Last week, there was an interesting series of articles bySlate contributor Lee Smith about his recent trip to Lebanon.

An exceprt from Tuesday:

Here's a tip for budding Arab-world political figures: If you don't talk about imperialism and Zionist agents, the Western media will think you are too Westernized and ignore you; if you want attention, wave an automatic weapon in a reporter's face, and he will write about the social services and educational programs your nice organization offers to the community. (I wonder what our journalists think the textbooks in a Hezbollah-funded curriculum might look like: Zeinab Has Two Mommies? The Middle East: A Wonderful Mosaic?) Yes, Hezbollah provides some social services, but, as George points out, so do many of the country's other sectarian communities, including the Maronite church, which is not armed.

Two excerpts from Thursday:

At lunch, a Latin American diplomat is praising Fahrenheit 9/11, which only seems strange because this guy's nation is famous for having thrown political opponents out of airplanes in the past. It gets worse when he starts to talk about the neoconservatives in the Bush administration. "Isn't Leo Strauss' influence on them similar to Nietzsche's influence on the Nazis?" he asks. I start to argue that the relationship in both cases is probably overstated when I look down the table and see that Elie's jaw has dropped. "Wow," he says, shaking his head in amazement, "this guy's comparing the neocons to the Nazis." "Yeah," I agree, "that's pretty crazy." I guess I'm accustomed to comments like that, but it's always good to be reminded that sometimes the "Western diplomatic sources" cited in the press are just well-manicured lunatics.

U.S. support, as Jumblatt himself made clear in the Washington Post, is not the "kiss of death"; rather, as we all learned watching Saddam slaughter the people we had encouraged to rise against him in 1991, it is the withdrawal of U.S. support that costs lives. The problem isn't our idealism and innocence in conjunction with our power, it's American fickleness, our national Attention Deficit Disorder, that is dangerous to the world.