Every Man in This Village Is a Liar_ An Education in War - Megan K. Stack [87]
“So what do you think?” I said.
“It’s ludicrous, surreal,” he yelped, swallowing a laugh and then leaning in a little. “It’s hard to imagine a country that feels occupied for thirty years is thanking its occupiers as they leave. This really shows the huge schism between the Lebanese president and government and people.
“Here,” he said, interrupting himself, “take my number and call me later. I’m going to be on CNN.” And he was gone, rushing off like the White Rabbit in shiny shoes.
The buses of Syrian soldiers rumbled east, through vineyards reconstructed from the wreckage of battle and fields greening with the first breaths of spring. They rolled past fading roadside pictures of Ayatollah Khomeini; kiosks where fresh fruit dangled on strings; tractors and orchards. The buses wept paint chips as they belched over the hills. Beneath the plastered portraits of Bashar al-Assad, the windows were cracked. The Syrian army is desperately poor; it was hard for anybody to hate the skinny young soldiers too much, simply because they lived so badly, moping around with the faces of kicked dogs.
Housewives and old men and schoolchildren lined the road and stood there silently, waiting for the Syrians to pass. They crowded the doorways of banks and gritty vegetable shops and clothing stores. I pulled over in the village of Riyaq, and stood with some women who had abandoned their mirrors at a beauty shop to watch history groan past. “The Syrians suffered a lot here,” a Christian woman told me. “At the time they entered, sectarianism was rife. Many people left here, and there was a lot of violence. The Syrian presence helped keep the Christians here. Without a doubt, a lot of mistakes were made, but we will remain friends.”
When the Lebanese saw the Syrians, they smiled and waved their arms and honked horns, as if they were watching relatives pull away. The Lebanese smiled up, and the Syrians smiled down, and they held up two fingers in the sign of peace and victory.
The pinched faces of the young soldiers hung in those busted windows, and their hands waved good-bye, good-bye. “To Damascus,” one of the guards chanted through his open window, his smile spread all over his face. Syria leaving and good-bye. A new day coming, and good-bye.
They disappeared over the borderline, off through the tanks and pine-shaded hills. All along the road back to Beirut, the people were returning to houses that had been seized by the Syrians. They were counting the things that were stolen, the fruit trees crushed, asking each other whether the townspeople who fled for America and Europe and Australia might finally come home.
I kept stopping to ask people how they felt. They all said the same thing.
I feel scared, they said. We don’t know what’s coming next.
These months of revolution would all come back like a bad dream. There was a promise embedded in all those Bush administration speeches: that if the Lebanese fought against Syria and formed a new government, Washington would back it up. Confident and strident, Lebanon pushed Syria away. Washington applauded, and said some nice things. But nobody addressed the tangle of Hezbollah’s power and Shiite fears—not the Lebanese, who could hardly admit the other half of the country existed, and not the Americans, who talked about Hezbollah as if it were an alien force, a fringe enemy, and not a grassroots movement woven into the fabric of Lebanese politics and society.
A year later, when Israel pounded Lebanon with bombs, broke the roads and bridges, and crushed the economy, when the country’s Washington-backed leaders wept and begged the Bush administration to call off the attack, Washington sat back and let Israel ravage this fledgling country in the name of crippling Hezbollah.
Lebanon found itself on the wrong end of the war on terror, after all.
THIRTEEN
THE EARTHQUAKE NOBODY FELT
The knowledge gathered