Letter from Lebanon

On a Sunday afternoon day-trippers and small clusters of tourists wandered over the Roman ruins of the city of Byblos, an hour north of Beirut. Greek Orthodox Christians gathered for the weekly service outside a stone church near the harbor. Waiters at restaurants offering sweeping vistas of the Mediterranean prepared the tables for the lunch crowds that would soon arrive. The waters of the harbor and the sea were glossy and placid. A few fishermen used the idle day to untangle their nets. But the appearance of calm is only a diversion from the latest conflict that undermines Lebanon’s constant quest for stability in the face of civil war in neighboring Syria.

A week before I had arrived a car bomb had exploded in front of the Iranian embassy, killing twenty-three, including the cultural affairs officer, who had taken up his post only two months before. A few weeks later another car bomb exploded in the renovated shopping district of downtown Beirut and killed Mohamad Chatah, the former finance minister, a vocal critic of Hezbollah, and a longtime voice of political moderation and reasonable discourse on the political scene.

“Everyone is on edge,” said Sameera, an instructor at the Lebanese American University, over dinner one night at an Italian restaurant on West Beirut’s Hamra Street. “All of the instructors are saying that there have been even fewer students in class.”

I saw a bit of this edginess up close, as I was crossing Beirut’s renowned Corniche to begin an evening jog. A woman was waiting to make a left turn as the oncoming traffic streaked past. The wait was getting too long for the drivers lining up behind her; horns began honking. Also stuck in the tailback was a police four-wheel drive. The officer in the passenger’s seat jumped out, brandishing an automatic weapon. He pounded on the woman’s window. Words flew back and forth. What was he going to do—execute her for not pulling into the oncoming traffic? Not this time, anyway. He stopped the traffic, impatiently waved her through, and got back into his four-wheel drive.

As itchy and edgy as the city is today, car bombs are far from novelties in Beirut. They have become the weapon of choice for settling scores or sending warnings between Lebanon’s many competing sects and all the outside proxies that have sunk their teeth into Lebanon’s affairs. On Valentine’s Day—February 14, 2005—a massive car bomb in front of the Phoenicia Hotel killed the former prime minister, Rafik Hariri, one of the few politicians respected across all segments of the country’s sectarian chasms for guiding the reconstruction after the 1975–90 civil war. Months later the Lebanese Broadcasting Corporation anchorwoman May Chidiac lost an arm and a leg when a bomb planted under the driver’s seat of her car exploded on September 25. On my first trip to the city later that summer another car bomb exploded on Monot Street, the heart of Beirut’s nightclub district. I was sitting at an outdoor café at the time and both heard and felt the explosion, about a mile away. Customers rushed inside to watch the news on an overhead tv set, and a few hours later a news report appeared on cnn. But there were no casualties, and so the next day the city was back to normal—always a relative term in the daily life of Beirut.

In Lebanon all explosions are not equal. Some reverberate to a greater extent than others, and their impact is determined by their effect on the country’s ever-fragile sectarian balance. By that measure both the Iranian-embassy blast and the bomb that killed Mohamad Chatah were “big ones,” for they brought the civil war raging in neighboring Syria to the heart of the capital. Until then any spillover had been confined to the border regions and the always divisive northern city of Tripoli, where the interests of Sunni and Shia Muslims, Maronite and Melkite Christians, and Palestinian refugees all collide.

“My uncle was hit in the head...