Winding up, for the moment, with Lebanon

Last updated on: September 5, 2018 at 9:53 am by Dan Peterson

Winding up, for the moment, with Lebanon 2018-09-05T09:53:40-06:00 Dan Peterson

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Formerly a great and beautiful city, Paris has now, I’ve been told by one American commenter on my blog, become a “third-world hell-hole” owing to the influence of Muslims. I confess that I’ve never noticed that transformation, and that I still can’t see it even now. Paris still seems to me a great and beautiful city. But then, I seldom visit Paris. It’s been almost a year since my previous stay here. (Wikimedia Commons public domain image)

Concluding the second-to-the-last chapter of my book manuscript, at least as it currently stands:

Misunderstanding was also the problem when the American Marines were sent to Lebanon in 1982. The United States thought, as well it might, that it was sending the troops in to prop up the legitimate government of Lebanon and to help it reestablish its control over the entire countryside. What the Americans did not realize was that the government of Lebanon was controlled by the Maronite Christians, largely for their own benefit, and that it really was simply one among the many warring factions of the country, with little more claim to legitimacy than any other of the country’s warlords. In fact, the government of Lebanon called in the Americans to help in its battle against other sectors of the population, most particularly against the Druze with whom the Maronites shared the Shouf Mountains. The American problem was that it was reading the Lebanese situation in the light of its own concepts and experience. It was deceived by the appearance of parliamentary democracy and republican presidency that Lebanon had copied so well from its contacts with the West. The Lebanese, too, would read the Americans in the light of their own experience. To many of them, the American Marines would come to be merely one more of the nation’s private militias, one that happened to be in the pay and control of the Maronites. Thus, to the Shiites and the Sunnis and the Druze, the Americans became the enemy. The United States had entered a tribal conflict on behalf of one of the tribes and did not even know it. (This case ought, by itself, to illustrate the imperative need for more knowledge of foreign countries and cultures among our policymakers.)[1] That is why the American Marines were blown up. It was an act that seemed full of irrational hatred to most in the West. Within the framework of Lebanese history and society, though, it had a certain logic.

By the mid-1980s, the Shiites had emerged to dominate Beirut. Their fiery religious absolutism, a far cry from the old and rather decadent tolerance of the Levant, had fundamentally changed the atmosphere of the city.

It is into this Near East, surging with passions and boiling with a newly reenergized Islam, that the Church must someday bring the restored gospel of Jesus Christ. The time is clearly not yet. Nevertheless, because of our own deep interest in the region, and because of our mandate to preach the gospel to all mankind, we are in the area now. Indeed, although it is little known among the Saints, we have been in the area for quite some time. The next and final chapter of this book will sketch the history of Latter-day Saint contacts with the Near East and will attempt to outline the direction the future of the gospel will take there.

[1] Certain writers, notable among them Frances Fitzgerald, have made a compelling case that a sometimes spectacular American failure to understand Vietnamese culture played a major role in producing the military disaster that occurred there.

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