all may change in the first flash of a new war. “Be careful,” warns a physician, “they may start kidnapping again.” (For the record, I’m half Canadian.) But for now, Beirut is the eye of the storm.
