by Kim Ghattas
I was only thirteen when the war ended in 1990, but I remember so much of it, so vividly. I remember the nights cowering in the underground shelter, sleeping on mattresses we had brought down with us from our third-floor apartment, and the screaming as our building shook from the impact of bombs falling nearby. In the morning, my father would take my two sisters and me to school. At one point in the war, we would say good-bye to him at a checkpoint, walk for ten interminable minutes through a no-man’s-land, then past some gunmen to get onto the blue bus that would take us to our school on the other side of our divided city. Every afternoon, we made the return journey, hoping our father had survived the day and was waiting for us. He would be sitting in his car, listening to the radio for reports of any shelling or sniper attacks as he waited for three girls with backpacks to appear from behind the barricades. We drove home and, if the shelling permitted, we stopped for some groceries at Abu Moussa’s shop, mostly fruit and vegetables that my father loved to pick by hand, one by one.
* * *
Clinton’s convoy was speeding up the hill, the roads cleared of all traffic. We cut across a large boulevard that led back into a different part of Beirut. I could see the intersection less than half a mile away below which had been a crossing point between East and West Beirut during the war and was named after the furniture shop on one corner—Galerie Semaan. With sand barriers and tall buildings overlooking it, it had been a favorite sniper outpost. My family and I had lived just off that intersection. During the war, radio announcers kept citizens informed with news flashes about where fighting had erupted and “Galerie Semaan” was in the news often. Whenever I tried to explain to people where I lived, all I had to say was Galerie Semaan—their eyes widened, their reaction ranging from disbelief to pity. Needless to say, we never had any visitors. Sometimes we referred to the area by its original name—Hay el Amerkan, the neighborhood of the Americans. When my family had settled there before the start of the war, it was a charming middle-class area, favored by expatriates and surrounded by orange groves. A year into the violence, the only expatriates were my mother and invading armies who all chose to set up their headquarters in our small cluster of buildings. Galerie Semaan didn’t just sit on the dividing line between the Muslim West and Christian East sides of the capital, it was on the southern edge of the city. North of us was Christian Beirut and beyond it the mostly Christian north of Lebanon. South of us was dominantly Muslim territory, Sunni and then Shiite in the deep south, along the border with Israel.
Israel, which already invaded southern Lebanon once in 1978, invaded again on June 6, 1982. Palestinian guerrilla fighters, using Lebanon as their staging post to liberate the Holy Land, were all over south Lebanon and the western part of Beirut, and some of their gunmen had set up positions in our building. As Israeli tanks started advancing toward Beirut and Galerie Semaan, we fled farther north, deep into Christian territory, to escape the ferocious fighting. When we returned in the early fall, the Palestinian guerrillas and their ragtag Mercedes cars had been replaced by Israeli soldiers rounding up blindfolded men and driving them away in tanks. In our apartment on the third floor, I found my bedroom gutted by a shell, curtains torn, shrapnel holes on every wall, my toys and clothes covered by grime and dust. I was only five but intensely aware of my surroundings and the reality of war, yet unable to comprehend why I was being punished in such a fashion and by whom. I also didn’t understand why they couldn’t instead have destroyed the awful green carpet and orange bed frame, which survived the whole war.
* * *
Now, I was home again. This time I felt strange, like a traitor, as if I had crossed to the other side. I was in a big American convoy, and I had become part of the American press pack that I had once perceived as arrogant, pushy, and entitled. (The traveling press corps was in fact one of the most collegial group of journalists I had ever worked with.) Unlike local reporters, those of us in the Bubble didn’t have to show up hours in advance to go through security; we could usually just waltz in a few minutes before the press conference started. We didn’t have to hustle for seats because two rows were always reserved for us. We always got a turn to ask a question.
Around the country, families sitting down for Sunday lunch or driving to their favorite restaurant were turning on the television or radio for their midday fix of politics. Depending on their political leaning, they tuned in to the Lebanese Broadcasting Corporation (LBC), a Christian right-wing television station; Al-Manar television, Hezbollah’s outfit; or Voice of Lebanon, for something in between the two. Each station presented its own, often wildly diverging, version of the truth. Most of them would carry Clinton’s press conference live.
In her bright blue pantsuit, Clinton stood in the wood-paneled press conference room smiling for the television cameras, a gold Lebanese cedar stamped on the lectern in front of her, the top of a Roman column affixed to the walls on either side. She talked about the need for Lebanon to have a fair election, free of outside influence.
On Al-Manar television, she was being excoriated for interfering in Lebanon’s affairs before the summer elections—an irony since Hezbollah of course had its own foreign backers. On LBC, they were talking about Clinton’s show of support for the country as it prepared for the vote. It was my turn to ask a question.
“Madame Secretary, welcome to Lebanon. I know you don’t want to speculate about the results of the elections, but it does look likely that Syria’s allies, including Hezbollah, will make a strong comeback. How will that affect your support for the Lebanese army that you just discussed? You said it was a pillar of cooperation between the two countries. Would you reevaluate that cooperation with the Lebanese army?”
