By Edward Cody
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, July 26, 2006; A08

BEIRUT, July 25 The baby carrots at Beirut's tony Duo Café restaurant were a little spongy. But the sauce normande was right on the beam and the loup de mer tasted reasonably briny against an astringent rosé from Chateau Kefraya.

On the 14th day of a bloody war -- yet another -- Beirut struggled Tuesday to live up to its old reputation as a Middle Eastern haven for cosmopolitan life and intercommunal harmony. As fighting raged in the south and refugees flooded northward, it was an act increasingly difficult to sustain, sleight of hand by an aging magician who is no longer sure of his tricks.

The latest round of fighting, matching Israel against Hezbollah, the radical Shiite Muslim movement, has already put cracks in a facade carefully reassembled since the last war ended in 1990. The rebuilt traditional buildings of downtown Beirut, with their trendy bars, fashion shops and high-rolling banks, have turned off the lights and locked the doors. Most of Beirut has taken to pulling down the shutters after a late lunch, frightened indoors by Israeli bombs that regularly blast Hezbollah neighborhoods on the southern edge of the city.

"We used to be open until 3 a.m., and in the summer sometimes until 5 a.m., but now there's nobody," said Maroun Khadrah, manager of Le Petit Café, across Maarad Street from Duo. He spoke shortly before powerful explosions from four more bombs cracked across town, shaking streets and buildings. "We close at 7 p.m. now," he said, gesturing toward a largely empty street. "Look around, everything's closed up."

The proud new expressway connecting downtown Beirut with the new international airport has been largely abandoned because it runs through the southern suburbs where Hezbollah has its headquarters and most of its supporters. Bombs have reduced block after block there to rubble. The airport has been bombed as well, and closed for the duration. A few lonely cars race frantically along the road, heading south toward the war zone, with the drivers hoping their vehicles are not in an Israeli pilot's cross hairs.

The new burst of war has also badly damaged the idea that Lebanon had recovered its national unity after 15 years of civil war. Hezbollah started the conflict July 12 without reference to the national government. In two weeks of fighting, the national army has stood by. As a result, the country's Shiites have sharpened their differences from the rest of the population, leaving 30 to 40 percent of the country imbued with an increasingly different idea of what its personality should be.

Sunni Muslim relief workers in the south Lebanon war zone said they have been insulted and even assaulted by Shiite refugees outraged that the rest of Lebanon is not helping in the battle. Reading the signs, some Lebanese warned of a danger to the reunified nation if the conflict drags on and United States and Israel proceed with their plan to try to disarm the Hezbollah movement across the country.

"The Israeli plan . . . is in fact that we become divided, leading to the disappearance of the state of Lebanon," Ghassan Tueni, the owner of an-Nahar newspaper and a widely respected Lebanese sage, wrote in a front-page editorial.

Michel, the waiter serving sea perch at Duo, was still outfitted in black tie as if on a Paris boulevard. Pouring the wine and serving the fish with a flourish, he appeared uninterested in such political intricacies, but desperate to hear that Lebanon would remain what it always wanted to be. "What do you think? How long will it go on?" Michel asked a foreign customer. "In the future, do you think it can be all right again?"

Visitors, including some who have been in the country for only a few days, report they have been asked that question over and over. Taxi drivers want to know. Hotel clerks inquire. Technicians look away from their cranky Internet equipment and seek the advice of strangers.

"Everybody always asks me that," said Cassandra Nelson, a communications officer for Mercy Corps, an international aid group, who had just arrived to help refugees. "My God, what do I know?"

Apologetically, Michel asked if fruit salad was okay for dessert, since Duo's more elaborate creations were not available in these trying times. "The Paris of the Middle East," people traditionally said of Beirut, and Michel did his best to make it seem true.

Actually, it was always more like San Diego: raw and unfinished. What set Lebanon apart was the people, an unlikely amalgam of primeval Middle East and a European veneer. The Phoenicians started here, replaced by Arabs. The Western quotient was left behind by French Jesuits who came in the 19th century to educate children, and French colonialists who came 50 years later to rule.

Their legacy was audible at Duo, which sits behind a row of columns and arches in the Beirut city center rebuilt with traditional Lebanese architecture. A lithe woman with stylishly unkempt hair, her tank top revealing a lot of gloriously tanned skin, used Arabic, French and English in a single sentence to greet a friend who had arrived for lunch.

Lebanese, particularly well-educated Christians, have always loved to do that, showing themselves and their neighbors how cosmopolitan they are. In the tiny Torino Express bar on the other side of Martyrs' Square, the traditional center of the city, a world-weary young sophisticate betrayed another legacy the other night, fending off the urging of a companion with the Hebrew for "Take it easy a minute."

As they always have in conflict, the people of Beirut have shown astounding resilience over the last two weeks. Michael Sawma, who runs Tapas restaurant just down Al Gemaizeh Street, reopened for business Monday night. With Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in town, there was a pause in the bombing and he got about 10 customers for sangria and calamari. Sawma showed up again Tuesday, but the bombs crashed and echoed down Al Gemaizeh Street once again.

It was harder to keep up pretenses in Jounieh, the Christian-inhabited beach resort just north of Beirut. The area is normally boiling this time of year with Persian Gulf Arabs spending petrodollars on hotel rooms, restaurants, nightclubs and brothels. As the first Israeli warplanes unleashed their bombs two weeks ago, most of them left for safety in Damascus, Syria, and Amman, Jordan. After Israeli jets bombed a television relay tower just above the beach Saturday, the last hardy few packed and fled.

"Even the Lebanese who had come here to get away from all the fighting, they left, too," lamented Rashad Bitar, who owns the Malibu Bay Beach Resort overlooking the Mediterranean. "They went to the mountains, those little villages up there," he added, pointing at the sharp spine of Mount Lebanon.

Ahmed Saadoun, who owns the Golden Gulf hotel just down the beachfront, said he still had a full house of southern Lebanese seeking shelter and safety after being driven from their homes by Israel's air campaign. As a result, instead of robed Arabs ogling bikini-clad Russian prostitutes, his poolside was populated by black-robed Shiite mothers chasing after children. "Before, this hotel was full, and full of what? Not Lebanese people, but people from every country," Saadoun said. "And now they all left."

Saadoun, who migrated from Iraq, said the most fearful thing about this round of fighting is that it could reopen Lebanon's civil war. Primeval forces have boiled over regularly through Lebanese history, bursting through the veneer. Mutual slaughters broke out between Druze and Maronite mountain men long before Israel was born. Since 1948, the emergence of the Jewish state just to the south has made peaceful coexistence among Lebanon's Shiite, Sunni, Druze and Christian communities even more difficult.

In the 1970s and '80s, Yasser Arafat and the armed Palestinians who took up residence here made it impossible. With their quest for a return to Palestine, they posed the uncomfortable question: How Arab is Lebanon? The long civil war and several Israeli invasions killed thousands of people and destroyed the country but never provided a definitive answer.

Lebanese, papering over their differences, have worked hard and spent a lot of money over the last 16 years to put their country back together again, hoping against hope that they could get along without really deciding their national personality. Rafiq Hariri, when he was prime minister, organized the renovation of the city center to symbolize the renaissance he hoped would endure. He now rests in an elegant new mosque overlooking Martyrs' Square, having been assassinated last year.