Cox’s Visit a Main Event in Lebanon

U.S. Rep. Christopher Cox hadn’t even sat down when Lebanese President Elias Hrawi welcomed the Orange County Republican to their meeting last week with what has become a standard greeting for the rare American visitor to Beirut.

“How did you get here?” the president asked.

It was a relevant question. Cox was, after all, in the capital of a nation better known in America for its hostages than its hospitality, a land that remains officially off limits to U.S. citizens under a strict State Department travel ban designed to prevent future hostage-taking.

Hrawi’s greeting to the Newport Beach lawmaker halfway through a two-day, fact-finding visit to postwar Beirut was an expression of pleasant surprise--and a reflection of hope within the new, pro-U.S. Lebanese government that this particular Christopher might be followed by another in the coming few days.

As the nations of the Middle East prepared for U.S. Secretary of State Warren Christopher’s first official trip to the troubled region later this week, Lebanon officially remains off his itinerary. Given a recent State Department decision to renew the five-year-old ban on travel to Beirut, based on lingering security concerns over the continued presence of Islamic radical groups in the country, Christopher’s official itinerary came as little surprise to most Lebanese.

But, as one Lebanese businessman put it during Christopher Cox’s visit last week, “At this point, any Christopher will do.”

And the government of Lebanon’s new, billionaire Prime Minister Rafik Hariri went out of its way to treat the U.S. congressman’s visit as a major national event and a suitable international showcase to prove that Beirut is on the brink of a new era of peace and prosperity.

Cox described his mission to reporters as a private trip “to listen and learn.” From champagne toasts in Hariri’s office to an impromptu stop at a street-corner sandwich shop, his presence appeared to prove what the Lebanese have been saying for months: that, after more than a decade of civil war, Beirut is not merely safe for foreigners but a potential gold mine for foreign investment.

Cox appeared reluctant to pass official judgment on a nation where Islamic militants held Americans hostage for years, saying only that he decided to make the trip after “I inquired of as many people as possible concerning my own safety, and I was convinced that such a trip was possible.”

It was not a routine trip. Cox and his official party included three Orange County constituents with longtime interests in Arab-American affairs--Orange businessman Mounzer Chaarani, retired educator George Dibbs and Santa Ana construction contractor George Hanna. All three are Lebanese-Americans, Cox said. Joining them were Cox aide Doug Riggs and former chief of staff Bob Sutcliffe, a graduate of American University in Beirut who is now a private attorney in Los Angeles.

They had traveled here on visas issued as separate travel documents so that they would not have to use their U.S. passports. And the delegation’s security was clearly a major concern for the host government, which claims as its greatest achievement the disarming and dissolving of the many militias that ruled over a patchwork of city neighborhoods and a now-largely pacified countryside.

Jeeps filled with anti-terrorist commandos and internal security forces wielding M-16 assault rifles ran interference for Cox’s three-car entourage of Cadillacs as they sped through Beirut’s congested streets--particularly when Cox requested a detour to get a closer look at the city’s bombed-out and bullet-scarred downtown area, where reconstruction is scheduled to begin in the spring.

The clearest illustration of the security concerns came when the congressman, while en route to a meeting at the U.S. Embassy, suddenly ordered an impromptu, U.S.-style campaign stop at a neighborhood sandwich shop. As Cox left his bulletproof car, dodged curbside rain puddles and went in for a mini-pizza and a few words of grass-roots conversation, commandos jumped out of their jeeps, weapons at the ready, and scanned the area for snipers.

Later, at the embassy, the 40-year-old Cox was welcomed by U.S. Ambassador Ryan Crocker, 42, and told him: “I’ve never met a younger ambassador,” to which Crocker responded: “I’ve never met a younger congressman.”

Over lunch, the ambassador explained Washington’s justification for retaining the travel ban, which Lebanon--hungry for American high technology and investment--considers a major obstacle to reconstruction. “If anything happened to an American citizen,” Crocker concluded, it would be as “bad for the Lebanese as for the Americans.”

Although the ambassador concedes that security measures have vastly improved since Prime Minister Hariri took office late last year, a rocket attack on the U.S. Embassy in October, 1991, and the car-bombing of the main administration building at the American University of Beirut 10 days later suggested that acts of terrorism are not just a memory here.

Cox took pains during his many meetings with the Lebanese leadership to assure them that they have no monopoly on unrest.

On several occasions, he likened Beirut’s struggle to find foreign investment to Los Angeles’ similarly frustrating task to find capital to rebuild neighborhoods badly hit during last year’s riots. As if to underscore the message, Cox noted that his visit last week coincided with a hostage-taking not in Beirut but at a Los Angeles bank.

During its intensive round of official meetings, the California delegation expressed sympathy for Lebanon’s struggle to cleanse itself of radical Islamic groups such as Hezbollah, or Party of God, the Iran-backed extremist group that was responsible for many of the hostage-takings here. The Lebanese sought to explain the presence of those groups as a necessary buffer against Israeli expansionism in southern Lebanon.

The Lebanese used the meetings with Cox to appeal for a visit from the secretary of state, who hopes to rekindle the stalled Middle East peace talks during his stops in Israel and a number of Arab countries this week.

“Not visiting Lebanon will be interpreted as (meaning) Lebanese sovereignty is not significant and that other countries can speak for Lebanon,” Foreign Minister Fariz Bweiz told Cox’s delegation.

“Even for a few hours, Warren Christopher should come. There are no security reasons for his absence.”

There was little mention of the most contentious issue in restarting the 16-month-old negotiations between Israel and its neighbors--the presence of nearly 400 Palestinian deportees in the no-man’s-land between Israel and Lebanon.

Cox’s meeting with Prime Minister Hariri, a businessman who has been labeled “the Ross Perot of Middle East politics,” provided a glimpse of the real message Beirut is now trying to send to the West.

Most of Cox’s meeting with the new head of government focused on the role American business could play in rebuilding Lebanon. At one point, the prime minister sent an aide to fetch a list of companies that have bid on such key and lucrative contracts as a new national telecommunications network, stressing that several American corporations were among them.

Although U.S. citizens cannot legally visit Lebanon without State Department permission, Hariri’s aides explained that American corporations can do business by using non-American employees in their country.

Finally, after indicating that he will report his findings both to his congressional colleagues and to the recession-hit corporations of Orange County, Cox indicated that he wanted to toast Hariri’s ambitious plans for rebuilding Lebanon. But the delegation already had consumed the customary coffee and fruit juice that usually accompany such visits.

So--in a gesture that recalled Beirut’s prewar reputation as the “Paris of the Middle East,” a nickname the new government hopes to resurrect--Hariri casually motioned to his aide, who reappeared with two bottles of perfectly chilled French champagne.

Times staff writer Fineman reported from Nicosia, Cyprus, and special correspondent Raschka from Beirut.