Spectator's Journal/Lost in Lebanon

...To-day there are 600,000 Lebanese Christians who have been made refugees in their own land...

...paper, $14.95...

...All in all, a visit to Lebanon demonstrates why men born free tend every-where to prefer at least some chains...

...The pitch begins almost immediately...

...In no country is this more evident than in the Federal Republic of Germany, where in 1987 the hoary Social Democratic party has a good chance of electing to chancellor the prime minister of the state of North Rhine-Westphalia, Johannes Rau...

...Their unofficial—and, opposing Christian Democrats charge, illegal—foreign policy is intended to undercut the government in much the same way Jesse Jackson aimed to upstage President Reagan at the Geneva summit...

...The result is a tremendous sense of abandonment among Lebanese Christians, the same people who (with Western backing) were responsible for making theirs the sole nation in the Near and Middle East where Christian, Moslem, and Jew stood equal before the law...

...The Lebanese talk of the subsequent American pullout as "the second fall of Saigon...

...This does have its down side...

...HI, I'M JOHANNES RAU Europeans are taking a long time to surrender their jokes about Ronald Reagan's movie theater past...

...Yet all we hear about the Christians is their refusal to re-duce the powers of the presidency—which to Western ears appears as an obstinate insistence on an abstraction...

...The student hogging the window in your train compartment is still likely to ask in his best ironic tones about that "cowboy-actor...

...But in wake of the Syrian-brokered peace accord it is beginning to dawn on some people that these failures are not so good for the West, either...

...The center-left SPD is a century-old creaker badly in need of help...

...A normal two-hour hop to, say, Rome thus becomes a two-day trek over land, sea, and air...

...Syria deploys missiles in Lebanon's Bekaa Valley and expands its military presence throughout the country...

...the deleterious impact of welfare programs, Social Security, and military spending on capital formation...

...the signs are not promising...

...He supports cutting taxes for those with annual incomes under DM 80,000 (about $33,000) but raising them for Germans in the highest brackets...

...Lebanon's one air-port being located in Moslem-held West Beirut, many people forsake the undeniable convenience of direct air travel for the undeniably greater convenience of not getting bagged by one of West Beirut's innumerable terror groups...

...Marines lost their lives to a suicide bomber who crashed his explosive-laden truck into their barracks...

...He says his name is Antoine and that he likes Americans...

...In a way the choice was an obvious one—Rau scored a resounding victory for his party in his home state last year...

...In his platform the North' Rhine-Westphalia leader hawks a brand of populism that is something novel in to-day's Europe, but it also reminds one of the appealing, conciliatory populism that in the U.S...

...Rau's answer to Germany's biggest problem, continuing high unemployment in the face of growth, seems vague and long term: he wants to overcome the "social, technological and ecological challenges" that unemployment represents, a task he estimates will take a generation...

...For unlike the hatred of all things American or Israeli in the Islamic world, the hatred expressed by Lebanese Christians is new...

...On the homefront, Brandt's ideological godchild, Saarland state prime minister Oskar Lafontaine, won voters with a heavy-weight anti-NATO pitch...

...I will remain who I am...

...You good man, Mee-ster Weel-yum," he tells me at regular intervals...

...As the recent peace accord signed in Damascus by the Christian, Moslem, and Druse militia chiefs demonstrates, GGTaxation and the Deficit Economy is essential reading for anyone seriously interested in reforming our economic policies...

...Lebanese hopes are today in Syrian hands...

...Over 'a half-million Palestinian refugees poured in-to Lebanon after 1948, and their fluency in English (Palestine was under a British mandate) has helped make their grievances known throughout the world...

...Since then there's been additional hemorrhaging as some voters depart for the new radical environmentalist party, the Greens...

...Proposals for reform include stringent constraints on the fiscal process, economic deregulation, tax reduction and simplification, and reductions in both transfer payments and military spending...

