LEBANON: On the Edge of Collapse

ROCK BOTTOM AGAIN, wailed the headline on Beirut's Daily Star one day last week. The paper was announcing the collapse of Lebanon's Cease Fire No. 12, which had kept political and sectarian violence down for most of the past month. Over the Independence Day weekend — normally a time of parties, parades and speeches praising the country's ethnic harmony — rival militias fought rocket, mortar and machine-gun battles along the front dividing Beirut's Moslem and Christian communities. Hundreds of kidnapings were reported by both sides. At week's end the fighting, which spilled...