Will Iraq Follow Lebanon's Path to War?

ap: It started gradually - an assassination, then a bus ambush. Slowly, gunmen took to the streets and sporadic fighting erupted.

Then the tit-for-tat kidnappings broke out, and the "liquidations'' and the car bombs. Those lucky enough to survive quickly picked up and moved - to another part of town or away altogether.

For many months starting in the spring of 1975, the citizens of Beirut did not know for sure if they were living through a civil war or just something that was awful but would - they hoped - end soon. But then the government split. The army disintegrated, businesses were looted and hotels sacked. Armed militias took over.

In the end, Lebanon's civil lasted 15 years. When the fighting between Muslims and Christians and among those groups themselves finally ended in 1990, the toll was colossal: 150,000 people killed, about half a million wounded and nearly a similar number displaced. One quarter of the population, or about 900,000 people, had left the tiny Arab country. Read more