Lebanon is the most recent example of an all too frequent modern tragedy, the small nation rent by internal division and external intervention: Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Uganda. And as with all tragedies, the agony is both unique and universal.

Understandably, Americans are deeply troubled by the latest chapter in Lebanon's ordeal, for we have a religious, moral, political, and, for millions of Lebanese-Americans, profound familial investment in the country. America's involvement is older by far than the modern state of Lebanon, having originated in the early nineteenth century and grown stronger with American relief efforts during the Christian-Druse battles of 1860 and the establishment of the Syrian Protestant College (now the American University of Beirut) in 1864.