WQASHINGTON REPORT: Barking Dog and Private Agency
Getlein, Frank
WASHINGTON REPORT BARKING DOG AND PRIVATE AGONY At this writing there is no peace in Lebanon and there is no prospect of peace. The Syrian incursion, as President Nixon taught us to call...
...Like all civil wars, this is basically a class war: our own, the new class of northern financial-industrial inteersts against the scarcely less new class of southern Big-Ag...
...It is impossible for anyone on the outside to figure out what the Arab consortium is up to in Lebanon because nobody on the inside knows...
...in Spain, the old owners out to recapture political power lost to the working people...
...It merely adds a fourth...
...Incidentally, the student wishing to understand that Cuban expedition has only to listen to traditional Cuban dance music and then to listen to authentic black African chants and percussion...
...This is what the Americans have done in Lebanon...
...If, as appears in Lebanon, we have now got beyond that, it is too bad it is so late, it is better late than never, and while it will not bring peace to the world, it can make the world's private agonies rather less terrible and that is no small contribution...
...We are not in Lebanon because Kissinger's employer, Ford, knows in his House of Representatives bones that neither house would stand for it...
...The American presence in Lebanon is an absence...
...Hence, the hope...
...Next, the whole bunch...
...The presence is an absence and the most positive negative since Mies van der Rohe...
...The Syrian interest is simple enough: when the French owned Syria, Lebanon was part of Syria...
...According to all those officials, there could be no such thing as a private agony...
...This is where the ironies in Lebanon begin to multiply beyond counting...
...They have done nothing...
...Our job is the education of Henry Kissinger and it begins to look as if the kid is ready to graduate...
...The Syrians, for example, who were one of the major creators of the refugees in the belief that the Jews would soon be exterminated, are now in arms against their own creation...
...What all those Arab states and factions are doing is shooting one another up because they enjoy shooting one another up, or, to phrase it more politely, they are fighting for freedom from one another because it is one another who chiefly threaten the freedom of all of them...
...More significant still, even though Henry Kissinger, on the record by far the most bloodthirsty American officer of government since William Tecumseh Sherman and in scale much more so than Sherman, even though Kissinger remains our Secretary of State, even so, we are not in there, howling in the night, rushing about savagely and tearing flesh from bones to save those lacerated from a fate still worse, which we, if not they, can see so clearly impending...
...The American presence is and almost certainly will remain that of the barking dog in the night of Sherlock' Holmes...
...One obvious motive is to keep Syria from seizing the crown of primacy owned by Egypt when Nasser was jumping around over there...
...It is almost inevitable that four years from now, and quite possible that six months from now, the United States will have a civilized Secretary of State, a foreign minister fit for company, housebroken, safely to be allowed in the living room with the grown-ups, for the first time in a very long time indeed...
...They did not tear anyone to pieces and, foaming at the mouth and howling, rush about the countryside destroying everyone they encountered in order to save them...
...How come...
...What the joint venture of the other Arab nations in the general geographical area adds is not at all clear, but it is reasonable to suppose it will be more in support of war, one way or another, than in support of peace any way at all...
...Even though Richard Helms, the country's most distinguished commander of assassins, burglars and similar technical experts, has been long pre-positioned in the area-and if you wish to believe that Helms is solely performing his decorative duties as ambassador to the Shah of Iran, you are, of course, free so to believe-but even with Helms on the scene, we have not knocked off an important leader on any side...
...Education in his line of work being, to some extent, unavoidably cumulative, there is no question at all but what his successor will start from where Kissinger left off, conceivably even further advanced...
...Except in extremely rare cases of rising or sinking to principle, Congress always reflects what it discerns, as best it can, to be the will of the people...
...Congress did not permit him even a few mini-bombs, a team of Helmsian assassins, in Angola, despite the presumably persuasive presence there of the dread Castro's troops...
...More important, they did not bite...
...Another is to get the PLO back into the puppet status is was assumed to have when the Arab states created it...
...Precisely, my dear Watson...
...The Syrian incursion, as President Nixon taught us to call neighborly invasions, does not really interpose a peace-keeping force among the three basic warring elements in lacerated Lebanon...
...Congress did haul Kissinger, whining and snarling, out of Indochina at last...
