Back to the terrible year of 1982 (Lebanon)

[IndianaGreen]

Back to the terrible year of 1982

If there can be said to be a prevailing emotion in multi-confessional Beirut today, it is one of helplessness that tips, at times, into fury, writes Julie Flint

Sunday July 16, 2006
The Observer

It is as if the clock had been wrenched back a quarter of a century, to the terrible year of 1982 when Israel attacked Lebanon to destroy the Palestine Liberation Organization and West Beirut was under siege, and often indiscriminate bombardment, for three long, hot-summer months. With one difference: in the place of the PLO is the Iranian-backed Hezbollah party.

Eighteen hours after Hezbollah guerrillas attacked an Israeli patrol on Lebanon's southern border last week, killing six soldiers and capturing two, Israeli planes screamed over Beirut in the pre-dawn hours, seemingly endlessly, and helicopter gunships attacked fuel depots at Beirut airport, bathing the Shi'ite southern suburbs in a Halloween glare. Few slept. It was unsettling for those of us who experienced earlier Israeli wars. It was terrifying for the under-20s who have never witnessed - or heard - Israel's air force in action.

When word of Hezbollah's attack first broke, teenagers on motorbikes rode along the Beirut seafront waving the party's flag and honking horns. Passers-by looked on indulgently. In the evening, after a day of bombardment chewed up the highway to Damascus and put the airport out of action, almost certainly for months, celebrants set off firecrackers. Passers-by still looked on indulgently. But as the extent of Israel's onslaught on the Lebanese state became clear, the atmosphere changed: the mood in Beirut is ambiguous, schizophrenic even, but there is no hint of celebration outside the southern suburbs. Not only is Lebanon blockaded by land and by sea, its all-important tourist season crushed in the bud, but many fear a blockade within a blockade as Israel attempts to root Hezbollah out of Beirut once and for all.

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,1821769,00.html

[still_one]

1. I am sure the 1982 invasion had nothing to do with the repeated

shelling of Israeli towns, or that the PLO had repeatedly violated the 1981 cease-fire agreement

[The_Casual_Observer]

3. These are new times and new antagonists. 20 years from now there will

be other ones with different names. There is no end to this. It's a cursed black hole graveyard place.

[still_one]

4. interesting view of history

[The_Casual_Observer]

5. Do you have a more reasoned slant?

[still_one]

6. no not at all, and I was not being scarcastic

[The_Casual_Observer]

7. We have lived with this shit all our lives. After all this time and

trouble nobody has moved a budge. When I was I kid I wondered what living through the "Hundred Years War" would have been like. I know now that I will never live long enough to see the end of this one.

[Redstone]

2. Well, then, maybe the Lebanese should have taken control

of their own country...

Redstone