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Lebanon Essay

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Lebanon

Lebanon, a nation that once proudly called itself the Switzerland of the Middle
East, is today a country in name only. Its government controls little more than half of the nation's capital, Beirut. Its once-vibrant economy is a shambles.
And its society is fragmented - so fragmented, some believe, that it may be impossible to re-create a unified state responsive to the needs of all its varied peoples.

Lebanon lies on the eastern shore of the Mediterranea n Sea, in that part of southwestern Asia known as the Middle East. Because of its location - at the crossroads of Asia, Europe, and Africa - Lebanon has been the center of commerce and trade for thousands of years. It has also been on the route of numerous conquering armies. …show more content…

Lebanon has four distinct geographical regions: a narrow - but fertile - coastal plain; two roughly parallel mountain ranges that run the full length of the country - the Lebanon, which rises in the west to an alpine hei ght of 11,000 feet while the eastern range, the anti-Lebanon, is crowned magestically by the snow-capped Mount Hermon at 9,232 feet. The two chains of mountains shelter between them a well-cultivated plateau extending seventy miles in length and fifteen miles in width. This tableland is called the Bekaa. This is a fertile strip of land 110 miles long and six to ten miles wide. Zahle, the third largest city in the country, is in the valley. The country's two most important rivers, the Litani and the Orontes, rise in the northern Bekaa near Baalbek, a city that dates to Roman times. The Litani flows southwest through the Bekaa Valley and then empties into the Mediterranean Sea north of Tyre. Its waters are used for irrigation, so it becomes a mere tr ickle by the time it gets to the sea. The
Orontes rises not far from the Litani, but it flows northward between the two mountain ranges, wending its way into Syria. Beyond the Bekaa and the anti-
Lebanon mountains, the Syrian desert only stretches east f or about 800 miles to the valley of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. This geography has been a determining factor for millenia in keeping Lebanon turned toward the West.

The landscape cannot be described without mentioning the most celebrated

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