Boots on the Ground

Cherry Orchards under Mount Sannine, Spring in Lebanon/ Photo ALB

Want some good news about America's involvement in the Middle East? Well put on your hiking boots (as I did this weekend) and head up to the Lebanon Mountain Trail, a 250-mile highland track that runs almost the entire length of the country. The project was inspired by the Appalachian Trail in the United Sates, and funded in large part by the American government.

The American advisors to the project, which started in 2005 and finished last year, no doubt found conditions a little different here in the Middle East than in peaceful Appalachia: the route through southern Lebanon had to be changed several times because war with Israel in 2006 left several proposed paths littered with cluster bombs. But the LMT has some advantages all its own, especially the broad span of culture and history amid the cedar trees and snow capped-peaks. The path (which takes about 30 days when done all in one go) meanders through Christian, Druze, and Muslim communities, some totally modern, others semi-nomadic, amid the archeological and architectural cultural remnants of Roman, Byzantine, Crusader, Mamluk, Ottoman, and French Colonial eras.

The Lebanese architects of the LMT are hoping to promote a sustainable alternative to the rapacious development that is destroying this tourism-dependent country, and preserve local cultures along the way. They've refurbished traditional red-roofed mountain cottages, owned by local families, turning them into bed-and-breakfasts for thru-hikers. They built the trail itself by finding and re-habilitating traditional mountain byways that had become overgrown and lost since mountain-folk traded in their donkeys for cars.

The LMT is just one of the many high-minded projects that the American government supports in the Middle East, ranging from civil society training, sustainable agriculture to education that rarely receive much attention. But perhaps that's because they pale in comparison to so much of the other stuff we do here. The US is the largest arms dealer in the Middle East, selling billions in weapons every year, mostly to Israel, Saudi Arabia and Egypt. Remember those cluster bombs in southern Lebanon that have killed 40 people and wounded 252 others since the END of the war in 2006? Many of them were made in the USA.

--Andrew Lee Butters/Mount Lebanon