“Give me the money that has been spent in war and I will clothe every man, woman, and child in an attire of which kings and queens will be proud,” said 19th century US senator and anti-slave leader Charles Sumner in reference to the US Civil War. His words have lost no salience since. The war in Iraq, for instance, has cost US tax payers at least $3 trillion according to research conducted by the former chief economist at the World Bank, Joseph E. Stiglitz. That’s enough money to put a lot of shirts on a lot of backs. In Lebanon, war has become somewhat of a national sport pitting the interests of regional and global players against each other in a seemingly endless saga of death and destruction. Indeed, the latest episode of Lebanon’s war saga that took place in 2006 between Israel and Hizbullah proved no different, leaving
