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.