This morning when I checked my in-box, I read the following email from a friend:
Some very close family friends of ours (Lebanese-Americans who are US citizens) were in Lebanon when the bombing started, and were staying with relatives just a few miles from the airport. Once Israel cut off the country, they had no safe options for getting out. The US military / embassy's solution? A $3000 per-person helicopter ride 100 miles to Cyprus.
Our friends opted instead to hire a taxi to drive them across land through Syria. Thankfully, I just found out that, despite traveling along a frequently bombed highway, they made it safely all the way through Lebanon and Syria and are now safe with friends in Amman, Jordan.
We are infuriated by our government's inability to provide timely, safe, and free protection to its citizens in the middle of a war zone. Calls to our representative in Georgia regarding this issue yielded the response, "how could they be expected not to pay for this service?" If I were to support the military for any reason it would be so it can be used to protect and rescue American tax-paying citizens. Isn't that what the military is supposed to be for? Isn't that what we pay billions of dollars to them every year to do, to protect us?
It's unfortunate that Bush's Neocon administration has seen it fit to spend nearly two trillion tax-payer dollars on a war of agression in Iraq, but refuses to spend what is necessary to protect its citizens, whether we are in New Orleans or Lebanon. A military that is as grossly funded as ours should be able to protect its citizens when we are threatened.
An article in yesterday's Times further documents the Bush government's shortcomings in protecting our citizens in Lebanon, highlighting once again Bush's failure to adequately prepare our government for response to crises:
The United States has 25,000 nationals in Lebanon. Its evacuation plans have moved more slowly than those of some other countries.
Leah Byrne, 26, an Ohio native, said that she had tried phoning the embassy nonstop -- "literally every five seconds" -- after Israeli planes began bombing targets south of her central Beirut apartment last week. "I never got through," she said. NYT
I am curious to learn what others have heard about getting out of Lebanon, for both US citizens and non-US citizens still trapped in its borders.