11 AUGUST 1990, Page 20

Tanks for the memory

IT HAS happened before. Twenty-odd years ago I had to do with a weekly newsletter, sent out from the Middle East's happy and prosperous financial capital, Beirut. Week by week our letter got later and later, and I was finally roused to ask what the excuse was this time. 'Our mes- senger', I was told, 'came under fire on his way to the airport.' I called this the most far-fetched excuse I had ever heard in my life. Later I learned that the most sophisti- cated marketplace could still have no answer to an unsophisticated man with a Kalashnikov rifle. Tanks make the same point more explosively.