...Lebanon's pluralistic democracy sadly has been overwhelmed by all the coverage of its civil war, in particular by American television's natural preference for footage of the more-orless constant gunfire along the "Green Line" dividing East and West Beirut...

...EUROPEAN DOCUMENT...

...Our awareness is therefore based on highly selective facts...

...By coming in only to cut and run when things got sticky, the Lebanese say, both the Americans and Israelis made a bad situation worse...

...My suitcase is grabbed from my hand by a young Lebanese who steers me toward his cab...

...Ironically, places like Lebanon—where the different segments of the populace are busy cutting one another's throats—are in-variably promoted in travel books as having people known for their "warmth and friendliness...

...We all know about the horrible Phalangist massacre at the Sabra and Chatilla Palestinian camps in 1982 that came three days after the assassination of president-elect Bashir Gemayel...

...Not coincidentally, Lebanon is the only place in the same area where Christians are free and equal citizens...

...Living as we do in a peaceful secularism, where religious differences are left to the individual's conscience, by William McGurn we forget that in the Middle East the fundamental distinctions are religious, and that these distinctions have awesome social, political, and economic consequences...

...Brandt, the party patriarch, and his fellow Ostpolitik pioneer Egon Bahr are busy dropping in on East Bloc capitals and have even signed an agreement with Communist leaders in hopes of reminding voters of their past achievements...

...In an earlier incarnation it helped oversee the enactment of Bismarck's social welfare laws, establishing Germany's tradition as a social welfare state, and since the end of World War II it has been the Amity Shlaes is deputy editorial features editor of the Wall Street Journal/ Europe party of unions and intellectuals...

...At a December party convention in the town of Ahlen, Rau swore he would never "snivel or dissemble...

...Even when they get used to Reagan, Europeans still don't quite understand him...

...More telling, it is a hatred born of disappointment...

...Careening across the one large road that runs along the Lebanese coast and through Beirut, Tony indulges in some bad-mouthing of both Israel and the U.S.—another sign that the shift away from the West has reached the Christian half of Lebanon's three million people...

...they are so generous...

...went out with Jimmy Carter...

...Whether the Damascus agreementwill really bring the peace the Lebanese so desperately want is anybody's guess...

...Lebanon thus appears to most Americans as a land populated solely by terrorists and Moslem fanatics...

...The lack of monetary controls that made Lebanon the banking capital of the Middle East has made it the drug capital as well...

...cloth, $34.95 FOR PUBLIC POLICY RESEARCH Available at bookstores 177 Post Street, Dept...

...Even before the Damascus accord, the Syrians occupied 65 percent of Lebanese soil, with another fifth falling into the Israeli security zone...

...The greater irony is the travel books are right...

...Back in the early 1970s, when Willy Brandt brought the party to its postwar zenith with his popular Ostpolitik, the Social Democrats were winning nearly 50 per-cent of the vote...

...And the prime minister of the state of Hesse has entered into a coalition with the Greens that some Social Democrats see as a model for a federal-level government...

...and the special political and bureaucratic interests that dominate the fiscal process...

...There are several different private armies, most of them superior to the government's...

...ones to the bottom of the pile, making Americans the last off the William McGurn is editorial features editor of the Wall Street Journal/ Europe and a European editor of The American Spectator...

...Once ashore, however, the Middle Eastern propensity for overlooking political divergencies in the interest of a little more baksheesh reasserts itself...

...If I go to New York," asks a handsome North Lebanese student, "what do they think of me there...

...a Brussels audience watching Steven Spielberg's Back to the Future laughs loudest when the time machine takes it back to a 1955 theater with a Ronald Reagan billing on the marquee...

...But things went downhill from there, and lately the party has been registering closer to 40 per-cent...

...Aside from the war (or perhaps because of it), Lebanon is in most respects a libertarian paradise...

...In 1982, Helmut Schmidt's coalition with the centrist Free Democrats finally collapsed...

