Middle East Update

...The formation of the United Arab Republic polarized the country...

...And in the meantime, in the Arab-Israeli arena, the Reagan Plan ran aground as a result of two developments that were not especially surprising...

...But that was resolved very quickly, and there were 12 more years of prosperity...

...So the PLO would be out of the Shuf, the Druse would control the Shuf and have a share of power in the country, and— again, we're just imagining here— you'd have a cease fire that would more or less be working, the Syrians would be satisfied with their own position on the ground and with their influence over the Lebanese government through the Druse and others—and the dust could start to settle...

...When you're operating in the kind of arena I've sketched here, one that is so extravagantly complex, it is the height of folly to employ war for any purpose other than survival...

...Rom 1946 to 1958, it did quite well...

...Ironically, however, by the time the Arabs had made the Reagan Plan moot, and Begin was therefore ready to sign the agreement with Lebanon, the Syrians had had the chance to recover from their defeat in the war, the Soviets had had the chance to reconsider their policy, and the two had had the opportunity to build a position from which the American-mediated Israeli-Lebanese agreement as well as the Reagan Plan could be sabotaged...

...For instance, when the kaleidoscope happens to settle into a favorable conjunction, they should not waste time...

...That produced a mood in the Congress and in the country that made possible the compromise on the War Powers Act...

...There's a view that's very widespread these days that says, in effect, that we ought to be prepared to accept a Lebanon divided into spheres of influence, that the country's never been united and that it will not be a tragedy if it doesn't come to be united...

...That doesn't mean that the question of Lebanese unity or sovereignty would really be resolved...

...The second choice would involve a serious defeat for the United States and a major political setback for the Reagan administration...

...For, curiously enough, amidst all the violence since 1976, Syria and Israel have managed to avoid clashing with each other, except for a moment in June 1982 when both agreed to stop fighting after a brief sharp encounter...

...There's some truth to that view, but if one looks at the history of Lebanon since it achieved independence in 1946, it becomes clear that when Lebanon was left alone, with all its internal complexity, it managed to do very well...

...will almost surely not be able to pull it off...

...That's what we are seeing today in Lebanon...

...Yet that is what has happened...

...They did not want to be sidetracked into the secondary Lebanese arena, where Syrian involvement was viewed by them as misguided in the first place...

...All analysts, from Thucydides through Machiavelli to Von Clause-witz, have pointed out that war is part of the domain of fortune, of fortuna...

...With the vast interests at stake in that war, the Soviets, it seems, wanted to concentrate their resources, to be in a position to deal with the likely consequences of an Iranian victory...

...The Israelis have an understanding with the Druse that the Druse will keep the Palestinians out of the area, an agreement which, in the strain of war, where you take help from wherever you can get it, has not been honored...

...The Soviets surely realized they were taking a certain risk in exposing their personnel to attack by Israel, with American backing, but they probably calculated that the risk was low in view of Israel's war-weariness and the strain in American-Israeli relations...

...If one is talking theory, rather than what the U.S...

...And yet I cannot bring myself to be categorical about anything to do with the Middle East or with Lebanon...

...In the Arab-Israeli arena, the defeats suffered by Syria and the PLO and the Soviet abandonment of their friends during the time of their distress, together with the United States' use of its influence to restrain a militarily dominant Israel, seemed to place the United States in a favorable position to make a new attempt to advance the peace process—which, in the form of the Reagan Plan, is what it did...

...A Leviathan, after all, can assert himself more easily against individuals...

...Given that quality of the Middle East problem, one cannot really expect politicians and leaders to be able to control events...

...But it could mean another reprieve for a couple of years...

...But Begin's reaction was also due, and probably in greater measure, to other factors, domestic and personal...

...In the meantime, in the other arena of the Middle East problem, the Iranian invasion of Iraq—which took place about the same time as Israel's invasion of Lebanon—ground to an indecisive halt...

...But even though I have long held that Lebanon was not doomed, I must admit that today, it is difficult to imagine that the country can be put back together again...

...But anyone who knows a bit about Lebanon must recognize that such a cease-fire is very, very fragile...

