(As appeared in the National Anxiety Center)

How curious it is. The headlines are filled with news from the Middle East, whether it be Iraq, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Israel, or Saudi Arabia, but there is nary a word about Lebanon. This nation was once governed by a coalition of Christians and Muslims who lived in peace with one another. Lebanon was a jewel among nations of the Middle East, a center for banking and a vacation destination.

Then, when the Palestinians turned against the former King Hussein of Jordan, trying to take over that nation, he drove them out. Many fled to Lebanon and brought an end to peace in that idyllic nation. America paid a price there, too. Its embassy was bombed and Marines sent by President Reagan were victims of a car bomber.

At one point, Israel invaded southern Lebanon in order to end the ceaseless attacks on its citizens launched from there. One of its biggest mistakes was to suddenly withdraw. Lebanon has become the homeland of Hizbullah, one of the most vicious terrorist organizations among the many spawned by the Islamic jihad against Israel.

Invaded by Syria in 1976, Lebanon today is completely subjugated. It is an obscenity that Syria is a current member of the United Nations Security Council. As of this writing, Syria has been in violation of the 1982 United Nations Security Council Resolution 520, calling on it to leave. Lebanon is yet another example of the toothless and ruthless UN. Lebanon exists as a name on a map, but the power that runs that once proud nation is yet another of the dictatorships in the Middle East.

Lebanon, for lack of adequate media attention and its virtual abandonment by the nations of the West and elsewhere, is the invisible victim of the Palestinians, Syria, and the Islamic jihad.

One cannot say it too strongly. Any voice of Lebanese dissent will bring torture and death. So terrible was the rule of Hafez al-Assad, the late Syrian dictator, replaced by his son, Bashar, that it defies the imagination to comprehend the barbarity visited on the Lebanese. Syrians, too, suffer.

The Assad dynasty flooded what was left of Lebanon after the Palestinians arrived with more than a million Syrians to alter the nation’s demographics. Political oppression drove an estimated 85,000 Lebanese to leave over a dozen years during the 1980s and 1990s. While the West focused on Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990, Assad continued the crushing of all the remaining outposts of Christian Lebanese resistance.

Today, Lebanon’s Palestinian refugee camps and its Bekaa Valley remain terror training centers. Syria continues to provide arms and other support to both Iraq and the Palestinians who wage their "intifada" against Israel.

For a quarter century, Lebanon has been the invisible victim that the West has ignored while it and the rest of the Middle East became al Qaeda’s staging ground for his attack on the United States and other nations.

When the US gets through with "regime change" in Iraq, it needs to turn its considerable military and diplomatic power on Syria, forcing it to withdraw from Lebanon and allowing that nation to rebuild itself into a powerful Middle Eastern democracy. Right now it is no less a threat to our security and to peace in that region than Afghanistan before US intervention.

The United States needs to stay in the Middle East for a long time to come. The map of the entire region needs to be redrawn and tiny Lebanon needs to regain its independence as a gift from freedom-loving Americans who have, too long, failed to aid its friend.

For more information, visit www.freelebanon.org

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