In Lebanon, the tiny Arab state and French Mandate on the Mediterranean's eastern shore, the United Nations came up hard against two complex, trouble-packed problems: the demands of Arab peoples for political freedom, and the clash of Western imperialisms in the strategic region of Suez and the Persian Gulf.
The Lebanese—less than a million Moslems and Christians living in a country smaller than Connecticut—had been promised their freedom in 1941, after British and Fighting French ousted a Vichyite administration in Lebanon and the neighboring French Mandate of Syria. U.S. diplomacy and Atlantic Charter propaganda had encouraged the aspirations of some...
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