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Source: http://www.usnews.com/usnews/opinion/articles/050404/4fouad.htm
The Apparition in the Levant
(US News) Fouad Ajami - In a radically different era, America was "burned" in Beirut and quit the city under the gaze of Arabs who took the withdrawal as a sign of American abdication. There had been that searing October 1983 attack on the Marine barracks which took the lives of 241 Americans. The U.S. Embassy was targeted by terrorists, and American missionaries and educators were murdered or taken as hostages for a cruel trade with Syria's and Iran's rulers. For good reasons, America gave up on Lebanon. But now the world is different, and there is in America a willingness to come to the aid of the Lebanese. It is Damascus and its tyranny on one side and the cedar revolution of the vast majority of Lebanon's people on the other. For once, there is an easy and good choice in an Arab land.