Nir Rosen has a new article out about Lebanon’s (latest) descent into chaos, as usual aided and abetted by the US:
Omar and his friends followed the fatwas of scholars associated with al Qa’eda.
Omar’s sitting room was a shrine to jihad: he had a large collection of ammunition shells and grenades on display in a cabinet and framed pictures of the September 11 attacks – the Twin Towers aflame and a smouldering Pentagon – greeted visitors near the doorway. When his little boy wandered in, Omar asked him what he wanted to be when he grew up, and the child, grinning, said “a mujahid! 
I visited often in the spring and summer. Omar was never without his 9mm Glock pistol; it was always in his hand, his lap, or next to him on the table. The gun was another symbol of the spread of the Iraq war – like many Glocks I had seen in Lebanon, it had been smuggled into the country after being issued by the Americans to the Iraqi security forces.