Weary of the Sight

President Bush says he has held off using military force to strike at the murderers of Marine Lt. Col. William R. Higgins because he is concerned about shedding innocent blood. No such moral reservations stay the hands of those who already hold the sword in Lebanon. Since March, when the latest round of slaughter began, more than 700 people have been killed and more than 3,000 have been wounded, most of them in exchanges of fire between Lebanese Christian and Syrian army forces, most of them noncombatants. Syria, aided by groups of Lebanese, Palestinian and Iranian gunmen, now says it is about to launch a decisive attack on the 300-square-mile Christian-controlled enclave north of Beirut. Pope John Paul II pleads for a halt to what he calls this “genocide.” It’s not that, not yet, but it wouldn’t take much for the killing to turn in that direction.

The most recent fighting can probably be blamed on Gen. Michel Aoun, who heads the 20,000-man Maronite Christian militia, professes to lead a nonexistent government, and who bombastically announced some months ago that he would rid Lebanon of the 40,000-man Syrian army that controls a good part of the country. Aoun’s delusions of grandeur were probably encouraged by a new flow of heavy arms from Iraq, Syria’s sworn ideological enemy. Aoun may also have thought the Western world would rush to his aid if he could make it appear that he and his forces were standing at Armageddon and fighting for the Lord.

Two things, both predictable, happened after this threat. Syria, after first throwing a blockade around the ports that are the Maronites’ lifeline to the outside world, began a ruthless shelling of Christian areas. The West, meanwhile, virtually ignored Aoun’s implicit invitation to rally to his cause. The results of Aoun’s wanton misjudgment have been predictably brutal and destructive. Beirut, scene of the heaviest barrages, is becoming both destroyed and depopulated; all but about 200,000 of its 1.5 million residents have taken flight. Like central Europe in the Thirty Years’ War, the capital has become a place of unchecked brutality, misery and devastation, a place where civilization has died.

The sad and terrible truth seems to be that the world no longer much cares, if in fact it ever did. Evidence could be seen this week as the U.N. Security Council met to call for a halt to the fighting. That meeting wasn’t sought by a member state, although any was free to do so. Instead, it was left to the secretary general, invoking rarely used power, to summon the panel and steer through the innocuous resolution. The world, after watching the Lebanese and various foreign interveners kill each other for 14 years, has grown weary of the sight. Worse, for those Lebanese who have so far managed to survive, it seems to have grown indifferent as well.