Americans trapped in Beirut; Embassy hapless

There are Americans trapped in Beirut with no way to get out, and the U.S. Embassy isn't even answering its phones. That's the gist of a story from MSNBC quoted on this blog.

[S]everal hundred U.S. residents [are] studying abroad this summer at the American University in Beirut, a school accredited in New York state that has about 7,000 students, most of them from Middle Eastern countries.

[A]bout 40 students [are] in the summer Arabic language program, many of whom have been huddled in a university dormitory since fighting between Israeli forces and Hezbollah guerrillas broke out Wednesday.

"There aren't any ... reliable ways to get out by air, land or sea," State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said Friday. U.S. citizens are being told to "assess what is best for their own personal security." [An interviewee] said so far she has heard nothing from officials at the U.S. Embassy in Beirut, which is about 20 miles from her dorm.

It gets better.

The U.S. embassy has been anything but helpful these last few days. When I finally got through to a human being last night he told me the embassy was closed, to try back tomorrow, and made me feel that I was crazy for even asking about an evacuation plan.

Last I checked, the embassy is supposed to be taking a little bit more of a hands-on approach; that's why it's advisable in certain regions of the world to register with them in the first place, if you're abroad for more than a holiday. It's not the responsibility of teenagers trapped in a war zone to figure out what to do - that's what the embassy staff get paid for. This because kids in a war zone have the unproductive habit of getting hurt. What is wrong with these people?

Is Heckuva Job Brownie at the Department of State these days?

As usual, there's a tie-in to the larger mess that the Rs have created in the entire federal government. State was always, along with the EPA, the agency of the government that Rs loved to hate most; perhaps because it has always been absolutely impervious to rabid ideologues, like, say, John Bolton, after whose "appointment scores of career DoS employees quit, only to be quickly replaced with dross, the main qualification of which was the right kind of opinions. This on top of a five-year pro-dross hiring campaign, mind you.

Now, the dross is faced with a real crisis, as opposed to the made-up crises that consume so much of the time of our rightist friends; you know, the school prayer and gay marriage kinds of crises. And what's their response? They're just not picking up the phone.

It doesn't take a genius to know that Americans in Lebanon right now face extraordinary peril, less even from the Israeli bombardment than from the indigenous factions in the country itself. Remember: this mess started with a kidnapping. And here you have forty-odd American teenagers sitting in an unguarded dorm in a war zone. Meanwhile, if they're studying Arabic, just a hint: which institution in this country has the greatest need of Arabic-speakers? To the point where they give out scholarships?

If Hezbollah has half a brain, they're probably already trying to figure out how to get those kids. Which is why it would make a lot of sense for the embassy to get in touch with them, get a battallion of Marines into the country - the Israelis aren't dumb enough to bomb our guys - and create a secured holding spot for as many Americans as they can.

However, just because something makes sense does not mean the Katrina administration is going to do it. In a scenario we should all be familar with by now, nobody's answering the phone. Literally.