Probably like many other veterans of Lebanon, I had been toying with the idea of going back to Beirut sometime this year.
I wanted to see for myself the city that Rafik Hariri had built from the ashes of a bitter civil war and repeated Israeli attacks. My plans may have been tentative, but I couldn't bear to see Beirut now after a month of Israeli bombardment.
I had been sent out to Lebanon by The Irish Times in 1980, as a cub war correspondent. At the time, Irish soldiers serving with the UN Interim Force in Lebanon (Unifil) were coming under fire from the so-called South Lebanese Army, headed by an Israeli puppet, the half-crazed Maj Saad Haddad whose headquarters were in the border town of Marjayoun.
Three Irish soldiers were killed by Haddad's "de facto forces" just after I arrived in Beirut, so it became a big news story at home. I travelled to the south nearly every day, almost always dropping in to Camp Shamrock, the IrishBatt HQ in Tibnin, before returning to Beirut to write my reports on a Remington portable typewriter in a room at the famed Commodore Hotel.
The hotel, which had its own international telephone exchange, was run by Fouad Saleh, a Palestinian living in exile, like so many others.
"Mr Fouad", who has since died, was always impeccably turned out in a fine suit with a red silk handkerchief in his breast pocket and he used to greet all of the guests with a deferential bow every morning before breakfast.
The civil war was still raging at the time; on the way into town from the airport, two of the many factions were firing RPGs (rocket-propelled grenades) at each other's positions over the airport road. Yet it was amazing to witness how resilient the Lebanese were, with makeshift bottle shops selling duty-free liquor reopening just minutes after the fighting died down.
In the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Chatila, whose names became synonymous with mass murder two years later, everything was remarkably well organised too.
There were no tents, but rather "informal housing" on congested streets, built up over many years. And everyone knew where they were from; when I asked one boy in hospital, he replied: "Haifa." But he'd never seen it, and probably never would.
Every night, a taxi driver called Mahmoud would take me to the Reuters office in his old black Mercedes, travelling slowly along shell-cratered roads; he was the only man I ever met who could drive a car and roll a joint for himself at the same time. He wanted to bring me to Damascus via the Bekaa Valley, where most of the cannabis known as Lebanese Gold is grown.
I never made it to Damascus. Instead, I went to Tel Aviv, via Larnaca in Cyprus. In Israel I expected to find some answers about why its surrogate army in south Lebanon were killing our soldiers. It was also apparent to me that the Israelis had fanned the flames of Lebanon's civil war for their own geo-political reasons, as if to guarantee permanent instability.
I had been reading David Hirst's definitive book, The Gun and the Olive Branch, documenting the root causes of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It was (and still is) compelling stuff because of its myth-breaking quality - not least in dispelling the ultimate Zionist myth that Palestine in the late 19th century was "a land without people for a people without land".
The truth is that only 70,000 Jews were living in Palestine in 1900 along with 700,000 Arabs. By the late 1940s, as the British Mandate came to an ignoble end and in the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust, the Jewish population had increased to 608,000 while the Arab population had risen to 1,237,000, giving a ratio of 33 per cent to 67 per cent.
Under the UN's 1947 partition plan, which was explicitly designed to create two states - Israel and Palestine, with Jerusalem and Bethlehem as an international zone - the indigenous Arabs were to get 45 per cent of Palestine, with the Jews being given the lion's share of 55 per cent.
Naturally, the Palestinians rose up in revolt against this inequitable deal. In 1948, when Israel declared itself a state, Jews held legal title to just over 6 per cent of the land. By the end of Israel's war of independence, it gained control of 78 per cent of Palestine and expropriated the land of tens of thousands of Arabs who fled after massacres such as Deir Yassin. All they had left was the West Bank and Gaza Strip. The Palestinians call this loss of their homeland Al Nakba (The Catastrophe) because it turned 750,000 of them into refugees, with no right of return. This was compounded after Israel captured the remaining Palestinian territories in 1967 and almost immediately began to colonise them with Jewish settlements - an illegal policy that continues to the present day.
As David Hirst has noted, Israel believes "it is entitled to absorb a great chunk of that 22 per cent of their original homeland which, in the shape of the Occupied Territories, is all that the Palestinians now officially lay claim to" under the 1993 Oslo Accords. And it is this virtual Bantustan to which the refugees must confine their "right of return".
Worse still, the present Israeli government is seeking to enforce the dismemberment of what remains of Palestine on a unilateral basis, with its "security barrier" as the makings of a border.
How on earth can the Israelis imagine that such a strategy will bring them long-term peace and security? It is surely much more likely to leave a festering sore.
If US secretary of state Condoleezza Rice believes that peace in the region must be based on "enduring principles", it has to be negotiated rather than imposed and must involve all parties.
That's why it was bizarre that neither Syria (part of whose territory is also occupied by Israel) nor Iran were represented at the recent talks in Rome on the conflict in Lebanon.
Could it be the case, as former Israeli prime minister Menachim Begin wrote (in a perversion of Descartes's old dictum) "we fight, therefore we are"? Armed to the teeth by its staunchest ally, the US, Israel is now behaving as one of its greatest military heroes, Gen Moshe Dayan, once advised: "Israel must be like a mad dog, too dangerous to bother."
With hundreds of civilian casualties from the latest war, most of them in Lebanon, the "international community" must realise that this is a recipe for semi-permanent conflict in the Middle East, as long as the real issues remain unresolved. And who will pick up the tab this time for rebuilding battered Beirut and so much else? One thing for sure is that it won't be the culprits.