...On the basis of his indomitable and implacable baby-killing, Arafat has been accepted as an authentic Arab statesman by other Arab statesman and the PLO as a liberation army by those world leaders who created the "refugees," by calling on Palestinian Arabs to abandon their homes and get out of the way of the latter-day Saladins way back in 1948...
...Kissinger's restraint, therefore, voluntary or imposed, does reflect what the people's representatives take to be what the people want: no more war, in the first place, no more horsing around in some elaborate way that later turns out to be war after all, no more behaving as if Dean Acheson, Foster Dulles, Dean Rusk, Henry Kissinger, whoever, had the whole world in his hands...
...In sum, Lebanon is a private agony, a status which flies in the face of the wisdom of every American Secretary of State from Acheson to Kissinger...
...On a personal basis, one may speculate that Kissinger, accepting the inevitability of approaching retirement, is trying to alienate no new segments of the academic community, in hopes of landing something a little better tha Chairman of Nixon Studies at Whittier College...
...From a Constitutional point of view, on the other hand, it is obvious that, after a long period of practical suspension, the vaunted principle of checks and balances has been restored to the formulation of foreign policy...
...The civil war was probably precipitated and certainly aggravated by the presence of a third party in armed strength, the Palestine Liberation Oragnization, an "Army" whose chief military exploits have been carried on against unarmed athletes, civil airline passengers and esspecially little children, Yassir Arafat being the most fearless and successful killer of babies in that part of the world since King Herod...
...frank getlein...
...The Lebanese civil war is perceived by those fighting it as an historic rising against social injustice which existed all the time beneath the veneer we all admired as a peaceful living together of dissident elements...
...The anticipated Congressional intransigence, of course, begs the question as much as does Kissinger's careerist caution...
...That is the American presence...
...Can one imagaine that in Lebanon, with no Cu-bas, no Warsaw Pactitioners, no Chinese, not even an Albanian or two, such a Congress would bless any American expeditionary force at all...
...In case, by some incredible stroke of good fortune, you have been spared any acquaintence with that famed archetype beyond his last year's embodiment by John Wood, the exchange that established the metaphor in the language was roughly as follows: "But Holmes, the dog did not bark in the night...
...The other half, getting the Russians to undestand the same thing, is equally important but is not, after all, our job...
...There is a logic in there somewhere...
...and so on...
...If the Americans have at last learned that there are other people out there and they really are other people, half the battle, so to speak, for peace, will be won...
...In passing, it is worth noting that it is utterly unbelievable that the Syrians could have made move without in some manner, however surreptitiously and indirectly, having cleared it with the Israelis...
...On historic anti-Semitic principle, the USSR is anti-Israel, but Israel is not a live issue in the current confusion...
...Things, in short, are out of hand and there seems to be no reasonable prospect of their getting back in hand for some time...
...Well, back in Lebanon, what they've got there is a civil war with complications...
...In either case, massive, defensive action had to be taken, foreign officials bribed, missiles deployed, giant arms contracts let, the works...
...Hence, once more into the breach and seize again what was once, if not exactly ours, at least the property of the same people who owned us...
...Meanwhile, back in Lebanon...
...The agony prolongs itself, as Dante remarked in a different connection...
...If some Macedonian sheepherder on a misty mountain-top broke wind, it had to mean something in the great struggle for the hearts and minds of the world: that poor sheepherder was either farting with us or against us...
...If Syria is to be free and independent, why should Lebanon be separated...
...They did not bark in the night...
...But if one thing is perfectly clear in all the confusion it is that the Soviet Union has no demonstrable interest in all this whatever...
...No one involved is aiming at turning Lebanon into a launching pad for Soviet adventures against the United States or even against the Sixth...
...Yet, in the midst of the agony, in the absence of any permanent hope for peace except the kind imposed by absolute force and given the courtesy title of peace, there is one decided sign of hope for ourselves, for the world and even, in the long run, for poor Lebanon...
...On the record, indeed on more than the record, on their own declarations, beginning with John Foster Dulles and most memorably in Theodore Sorenson's avowal of his desire to go any distance and bear any burden, all of those canine caprices are exactly what the Americans might have been expected to do...
...Fleet...
Vol. 103 • July 1976 • No. 15