...What got Rau the job was widespread recognition that his handsome, preacherly air (his father was a Protestant pastor) and his moderate principles mark him as a new kind of German politician, a change from the run-of-the-mill, puffed-up professional that one is likely to en-counter in Bonn...

...Lost, too, in the coverage is any real sense of the Lebanese Christian community, or any awareness that fanatical elements in Lebanon—inspired mostly by Iranian and Libyan fundamentalist groups—are threatening them with extinction...

...Even thetraffic betrays a laissez-faire spirit: Not a single traffic light seems to exist in the entire country, and the Lebanese driver tends to go for his horn when his more delicate American counterpart would go for the brake...

...Instead the party last September decided, somewhat surprisingly, to go with the 54-year-old Rau...

...The big lesson politicians here seem to have abstracted from American politics is that appearance is all, and the campaigns for several coming elections are replete with examples of hard-bitten old ideologues sweating to "out-image" one another...

...26 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1986 Of course, even in the midst of a civil war normal life adapts...

...Television coaching and questions of style are shaking up the old issue-bound coalitions, and parties scarred from forty years of battle under the proportional representation system are working hard to polish up candidates for the coming round of elections...

...A windshield bedecked with holy pictures and the word T0-NY spelled out in glittering stick-on letters assures me that my new friend is not in the employ of the Islamic Jihad...

...Not far from this port, 241 U.S...

...But how many know that until this war Christians lived in peace with their Moslem and Druse brothers all over Lebanon, and that the reason they lived all over the country was that they were placed as buffers, because the various Moslem sects and Druse cannot get along with each other at all...

...by Amity Shlaes None of these ideological SPD figures, though, is the party's candidate for chancellor...

...Just a few years ago, Tony probably would have been singing their praises...

...Certainly all Christians are not angels and all Moslems are not fanatics...

...Still, the people are optimistic...

...530 pages...

...But Lebanon's Christians are being slaughtered, and much of the world doesn't even know that half of Lebanon is Christian...

...That America's and Israel's failure of will in Lebanon was bad for Lebanon has been obvious from the start...

...But the West has an interest in Lebanese Christians because they are Lebanon's democratic element, not simply because their religion happens to be more familiar to us than Islam...

...There are no exchange controls, for example, so it is one of the few places left where a man can enter and leave with a million dollars and no questions asked...

...The existence of effi-cient and well-financed private armies is a major obstacle to Lebanese unity and political reform...

...JAMES C. MILLER III, Director Office of Management and Budget TAXATION AND THE DEFICIT ECONOMY Fiscal Policy and Capital Formation in the United States Edited by DWIGHT R. LEE Foreword by MICHAEL' BOSKIN Twenty-two distinguished economists examine the harmful effects of taxation on personal and corporate income...

...A variety of good old-fashioned plots are afoot in the SPD to woo back the organization's fading constituency...

...Yet not a boo from the same people who lam-basted American and Israeli military intervention here...

...The distinction is crucial...

...Do they think I am terrorist...

...Along the way Americans are reminded that even the traditionally Westward-looking Christian community here is no longer enamored of Uncle Sam: Crew members returning passports to debarking passengers relegate U.S...

...And although there are no meter maids to hand you a parking ticket, there's also no one to protect you from being shot by the irate driver whose fender you just dented...

...Yet the fourth estate, most of which holes up at West Beirut's Commodore Hotel, continues to write about a "Christian-dominated government"--technically true, but a government whose de facto control ex-tends to a mere fraction of the land...

...With the rest of his party he opposes a change in labor law currently THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1986 27...

...But there were other SPD winners in the same elections—Saarlander Lafontaine, for example, was the first Social Democrat since 1966 to win a state back from the right...

...1, San Francisco, CA 94108 A PACIFIC INSTITUTE LOST IN LEBANON Beirut—Here on the overnight ship that ferries passengers from the island of Cyprus to the port just north of the Lebanese capital, the social and economic distortions arising from the country's decade-long civil war become painfully apparent...