The Pentagon’s new pin-up boy

Mukhtara, Lebanon

With his bald pate, droopy moustache and sad, bleary eyes, Walid Jumblatt looks more circus clown than Pentagon pin-up. And if the warlord’s eccentric appearance were not enough to dismay White House officials, then his penchant for virulent leftist anti-Americanism would seem to place him firmly in their ‘against us’ category.

As Lebanon’s Soviet-backed chieftain of the Druze, a secretive sect which broke away from Shia Islam in the 11th century and believes in reincarnation, Jumblatt, now 55, played an active role in the country’s blood-soaked civil war. In 1983 he announced a campaign of ethnic cleansing of Maronites. ‘With the help of our Syrian allies we have removed the Christians and only the Druze villages will remain…. Such is our objective.’ History records that he tried to be true to his word.

Over the years Jumblatt’s colourful pronouncements kept him well away from the Oval Office guest list. In 2003 he not so much as stepped but cartwheeled over the mark.