“Well, Kim, first let me say that it’s a great delight to have you with me on this trip. As some of you know, Kim is Lebanese and has been so excited about coming back to a country that she loves, and I am pleased that I could be the reason she got to come back at this particular time.”
I felt flattered: she remembered me and our conversation. But she had also made my feelings known in public on national Lebanese television, in front of all the local press. I knew it was a small moment, but I felt she used me to make a connection with the Lebanese people at a time of tension in the country, when the United States was trying to shore up support for Western-friendly politicians.
Much later, she would tell me that she had made the comment on the spur of the moment because she was deeply moved to see me return to Lebanon with her after all I had lived through. She had looked at me standing there with a microphone and seen someone who symbolized what Lebanon could be. But in that moment, long before I would ask her about it, the interaction left me feeling deeply unsettled. In Lebanon, as a journalist or a politician or anyone with even the tiniest bit of a profile or influence, you were considered either a stooge of the United States or an agent of its local opponents: Hezbollah, Iran, and Syria. Clinton’s casual comment meant I had just been tainted by an American stamp—or graced, depending on who was judging.
* * *
We drove back toward the Mediterranean, into the center of the city. Ottoman Empire and French Mandate–era buildings gutted by the civil war fighting had been painstakingly restored to their ancient glory. Whatever could not be saved had been razed to the ground. Empty plots of land and cranes dotted the landscape. Clinton was going to pay her respects at the tomb of Hariri, buried in the heart of the capital, near the mosque he had helped build, the largest in Lebanon. He had been prime minister during all the years that she had been a First Lady. Bill called him a personal friend. Once out of power, the two men had stayed in touch and had met at length just two months before Hariri was killed. Hariri’s son Saad had taken on the political mantle and stood by Hillary’s side as she laid a wreath.
We had arrived barely two hours before, and it was already time to leave. But I was exiting the Bubble and staying behind in Beirut to see my family. Lew Lukens had given me my passport back. I took my suitcase out of the p
ress van. My colleagues, the secretary, Jake, Jeff, Huma, and all the others got into the armored motorcade. One by one, the black cars took off, police sirens wailed. I watched the convoy drive up the road toward the airport and disappear beyond the small hill.
Suddenly I felt strangely vulnerable, abandoned by the side of the road with my luggage. I wanted to wave good-bye like a child, but everybody was off, going back home. And I was home.
Was I?
I was standing on a patch of gravel, a shrine to a dead politician to my right, a statue to Lebanon’s many martyrs since the Ottoman Empire to my left, and a six- or eight-story-high banner hanging from a building behind me, stamped with the face of Gebran Tueni, a prominent journalist watching me from beyond the grave. Like Hariri, he had been killed by a targeted car bomb in 2005. He was the husband of a close friend. His death was also blamed on Syria. Nine political and public figures had been killed in explosions between 2005 and 2008, and an international investigation was under way to look into the connection between the murders and find the culprits. Syria’s friends, like Hezbollah, saw the investigation as an international machination to destroy Damascus. But the West had also long wanted Syria to make peace with Israel. In Lebanon, Syria’s opponents worried that justice would fall victim to wider geopolitical considerations.
During the press conference, Clinton had been asked whether the United States was going to strike a deal with Syria at the expense of Lebanon. She said justice was overdue in Lebanon—the age of impunity had to end.
“So, I want to assure any Lebanese citizens that the United States will never make any deal with Syria that sells out Lebanon and the Lebanese people,” she said, becoming animated, softly banging her hand on the lectern, emphasizing every other word.
“You have been through too much, and it is only right that you are given a chance to make your own decisions, however they turn out, amongst the people who call Lebanon home, who love this country, who are committed to it, who have stayed here and done what you can to navigate through these difficult years. It’s a complicated neighborhood you live in, and you have a right to have your own future. And we believe that very strongly.”
* * *
I had heard that before. Or at least I had wanted to believe it was what I had heard, back in September 1990. I was becoming politically aware and sitting in the back of my parents’ olive-green Peugeot one sunny September Sunday morning, listening to President George H. W. Bush on the radio. We were driving to a restaurant in the hills east of Beirut for Sunday lunch on a rare quiet day during one of the darkest periods of the war. My sisters, Ingrid and Audrey, both older than me, had been sent to universities abroad, away from the madness. Michel Aoun, an army general who had recently been appointed interim prime minister, had declared a war of liberation against Syria, which occupied most of Lebanon with forty thousand troops. The rebel general ruled only over the Christian enclave where I lived and the army he commanded was just a small remnant of the country’s divided national army. But his soldiers were conducting a ferocious assault against Syria’s occupation, making some gains or at least fighting the Syrians to a stalemate. Aoun was greatly helped by the supplies of weapons he was receiving from Saddam Hussein in Iraq. The world had grown tired of watching the televised gory images of our internecine clashes, except when, like now, moving battle lines in Beirut reflected the shifting balance of world power.
Iraq had just invaded Kuwait. Oil fields were burning. The Berlin Wall had fallen a year earlier. The Soviet Union was trying to keep itself together while the U.S. eagle puffed its chest and spread its wings. On the radio, the voice of President Bush was telling us he stood with the Lebanese.
“America is finally listening,” I thought with relief. “They’re going to help; all will be well.”