...Although the failure of the Iranian attacks and the ensuing military stalemate continued to protect the American interest in the region, the situation could change with the demise of either of the top leaders of the belligerent countries, Iran's Khomeini or Iraq's Sadam Hussein...

...Israel's military victory seemed to open up bright new prospects in Lebanon itself and in the Arab-Israeli arena...

...After considerable deliberation and delay, the key Arab parties failed to give the plan decisive support, and thus foiled the political strategy underlying it...

...Further, a deteriorating economy made cutbacks in the budget imperative, and intensified the squabbles among various factions and government ministers over the relative shares of the "sacrifices" that had to be made, once again undermining the cohesiveness of the government...

...In retrospect, it seems that one of the factors that had contributed to Soviet passivity in the crucial fighting stage of the Lebanese war was its sense that the contemporaneous Iranian offensive might prove to be conclusive...

...Now, these are just a few, randomly noted, elements of the present situation...

...There was freedom of expression, there was an utterly free marketplace, you could buy anything—newspapers, parties, armies...

...Alternatively, one can imagine a Lebanon divided into a Syrian zone, two Christian zones, a Muslim zone, a Druse zone and a border area under Israeli influence—a fragmented Lebanon, but one where the level of violence is substantially reduced...

...Moreover, Syria engineered a coalition of Lebanese factions, armed them and encouraged them to oppose the policy of the Lebanese government and seek its overthrow, and supported a war of attrition by Lebanese and Palestinian elements against the Israeli forces of occupation...

...As the Israelis pulled back, the Syrian-supported Druse militias launched an all-out military campaign aimed at destroying or expelling the Phalange militias from the area and denying entry into it to the Lebanese army, newly reconstituted with American help...

...We take as given that the present level of involvement of the United States in the fighting in Lebanon will continue, more or less...

...This is especially true of resort to war...

...Second, they want to insure that their allies will not turn to the United States for help, and to put Syria in a position to contest, directly and through proxies, the American bid for ascendancy, as expressed both in the Reagan Plan and in the mediation in Lebanon...

...The "each" and the "all" here are not individuals...

...We take as given that the present Israeli government stays in power...

...they should avail themselves of the opportunity, they should act...

...Once the Syrians realize that the Americans are going to hang in for at least another 18 months, they may decide to cash in their chips.That distant and wholly external event may therefore be the reason for the cease fire that's just been announced...

...That strategy had counted on the support of such parties to cause an erosion of Begin's political position, leading to his replacement by a government headed by Labor, which had indicated its support for the plan...

...After all, the country's been in a Hobbesian state of war of each against all since 1976, and anything would be better than that...

...It didn't get involved in the Arab-Israeli conflict, it didn't get involved in the arms race, when others were spending their life and their substance on weapons, spending as much as YS or 20 percent of their GNP on weapons, Lebanon was spending less than one percent...

...It was a success, so to speak...

...And then you had the intrusion of the PLO, which developed especially after the PLO was thrown out of Jordan in 1970, and came to a head in 1975...

...But once it became apparent that the Gulf war was likely to grind on without decision indefinitely, they were ready to reconsider their position regarding the Lebanese issue...

...in the fall of 1983 is either to confront the Soviet-Syrian challenge by sticking with the original objectives of restoring the unity and sovereignty of Lebanon and advancing the Arab-Israeli peace process, or to renounce those objectives and get out of Lebanon...

...Domestically, he could not ignore that for the first time in the war-studded history of Israel, large segments of the Israeli public had expressed opposition to their country's involvement in war, and the opposition grew with every new announcement of casualties suffered in the war of attrition...

...What all this adds up to, so far as the United States is concerned, is that the logical choice before the U.S...

...During those years, I used to point out Lebanon's wisdom...

...They not only suffered substantial casualties, but— the assumptions on which their mission was initially based having been completely undermined—they were left exposed to additional hostile action without any appropriately redefined mission...

...Or, to return to the earlier metaphor of a Hobbesian state of nature, a war of each against all: We have an impossible situation...

...Just as favorable configurations have a way of turning awry very quickly, so dismal configurations have a way of opening up, of turning in better directions...

