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For the folks at home, it was an interesting week for the old problem to arise, as they sat back among the confusions, watching Lebanon with one eye and with the other a U.S. astronaut floating gloriously in the blackest space, at once free and alone. Is that what the country wants to be in the end, free and alone? Too late for isolation. Yet what does the nation mean when it sails into cauldrons like Lebanon—let's fight to the death until someone gets hurt? Oh, if every beach were Grenada's. After the easy questions, the hard ones, and then a silence, as the nation sways, like its Marines, between the devil and the sea. —By Roger Rosenblatt