I thought it meant he stood by me and what I thought was best for Lebanon. Just a few weeks later, on October 13, 1990, Syrian troops invaded the Christian enclave of Lebanon, looting and raping on their way in and arresting scores of soldiers and Aoun sympathizers or shooting them at close range execution style. We were convinced a deal had been struck: the United States had given Syria the green light to take over the rebellious but prized part of Lebanon that had so far remained outside its control. In exchange, Hafez al-Assad, the dictator in Damascus, a bastion of anti-Americanism, agreed to participate in the American-led coalition against Iraq to liberate Kuwait. America wanted the broadest possible coalition and Arab participation was key.
I felt betrayed, devastated, and furious at the United States for selling us out, for lying to me about their support for my country. I couldn’t fathom that elsewhere in Lebanon, in a different community, another neighborhood, someone listening to a different radio station but hearing the same words of the American president had understood them very differently. For them, the Syrian invasion was a sign that America had supported their version of what was best for Lebanon. Either way, it seemed clear that there was a plan, that America did pull the strings and could end wars if it wanted to. I didn’t understand the intricacies of the geopolitical ballet the United States had had to perform, the work it had required to make everybody’s positions align from Russia to Israel to Syria. But the guns fell silent, and we found ourselves under Syrian occupation.
If America was the source of all our trouble, we also believed it had the answer to our problems, and this elicited hope and disappointment in people like a roller coaster. And if we believed America pulled all the strings or could save us, it was probably because the United States had once intervened in Lebanon with great success.
* * *
In 1958, Operation Blue Bat brought fourteen thousand U.S. troops to the shores of Beirut. President Dwight Eisenhower had sent them to help prevent the overthrow of the Christian president by a rebellious, dominantly Muslim opposition backed by the nationalist Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser. It was a time when “international communism” preoccupied Washington, and Nasser’s links with the Soviet Union were a good enough reason to back the pro-Western president of Lebanon.
The opposition was intimidated, another more widely accepted president was elected, and the Americans left three months later with barely a shot fired. It was a successful projection of American power etched in the memories of the Lebanese and many others who had watched around the world. America was a reliable, powerful friend that got things done or, for its enemies, a power to be feared. The Soviet Union and Communism appealed to many as well, but America had better, bigger, shinier toys.
The next time a Lebanese president asked for help, in 1982, after the Israeli invasion and our escape from Galerie Semaan, we were a different country, seven years into a savage civil war. Everybody still thought it was 1958. When we heard the marines were coming, my sister Audrey was ecstatic. She was thirteen years old at the time, I was five, and our exposure to the war’s raw images was limited by power cuts and curfews. The only way my sister could picture what an American marine landing could look like was to imagine an endless supply of bubble gum.
The marines arrived with French, Italian, and British troops ostensibly as a neutral force to help bring peace back to Lebanon, separate warring Christian and Muslim militias, and keep the Israelis in check, away from the Syrians, who had also invaded. These forces were going to make sure that the Palestinian guerrilla fighters left the country as had been agreed. In the process, America would strengthen the central authority—the president and the Lebanese army, the good guys. But the lines had become murky—the good guys were bastards too, though they spoke English and wore ties. The president, a Christian, roped the smiling, optimistic marines into his feud against his Muslim opponents. America believed in good and evil, black and white, but Lebanon was now full of gray. By the summer of 1983, the marines were increasingly drawn into the fighting as they tried to shore up the president and his army against the Muslim militias—they had picked sides, de facto. The leftist, pro-Syrian newspaper As-Safir started referring to the Western troops as
the international militia. It ended in blood and tears on October 23, 1983, with the smoldering marine barracks, hit by a suicide truck packed with twelve thousand pounds of TNT at 6:20 a.m.
After the attack, the single deadliest day for the U.S. Marine Corps since the Battle of Iwo Jima in World War II, President Reagan swore his commitment to Lebanon. There would be no run for the exits, he said, because America would not be cowed by terrorists. Four months later, the marines left. Those who had carried out the attacks and saw America as the enemy cried victory. But thousands of others felt utterly abandoned. And Audrey still wanted her bubble gum.
The sacrifice for America had been great, but we couldn’t grasp the enormity of it. We were still living in hell and we still wanted the world to help. To us, it looked like America had made promises, raised our hopes, and then cut its losses, leaving us in the downpour—a deluge that would eventually catch up with the United States too.
The marine barracks bombing was the first salvo in the war between radical Islamic militants and the West, America in particular. Warning shots had been fired a few years earlier, in 1979, in revolutionary Shiite Iran when Islamists had overthrown the country’s secular monarch, Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, a friend of the United States and an enlightened despot. Later that year, still seething with anger at American interference in their country, students and militants took over the U.S. embassy in Tehran and kept fifty-two Americans hostage for 444 days. Iran’s new ruler, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, wanted to push America even farther out of the region, and with his allies in Beirut, he delivered a deadly message to Washington on that October morning. Combined with the Vietnam War debacle, still fresh in the collective memory, the events in Iran, and the Beirut bombing, the headlines were all about American decline. Politicians, pundits, and grocers emphatically declared that America was over.