...And so we have witnessed the massive reinforcement of Syria and the commitment of Soviet personnel to the manning of Syrian air defense, all calculated to serve two purposes: First, the Soviets intend to recover the prestige and credibility they lost when they let their allies down in their time of distress...

...Note, however, that for the very same reasons, it is wrong to say—as so many people are now saying—that in Lebanon we face a problem that has no solution...

...And almost any explosion in the Middle East tends to involve all the different dimensions...

...it is a recess, not yet a solution...

...This suggests that an extended period of coexistence between these two principal antagonists may not be impossible...

...And they should also recognize the obverse— that to make long-term plans on the basis of projecting an eventually favorable conjunction of two or three variables while ignoring all the others is nonsensical...

...We take as given that Gemayal hangs on...

...That doesn't mean that the Syrians or the Israelis would withdraw...

...Moreover, the American Marines and other elements We have to recognize that the Middle East problem involves so very many variables that any one of them can change at any time and thus change the entire configuration...

...This conversation took place in the last week of September 1983...

...That's when Lebanon became the economic center and the cultural center of the Arab world...

...I don't say that it is the reason, or that this is the direction in which things will go...

...So far, no Leviathan has come close...

...It is not generally appreciated that the failure of the initial Iranian offensive was probably instrumental in helping shape the Soviet reversal of its course in the Arab-Israeli arena...

...MIDDLE EAST UPDATE NADAV SAFRAN If we want to understand what's happening in Lebanon, we have first to understand that "the Middle East problem" is a complex problem, with many dimensions, including a dimension internal to the countries of the area, an inter-Arab dimension, an Israeli dimension, an Iranian dimension and a U.S.-U.S.S.R...

...And that compromise, in turn, can affect the situation in Lebanon quite drastically, because it forces the Syrians to take into account that the American presence is not so tenuous after all...

...the Soviet Union had failed to do anything effective to help its friends, and had left them with no choice but to look to the United States to save them from a worse defeat...

...By keeping the triggers of the missile system in the hands of their own personnel, they also sought to protect themselves against the Syrian's embroiling them in an armed conflict against their wishes...

...And we may hope that it will last...

...The Syrians have tried, and the Israelis have tried, Bashir Gemayal tried and failed, and the U.S...

...And a change in any one of these, or in any of a large number I've not mentioned, could dramatically change the picture...

...One event—even a totally extraneous event—can lead to a vast chain reaction...

...Take an example: We take as given that Assad stays in power and continues to pursue his present policy...

...Should we all have been able to predict the current situation...

...But it's not implausible to imagine such reasons and such developments...

...So far as Begin is concerned, his passive reaction to the Syrian sabotage of the Lebanese-Israeli agreement and the deployment of Soviet-manned air defense missiles was partly due to his resentment of the two-faced role played by the United States in Lebanon and of the political strategy underlying the Reagan Plan—that is, the intention to bring about his replacement by Labor...

...Does all this mean that everybody was simply wrong a year ago, when a very different outcome was forecast...

...Account must also be taken of the report of the Kahan Commission, which had investigated the degree of responsibility of Israeli government and military leaders in connection with the massacres at Sabra and Shatila, and had found fault with several of them, including Begin himself...

...At the same time, the Shiite militias, also supported by the Syrians, attempted to take control of West Beirut...

...of the Multinational Peacekeeping Force, which had been sent the year before to separate Israeli from Arab forces and provide moral support to the Lebanese government, got caught in the middle of the renewed civil war and the Syrian-instigated revolt against the government...

...But if there's a relatively early settlement, before the Palestinians have had the chance to become entrenched, the Druse might well keep their promise...

...At the same time, we have to recognize that the Middle East problem involves so very many variables that any one of them can change at any time and thus change the entire configuration...

...His reflections in developments in the Middle East, recorded in conversation with moment's editors, appear regularly in these pages...

...Now, is all that so implausible...

...Moreover, the mere willingness of PLO leader Yasser Arafat to discuss the Reagan Plan with King Hussein had led the Syrians to support an armed revolt of PLO elements against Arafat, a revolt that was temporarily resolved by a compromise that crippled Arafat's authority and enhanced Syria's control of PLO policy...

