Foreman: Blood on the Streets in Beirut

Last month in Beirut I was caught up in a physical attack on Christopher Hitchens, the Anglo-American journalist, by pro-Syrian thugs. It was my first visit to the Lebanese capital – as the guest of the New Opinion Group, an anti-Syrian NGO. The violence came as a surprise, partly because we were walking down one of the city’s smartest streets, but mostly because one of the most striking things about the city is the way it looks and feels so calmly Western European, so civilised and so very much recovered from the civil war of 1975-90.