So, after thirty years, Syria is promising to leave Lebanon. Thirty years of on-again-off-again war, civil war, guerilla war, of news stories so much the same that the rest of the world just tunes them out, of front page pictures of weeping women, dead children, explosions, politicians, truces made and broken, meddling neighbours, incursions, excursions, recursions and, of course, promises.

My friend Orfali is at once ecstatic and afraid. Ecstatic because there is a real chance of peace in her homeland, afraid because her hopes have been dashed before. We were talking about it this morning as she ran up my purchases in her little neighbourhood store. I asked her, if it came true, would she go back. No, she said. Thirty years ago her father fled the soldiers with his large family, and now they are rooted in other soil, with large families of their own. Now they are Australian, American, Canadian citizens. Their children know no other home.

Between Orfali and her husband, Malek, their extended family accounts for almost two hundred Australians, Americans, Canadians of Lebanese heritage. And that's only one family. What of all the others? How many citizens has this one civil war bequeathed the rest of the world? There are offially 3.6 million citizens in Lebanon. There are far more Lebanese living abroad.

It started me thinking. Thinking about the hidden cost of war. Not just the destruction of a land, the civilan casualties -- or collateral damage, if you prefer, not just the impoverished and maimed survivors in the homeland, but the exiles, the lost careers, the children given away and their children. The futures that won't happen.

If you live in a major North American city, you probably see these futures every day, and never think about it. In this city, there are two huge cab companies, one driver owned, one not. Between them, they employ close to one thousand people, mostly men.

Overwhelmingly, the drivers are Lebanese, Muslim and Christian, with a sprinkling of other Arabic peoples, Somalians, and the occasional Indian or Pakistani. Ask them about their journey, and the tale becomes depressingly familiar. I have talked to civil engineers, doctors, the sons of doctors, mechanical engineers, physicists, teachers, architects, and many other professionals who fled from the soldiers to come to Canada. They got in because they were educated, but, once in, could not practise their professions. Often, their wives are in the same situation: teachers, nurses, professors, designers who cannot make a living one of the richest lands in the history of the world.

Why? Because immigration is a federal jurisdiction, but licensing is a provincial one. The feds let 'em in, the provinces won't accommodate them. This despite headlines screaming about shortages of doctors, teachers, engineers. It's the same down south in many areas, and they have ten times the population we do.

So they end up driving cab, twelve hours a day, six or seven days a week, while their wives do cleaning or laundry. The lucky ones, like Malek -- an engineer -- and Orfali, run small businesses. They get by. Some get comfortable. A few get rich.

But not many.

Think of those futures. Think of the bridges not designed, the buildings not built, the sewers not laid, the illnesses untreated, the children uneducated, the income forgone, the children born abroad and lost to Lebanon forever. Think of the cost to Lebanon of losing these professionals. Think of the cost of losing thier children. Think of those children not educated to the level they would have been had their parents been able to continue practising their professions. Orfali and Malek have a large family -- so large I can never remember if it is eight or ten children. I have met a lot of them. They are good young people: hard-working, clean living, religious, courteous and thoughful. Not a bad one in the bunch. Only one is a university student.

Think of what they might have been able to do if the civil war had not sent them to be children of another country's labouring classes.

Now, imagine that the, say, four million, Lebanese abroad have paired up exclusively with each other, which they have tended to do in the first and second generation. That makes two million lost families, a large number of which are headed by people who would have been members of the professional classes, sending sons and daughter to univeristy.

Imagine they have only three children each. Six million children that are lost forever to the land of their forebears. added to their parents, that makes ten million citizens in one-and-one-half generations.

What might Lebanon have become if the best and brightest had not had to flee the soldiers? What, for that matter, might we become if we found a means to allow them to practise their professions? What futures might there have been for their children, and their children's children? What world might this be if that one war had been avoided?

This is just one war, regarded by the experts in these things as a local conflict. Look in your newspaper. How many such local conflicts are going on right now? How many citizens are being given away to other countries? Not just the professionals that can match up to the stiff demands of the richest nations, what about the farmers, the weavers, the fisherfolk, the ragpickers, the shepherds, the medicine women, and all the lost children living in camps across borders while their land is being desolated?

A few months ago, in another regard, I became curious about the demographic results of the Holocaust. Everyone in the English-speaking world can recite the "six million dead" description. But what does it mean?

I discovered that it meant about half of all Jews known to be living at the time. Think about that. Think! Not just about the horrific deaths of the victims, think about the destruction of a people and a culture. Where are the klezmirim in Poland? Where is Yiddish a living language?

Where are the children and the futures? Today there are about thirteen million Jewish people in the world -- probably an underestimate, given the Jews historic reluctance to be counted -- a reasonable reluctance when one considers that counting led, at the least, to onerous taxes and at the most to expulsion. Add in the non-Jews with Jewish forbears, and I imagine the number exceeds twenty million.

Think about the fact that the Jewish population has tended to contribute out of proportion to its numbers in intellectual and cultural areas like arts, science, philosophy. think of the fact that, until the thorny issue of Israel-Palestine, which is strongly influenced by the meory of the Holocaust, to both lead and man movements for social justice.

What kind of world would we have if six million Jews had not been murdered so foully? What would they, and their children, and their children's children have contributed to the countries of which they would still have been citizens? What kind of Middle East would we have if the Western nations had not dumped a load of traumatised survivors in Israel and then walked away from the consequences?

It would be a world in which klezmir was a living musical form instead of a revered museum tradition, in which the carriers of Jewish culture in Poland would be Jews, rather than guilt-ridden young Poles two generations removed from the roundups. It would be a world in which Isaac Singer was read in the original by people who understood the nuances of the language.

Perhaps it would be a world in which the Palestinians had a homeland, and the Jews still led the fights for social justice in Europe and America. Certainly, it would be a richer, stronger, smarter world. And, given the issues we are presently facing in the environment and our societies, we should mourn that loss not only for itself, but for the futures that never happened.

It didn't just happen in the history books. It is happening to us all, right now. That is what we lost in one genocide. The war in which it was embedded killed an estimated 20 million people outright, displacing millions more.

What happened to those futures? What did we lose in Viet Nam? Cambodia? Rwanda? In North Ireland? The Balkans?

What have we lost in Lebanon?

Right now, the rich world is pouring our hearts and wallets for the survivors of the tsunami that is the largest natural disaster recorded in human history. As well we should. The 280,000 dead do not begin to scratch the surface: millions of survivors are struggling to come to terms with the apparently random loss of family and friends, the complete eradication of homes that will not be rebuilt because of poisoned land, the fisheries destroyed, the forests levelled, the futures lost.

The tsunami could not have been prevented. Wars can be. Next time you see the trite, mundane image of a mother shrieking her grief at a dead child, of a bomb exploding, or read of another byzantine twist in some ceasefire negotiation, think.

Think not only of the dead, but of the living. Think of the survivors on the land. But think, too, of the exiles, the children of the exiles.

Think of the cost of war to those lucky ones who escape abroad. Of the futures that will not be.

Think of the cost to the world in lost bridges, hospitals, education, designs, food production; think of the cost to the world in lost creation, invention, agitation; think of the lost potential.

Think of the cost to you.

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