Stability

My little college in the middle of North Dakota was like a little Middle-East for a while in the 1980's.

Most of the Iranians left during the hostage crisis, of course - there had been dozens, a major source of income for a tiny, struggling college in the middle of nowhere. But other Southwest Asians attended, too.

In the dorm across the way, two Palestinians shared a room. In the other dorm, on the far corner of campus, lived two Jordanians. Although the PLO and the Jordanians had exactly no love lost for one another, the four of them got along just fine, although didnt make a point of hanging out together. There was also a Kuwaiti kid, who dazzled the locals; the Kuwaiti government, after paying the tuition and room and board of their exchange students, gave them a $3,000/month stipend, putting him in the top 25%of incomes in Jamestown. The snow got to him pretty quickly, and he transferred to a school in Arizona after his freshman year.

Anyway.

In my dorm - Watson Hall, the campus' "Animal Dorm" - lived seven Lebanese guys. They were mostly, maybe all, Lebanese christians. Some of them told stories of what they'd do over the summer; fly back to Cyprus, take a boat to Beirut, spend the summer fighting the Lebanese Civil War, take the boat back to Cyprus, then fly back to North Dakota via Paris, Chicago and Fargo. I never knew whether the war stories were fish stories, and nobody cared to pry, that I recall; they were mostly great guys. The only friction was when women (to the extent that college girls were "women" back then) came into the picture; most of us guys at Jamestown College were fresh off the turnip truck; the Lebanese guys were urbane, had seen a good chunk of the world, spoke French and English and, of course, Arabic, and had (this didn't hurt) plenty of money. This, among a bunch of guys who wore sweatpants to class, belched the alphabet and would drink beer with straws to get more potent buzz from less beer (Red, White and Blue, $4 a case).

Most of them went to grad school in Arizona, at an international biz grad school that attracted a lot of foreign expats. I think most of them were fairly intent on staying in the US, or at least out of Lebanon; the Civil War wasn't getting any less ugly.

I think about them - Fahdi Melki, Jalal Babik, Jihad Beaino, Fuad Shanti, Milad Basil, and the rest - when I see the news from Beirut these days.

The best thing about the Bush Doctrine - for someone who, at the tail end of my liberal years was horrified by the things that the US was willing to tolerate in the interest of "Stability" - is that the great dream of many of us small-"l" liberals from the end of Kissinger's era of realpolitik, who preferred promoting the rocky path of liberty to the dictator-lined road to stability, seems to finally be happening. The US' actions in Iraq and Afghanistan are having a ripple effect.

A few more nations like this - nations who reject dictatorship, terror, autarchy - and maybe even the american left will have to pay attention. And if Egypt - one of the most populous Arab nations and one of the biggest Moslem ones - follows through on Mubarak's promise, it'll have the glorious result of leaving Qaddafhi stuck between two (fledgeling, imperfect) democracies, Algeria and Egypt.

Note: I will stipulate in advance that Bin Laden is not likely in Lebanon. I suggest it is neither relevant nor an especial sign of Bush Administration failure.

Anyway - guys, I hope you get your country back soon.