Lebanon and Syria

This is the highway into Beirut from the airport. It is lined with billboards showing Hezbollah soldiers with the words, "The Divine Victory." The word "divine" is green, the color of Islam.

I stayed in a beautiful hotel on the sea near this rock formation called the pigeons' grotto, which is something of a symbol of Beirut.

The war is over, but there are still soldiers everywhere. They are with the Lebanese army. You never see Hezbollah fighters in uniform or with weapons. They are very secretive and very disciplined.

This is the old Saint George hotel, which was being renovated when a bomb killed the prime minister, Rafik Hariri, on the road in front of the building in February 2005. You can see the bomb crater only slightly in this photo. The area is cordoned off because there is an ongoing investigation into who was responsible for the assassination.

There was an attack at the American embassy in Damascus, just a couple of hours away, so we drove there - myself and a photographer and a driver. The trip ended up taking about eight hours because they wouldn't let American journalists across the border for a while.

This is the Syrian side of the border. Syria is full of cool 1970s era cars that have been carefully maintained and are used as taxis.

I went to the souk, or market, in Damascus. It was similar to such markets all over the Arab world. This is a beverage vendor. He mixes water with various syrups.

He was quite entertaining, flipping his cups and things around.

There is a famous ice cream shop in the souk. It makes an interesting sort of icy vanilla gelato. They serve it dipped in chopped pistachio nuts.

The guys scoop it by hand from a huge mound of the stuff. I had a cup and it was delicious.

Beyond the end of the souk, in the sunshine, you can see part of the Grand Mosque of Damascus, also known as the Umayyad Mosque, one of the oldest mosques in the world. Inside there is a shrine to John the Baptist that is said to hold the head of poor John. There are several other places that claim to have his head, however, and most of the heads were found through 'revelations,' so their true provenance is uncertain. Alas, I had to run to a meeting with a rather boring political analyst, so I didn't go inside.

This is what's left of a bus and a car on the no-man's land between the border posts of Lebanon and Syria on the Beirut-Damascus road. More than 50 people died in the bus when it was hit by an Israeli missile during the sixth day of the war. The people were fleeing Beirut for the safety of Syria. I don't know the story about the car. The road here was obliterated by the missile, but the crater has since been filled in.

This is an apartment building in the Dahiya district of southern Beirut, Hezbollah's heartland. It was the most heavily bombed area during the war. Most people had evacuated by the time the bombing began, but some people stayed and many of them died.

There is nothing but rubble left on the lot where Hezbollah's heqdquarters once stood.

"Made in USA" banners and billboards dot the district and many of the major roads around the country. The Shiites blame the U.S. for the bombing as much as they blame the Israelis. Even the pro-Western Lebanese are angry at the U.S. for encouraging Israel to continue with its bombing campaign long after it was clear civilians were dying.

Another "Made in USA" sign in the Dahiya district.

I spent the last two days in Lebanon in a village called Mukhtara, ancestral home to the warlord, Walid Jumblat. On the first day I had lunch at the home of Nehme Tohme, a relation through marriage of my friend Nick Haddad.

Tohme is a minister in the current government and he had several parliament members there with him. He took me to see Jumblat in his castle and later Jumblat joined us for lunch with the European Union representative in Lebanon. It was a fascinating lunch in beautiful surroundings.

Jumblat gave me an appointment for the next day and so I went back to the castle, a sprawling stone complex on a mountaintop with beautiful views of the Shuf, or Chouf, region of Lebanon. His family has lived there since 1620, though most of the castle dates from the 17th and 18th centuries. It is filled with his various collections - oil paintings and guns, antique and modern, and high-powered telescopes.

He doesn't leave the castle much because he comes from a long line of assassinated political leaders and in the current climate is very worried about getting knocked off. If he stays alive, he will be a grandfather in about six months and said it will be the first time in several generations that his line has lived to see a grandchild.

Above is one of his paintings, depicting, I gather, the Soviets entering Berlin.

He is an odd looking fellow but he has a beautiful wife. He has a funny shar-pei dog named Oscar. He said he spends his free time reading and playing war-related video games. When I saw him, he said he was reading "The Heart of Darkness," by Conrad, "The Sea Wolf," by Jack London, and a book by a man named Robert Kaplan called "The Coming Anarchy."