Fareed Zakaria said on CNN on October 18 that decades from now we will be glad that Barack Obama refrained from a more active role in Syria. Eugene Robinson in the Washington Post on Oct 5 wrote that Obama is right to be cautious about choosing friends in Syria and right to pursue a long-term goal in contrast to Putin’s short term plan.
International intrigue is a subject on which I know little and prefer to keep silent. My role is merely to share the human face of the Middle East. However, armies in countries that are not their own turns out to be something I have experienced.
During the civil war in Lebanon it became necessary to pass through military checkpoints daily. Over time I engaged Palestinian militiamen, Syrian soldiers, the Israeli army, and the U.S. Marines. I had to learn to live with alien armies and observe the behavior and attitudes of people around me. I learned in the process that war can feel very personal. A man never forgets who killed his brother. A woman resents after a few days the roadblock of an alien army, even an army that claims to be protecting her home. From what I saw and heard, I believe that a bomb dropped is an enemy made, and a soldier in someone else’s street is not safe.
At the place where I chose to begin the story in my book, Lebanon was occupied by the Syrian Army. Why? To make a complicated story too simple, they intervened on the side of Christian militias who were nearly overwhelmed by a Palestinian militia in a camp within Christian territory. That was Tel azZaatar, which no longer exists. No matter where one’s sympathies lay, the siege of Tel azZaatar was dreadful. To the people in our neighborhood both the Syrians and the Palestinians were foreigners and their motive questionable.
So…the Syrians came and the battle ended for a while, but Lebanon was an occupied country. Our community, other big parts of the country, and the roads we traveled daily were now controlled by the Syrian Army. Our resulting experiences were sometimes stressful, occasionally funny, now and then terrifying, and increasingly frustrating.
Once, coming back to my office, from a trip down to Beirut, I was stopped at a checkpoint on the Mkallas Circle. The soldier in charge asked me where I was going, and I told him Monsourieh. He then said, “Take these two men with you.”
The two men stood just behind him, dressed for battle, it appeared to me. They wore helmets, heavy boots and ammunition belts, and they had big guns in their hands. I certainly did not want them in my car.
I told the soldier, “I can’t.”
He said, “What do you mean, you can’t?”
I said in Arabic the obvious, “I am a lady alone and it is not appropriate.”
The soldier who had leaned into my window to hear this, then stood up and said to the other two men, “She is a lady alone, and it is not appropriate.”
I drove up the hill laughing.
There was a soldier I remember kindly, just a kid, 17 or 18. For a long time he stared at my i.d. card which was hand-written in Arabic and French. Then, handing it back to me, he said, “Nobody but God could read it.”
After a while, relationships went downhill. Roadblocks were a nuisance. We saw them as constant interruptions and delays. How long did these foreigners plan to stay? Assad’s political motives became suspicious. And the rules broke down. People’s cars vanished off the streets and were never seen again. The favorite bakery in our area was robbed in the night, all of its equipment carried away, leaving us hungry for those delicious buns. A friend of ours disappeared off the street and after long, anxious days was found in a Syrian prison. The men at checkpoints became testy and suspicious and our resentment of them more obvious. Without our knowing exactly when it happened, the army that “rescued” us had morphed into the enemy. Somebody was slitting their throats quietly at roadblocks during the night.
Why do I care now? Why should you care? Because we have soldiers all over the world. And because I want to say that Obama’s reluctance to put our men in Syria is wise and good. Of course, I don’t know about military power or international politics, just about human beings.
I know a young man who served in Iraq with the U.S. Army. Home again, he said to a mutual friend, “My job was to find the I. U. D.s, (Improvised Explosive Devices). One day as I was walking through the street with my equipment, I began to think about the situation. Why were those devices there? To kill me, that’s why. And why was I there? To find them before they killed me. Does this make sense?”
Any alien army that interferes in a civil war will make enemies, and even their friends may not like them for long. Fighting in someone else’s country is always a risky business for the simple reason that people are territorial and distrustful of others who invade their space with guns.
I agree with our president that Russia may stay in Syria long enough to be sorry. I am certain that a bully with bullets is a temporary friend, not a leader.
While writing this I have remembered with sorrow the 241 United States Marines who perished in their barracks in Beirut in1983, particularly those with whom we spent a lovely afternoon only a week before. Just as I finished my essay I realized that the anniversary of that disastrous but instructive event is upon us. They died in the early morning on October 23. This piece is now dedicated to them, whose story is in my book.