I returned home to Beirut this week to find my landlord, Mustafa, welding an armoured door on to the entrance of his ground-floor flat. "There are many thieves nowadays, Mr Robert," he pleaded with me. "They will come to my house first - they will not reach your apartment."
Well, I don't really want an armoured door on my home. But have things deteriorated this far in Beirut? I pondered what to say to Mustafa. Truly, I could not repeat the latest mantra of the late Tony Blair - south of the Lebanese border and talking about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict - that he had "a sense of possibilities".
All of us in Lebanon have a "sense of possibilities" right now - and they are all bad. The Lebanese army - still fighting its way into the Palestinian Nahr el-Bared refugee camp in the north of the country more than a month after the minister of defence announced total victory over the army's "Fatah al-Islam" opponents - is about the only institution still working in this country. Yesterday morning's Beirut newspapers carried front-page pictures of Lebanese soldiers aboard an armoured personnel carrier, all making "victory" signs to photographers.
But victory over whom? Day after day, we've been watching the US air force C-130s arriving at Beirut's Rafiq Hariri International Airport - named after the man whose assassination on 14 February detonated the latest tragedy of Lebanon - with their cargoes of weapons for the Lebanese army. Would that they had arrived a year ago, many Lebanese say, when Israel was destroying much of Lebanon. But of course, a year ago, the American air force C-130s were arriving in Israel with weapons to be used against Lebanon, including cluster munitions which have contaminated 36.6 million square metres of Lebanon.
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