...In a certain sense, it is our duty as analysts, looking at the situation in retrospect, to identify the mistakes we made, to point out the things that might have been forseen, that should have been foreseen...

...But what one can expect, or should be able to, is that the leaders should themselves recognize the complexity of the problem, and act accordingly...

...government or the Israeli government should do tomorrow, I can conceive of quite a number of plausible scenarios that could result in a Leviathan—not necessarily Lebanese—recreating, this time more successfully, the conditions that the Israeli Leviathan seemed to have created, momentarily, a year ago...

...Look, for example, at the impact of one totally unrelated accident, the Soviet shooting down of the Korean airliner...

...If they were, it would be easier to deal with the mess...

...The first choice would certainly require the full cooperation of Israel, which is not likely to be forthcoming under the present Israeli government except on terms that would undermine the objective of advancing an Arab-Israeli peace on anything like the terms of the Reagan Plan...

...Although Begin managed to survive politically, the reshuffle of his government that he was compelled to make at the behest of the commission turned former Defense Minister Ariel Sharon into a center of opposition within the Cabinet, weakening altogether its confidence and decisionmaking capacity...

...Finally, Begin's weakened health and the heartbreak he suffered at the death of his wife helped destroy his characteristic combativeness...

...His last display of determination took the form of a firm decision to resign, after making certain that the succession would remain within his own party...

...And now, a year later, as a result of Nadav Safran is Director of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University...

...A cease fire could mean an agreement by Gemayal not to send the army into the Shuf, and to give the Druse some share in power...

...The Syrian and PLO friends of the Soviets had taken a bad beating at the hands of the U.S.'s Israeli friends...

...In Lebanon, the Israeli action, by weakening all the forces in the field except the Christian Phalanges and by forcing most of the Lebanese factions to rally around a Christian-led government, appeared to open the prospect of removing all foreign forces and restoring a unified, sovereign Lebanon under the control of a government friendly to the U.S...

...he cannot assert himself so readily against groups...

...That doesn't even mean that the civil war in Lebanon would end for good...

...Although that attempt was put down by the Lebanese army, the fear of a renewed uprising kept the bulk of the Lebanese army pinned down in Beirut...

...In short, by the fall of 1983, not only had the prospects for the withdrawal of all foreign forces and a reunified Lebanon all but vanished, but the civil war had been renewed with greater force than ever...

...developments in the big powers, the regional and the domestic dimensions, the situation has changed beyond recognition...

...It was free enterprise run amok...

...We are looking into a kaleidoscope, and a very slight jolt can change the whole picture...

...Then there was a brief civil war, occasioned by the intrusion of outsiders...

...We speak on the eve of a cease-fire, which is obviously much needed...

...At the same time, Begin did his best to drag out the Israeli-Lebanese negotiations, in order to postpone for as long as possible having to face the United States on the issue of Judea and Samaria...

...Let's go back: In the fall of 1982, it appeared that the United States had achieved a position of advanced ascendancy in the Middle East heartland as a result of the Lebanese war...

...In September 1983, the Israeli forces withdrew unilaterally from the Shuf mountain area, in order to improve their lines and reduce their exposure to guerilla action and to the mounting interfactional struggle...

...That issue, of course, was at the heart of the Reagan Plan, and it was Begin's intention to create as many "facts on the ground" as possible, by accelerating settlement activity...

...By the time the American-mediated Lebanese-Israeli negotiations were successfully concluded, Syria felt confident enough to reject the agreement and to refuse even to discuss the withdrawal of its forces without an abrogation of the Lebanese-Israeli agreement...

...And that gives time for other things to happen...

...In Lebanon, while the United States engaged in a protracted effort to mediate a Lebanese-Israeli agreement on the withdrawal of Israel's forces— which was expected to lead almost automatically to a withdrawal of Syria's forces, because of their demonstrated vulnerability—Syria received massive Soviet military reinforcements, including a refurbished air defense system partly manned by Soviet personnel...