COMMENTARY
A small reference to TVM in this AlJazeera Stream video. The TVM avatar is very visible in the tweet stream on the wall of the studio. I followed the civil war in Lebanon quite closely, but was never 'on the ground' in Lebanon during the height of the violence. I did pass through Beirut in a lull in the violence. The airport opened for a couple of weeks, then violence closed it up again. I flew Beirut to New York in a 747 with way more cabin staff than passengers ... comfortable, but reflecting a very bad situation, Apparently the plane was effectively a cargo plane for this short time ... and then things closed down again. My message to the AJStream was simply that civil war can go on for a very long time. I did not want to make any comparison beyond this, though my feed was criticized because of my apparent attempt to draw comparion. Someone else did the same for Libya. All these places are very different.
Peter Burgess