Hassan M. Fattah, who wrote occasionally for TNR, is now in Lebanon, and I almost always learn from him. His "Beirut Memo: A Nation With a Long Memory but a Truncated History" teases out the tale of everyone wanting to hijack Lebanon's sovereignty and character and submerge it beneath their own. (Jack Shafer, now that everybody else but you, putz--oh, and also John Kerry--seems to get the idea, please pay attention.) So there is isn't even one national history taught in the country's schools. There's a Maronite history and a Sunni history and a Shi'a history. There is even a Druze history. And, most important for the destiny of Lebanon and its various sects and ethnicities, a Syrian history. The question is whether the U.S. will come down on the side of Damascus, which means suppressing all indigenous identities, as James Baker surely wants it to do, or not. But Baker has no sympathy for a small people trying, painfully for everyone, to make itself whole. There is one issue that Fattah doesn't touch. It is the role of Israel in Lebanon's identity. Israel and Lebanon--no territorial quarrels with each other, exactly none. In fact, Israel had no intrinsic differences with any of Lebanon's population groups. Until the Palestinians made of southern Lebanon a mini-state of their own. Now, no one cares a fig for them, the rewards of thanklessness for harboring them over four generations. Until Syria and Iran tried to subvert Lebanon, even the Shi'a had no quarrel with Israel. In fact, they welcomed Israel into Lebanon because it rescued them, those most brutalized people in the country, from Yassir Arafat and his gang of murderers. Now, Hezbollah, armed and paid by Damascus and Tehran, has euchred the Shi'a into a holy war with Jerusalem, a war which they will not win and one that puts them at odds with other Lebanese.