Beirut Best Quotes

Seth and his co-workers were born imperialists, and so would pillage the city for tiny, cash-only ramen places or Thai restaurants that had a secret, ultra-authentic room behind the kitchen where the staff also ate and where they would insist on eating, too. They were the best and the only and the highest and the chef was trained in Beirut as a prisoner of war and the waitstaff had to get scuba training so that they could understand what it meant to touch pleasure and the restaurant itself used to be a church or a secret meeting place for the Illuminati or a Tibetan monastery that only the hottest, most favored Tibetans were invited to. It was not just about owning the city. It was about owning everything beneath and above and behind the city, too.

the Iranian Revolution would take on the profound significance that it has, that its legacy would mark it as one of the most important political developments of the modern age. If at first glance this seems a tad hyperbolic, consider what that revolution has wrought. In the forty-six years since its success, the Western and Islamic worlds have engaged in what many on both sides regard as an existential confrontation, one marked by revanchist religious fundamentalism and state-sponsored terrorism on one side and by paranoia and ultranationalist bigotry on the other. It has colored almost every political and economic development in the Middle East during that time, a gamut that spans everything from the Arab-Israeli conflict to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to international trade and energy policy. While the effects of the revolution have obviously been most profoundly felt within Iran itself, they have been only slightly less so in the United States. The collapse of the Iranian monarchy brought an abrupt end to one of the most important economic and military alliances the United States had established anywhere in the world. Its aftershocks led to the fall of an American president and the advent of a new administration intent on re-exerting American influence abroad through massive rearmament and the sponsorship of proxy wars. The radically altered Middle Eastern chessboard created by the revolution has led directly to some of America’s greatest missteps in the region over the past four decades—to name but two, the 1983 intervention in Beirut that left nearly three hundred American servicemen dead and the early embrace of Iraq’s despotic Saddam Hussein—and it has been a crucial contributing factor in most others: the disastrous 2003 American invasion of Iraq, its ham-fisted approach to the Syrian civil war and the rise of ISIS. Today, the specter of revolutionary Iran continues to drive American foreign policy in such disparate corners of the Middle East as Lebanon and Yemen and Israel; remains a point of division between Washington and its European allies in how best to deal with Iran’s ongoing and highly contentious nuclear energy program; and poses a chief complicating factor in Western efforts to aid Ukraine in its fight against Russian invaders.

It’s the great irony of our national security personnel, from the swords to the shields, that if we do our jobs right, no one hears about it. The best umpire in the league is one you never notice. But if we don’t do our jobs right, it’s the USS Cole, Beirut, Oklahoma City, or even Benghazi all over again. Today we’re doing a tremendous job, but we’re at a crossroads.

In 1982, when Arafat and his Fatah fighters were besieged in Beirut, on the brink of being pushed out of Lebanon by the Israelis, Gaddafi sent him an open telegram suggesting his best option was to kill himself. “Your suicide will immortalize the cause of Palestine for future generations,” he said. “There is a decision which, if taken by you, no one can prevent. It is the decision to die. Let this be.” Arafat is reported to have replied that if Gaddafi would like to join him, he might consider it.