AMERICANA MAKES RETURN TO LEBANON : BEIRUT REBOUNDING FROM WAR.

Byline: Charles W. Holmes Cox News Service

Slowly, the modern ruins of this war-scarred city are vanishing, literally being pushed into the sea to make way for new apartment buildings, shopping centers and hotels.

And a decade after Americans fled the bombs and bullets of Lebanon's merciless civil war and hostage-taking militias, America is coming back.

Not its citizens, whose travel to Lebanon is restricted by a U.S. prohibition. But Americana has emerged: burgers at Hardees, rental cars from Hertz and wide-screen TVs displaying the NBA in luxury hotel lounges.

``Eight years ago none of us would have believed it,'' said Riad al-Dehni, 28, the floor manager at J. Paul's, Beirut's newest and hottest restaurant.

Replicated from a Washington, D.C., eatery of the same name, J. Paul's is decorated in a faux-Georgetown motif with statuettes of U.S. presidents peering over tables and the official seal of the United States adorning the maitre d' stand. Cheeseburgers cost $12. A raw bar serves up oysters on the half shell.

``There were tanks lining this street and the buildings were burning. Now, it's got the best restaurants in the city,'' al-Dehni said.

On the rebound

After seamless spasms of carnage and mayhem from 1975-90, Beirut is rebounding. The city celebrated in its prewar days as the Paris of the Middle East is once again returning to its chief peacetime pursuits: making money and enjoying the good life.

Yet citing a continuing threat of terrorism against Americans, Washington maintains a nine-year-old prohibition on U.S. citizens using their passports for travel to Lebanon.

In Beirut, the ban is seen as a weak attempt to pressure the Lebanese government, and its overseer, Syria, to rein in Hezbollah guerrillas in the south and make peace with Israel.

``It's a political measure linked to the Syrian-Israeli conflict,'' said economist Kamal Hamdan. ``It's not good for Lebanon and it's not good for American business.''

Seven years after the end of the civil war, cellular telephones far outnumber guns. The ``green line'' that ran down Beirut's center, the battle line between Muslim and Christian militias, has faded with a massive, $11.7 billion public works project to repair utilities, carve new roads and erect new office towers.

In a broad sense, the Lebanese have chosen to forget the war, a collective amnesia that assists the healing process but unnerves those who believe the new gloss on Beirut is a thin salve covering deep, unhealed wounds of a society.

``Are the people of Lebanon more divided today than they were before? I think they are. But somehow they are more willing to live with those differences,'' said Farid el Kazen, a political scientist at the American University of Beirut.

Gap between rich, poor

No one in Lebanon who lived through the bloody years suggests that anarchy was preferable to the new capitalism.

But anxiety abounds over a growing gap between rich and poor, alleged government mismanagement of the reconstruction and the fragile co-existence of the myriad Muslim and Christian factions.

``The struggle which was fought with guns and bullets is now institutionalized in government and public administration. The new war is fought over political influence and contracts and money,'' Hamdan said.

Lebanon's billionaire prime minister, Rafik Hariri, a Sunni Muslim, is the prime mover behind the rebuilding, with the help of Solidere, a $1.8 billion company created by his government to develop the city center.

Hariri, who made his personal fortune in construction in Saudi Arabia, came to office in 1992 and has somehow managed a difficult coalition government that includes such former warlords as Nabih Berri of the Shiite Muslim group Amal and Elie Hobeika, a Christian Phalangist.

Returning home

Lured by the promise of a new Lebanon, Haj Rayes, a Lebanese-American in the real estate business, moved his family back to Beirut from Los Angeles two years ago because the rebuilding boom offered more potential for profits than in California, deep in recession at the time.

Rayes returned after a 20-year exile: ``The opportunities were too good . . . and if peace doesn't last in Beirut we can always go back.''

Politically, Lebanon remains a dominant obstacle to Middle East peace.

Throughout Lebanon, about 35,000 Syrian troops have remained since the war's end to ensure Damascus' powerful influence over the Hariri government and to prevent the Lebanese militias from rearming themselves.

In the south, a small war still seethes between Shiite Hezbollah guerrillas, backed by Iran, and Israeli occupation troops in a border zone nine miles deep into Lebanese territory. The unrest has deterred some foreign investors and periodically sends streams of refugees into Beirut when the warfare heats up.

U.S. position

America's arm's-length foreign policy toward Lebanon endures, in part, because of this remnant of Lebanon's bad old war and the potent memory of the U.S. experience in Beirut of the 1980s - 241 Marines killed by a suicide truck bomb in October 1983 at their headquarters near the Beirut airport, 12 Americans seized and held hostage.

Eager to attract U.S. investors and tourists, Hariri has urged, without success, that the ban be lifted.

In all, Beirut expects to spend some $60 billion in public and private capital on its rebuilding effort. While some American firms are competing for a share via their foreign subsidiaries, European and Japanese companies are grabbing the lion's share of the market.

Still some Lebanese argue that the United States is getting its revenge in the style of the Beirut's reconstruction - with its glitzy office buildings and fast food restaurants. The rebuilding is finishing the job the war began by ripping the soul from the city, they contend.

Across the street from the American University, a cafe that served as the meeting place for the city's leading intellectuals before the war is now a Pizza Hut.

These days money, not memories, counts most in Beirut.

``We have a saying in Lebanon,'' said Hamden, ``the battle has stopped because there are no more fighters.''

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Photo

Photo: Hassan Balhass, 24, wounded by Israeli fire in 1990, serves as a reminder of the carnage and mayhem that overtook the country.

New York Times