What America Hasn't Learned from Its Greatest Peacekeeping Disaster
Shuger, Scott
What America Hasn't Learned from Its Greatest Peacekeeping Disaster Two hundred and forty-one young Marines died needlessly in Lebanon. They were set up by clumsy diplomacy and bad intelligence....
...Some of these Arabs had no initial hatred for Americans...
...After the Sabra and Shatila episode, it wasn't clear that Gemayel could even control his own Phalange faction...
...On the surface, this was the same formula that the U.S...
...Indeed, as of September 1989, it still hadn't fallen...
...fire was used to support the Lebanese army, "we'll get slaughtered...
...troops later told Thomas Friedman of The New York Times...
...A lesser response could have been the signal of an American retreat from responsibility...
...On my own initiative I went back to the office where we had been sending reels and reels of tape we made during our investigation...
...The more McFarlane's fidelity to the Gemayel government increased, the more he turned previously neutral Arabs against us...
...And the thirst for revenge that would cause would not be directed against the carriers and battleships—they were too far away...
...Although the Druze had from time to time cast their lot with the PLO, they were politically conservative and hence not truly comfortable with the PLO's doctrinaire leftist anti-Americanism...
...But if the Marines had known that a high-level Phalange had helped bomb the embassy, they almost certainly would have restricted the ready Phalange access to their compound and would have tightened security along the outer perimeter as well...
...foreign policy...
...Marines and French and Italian forces, which successfully supervised the peaceful departure of 15,000 PLO fighters from Lebanon...
...The original American plan for dealing with Lebanese factionalism leaned heavily on the idea of strengthening the Lebanese army and making it truly multi-sectarian...
...And screwed it up royally...
...Although Israel supposedly had promised the U.S...
...As for Bud McFarlane, he got a promotion...
...When we first arrived in Beirut, it was just great," one of the U.S...
...responded by sending in 14,000 Marines, whose presence was stabilizing enough for elections to be held...
...the battleship New Jersey was alerted for deployment off the coast of Lebanon...
...But he also wanted some sort of third-party military presence to ensure that his forces weren't routed in the bargain...
...Very likely the camera was already set up on a tripod, already pointed in the right direction...
...Few military officials wanted an overseas deployment without firm and express congressional approval...
...supplies and training...
...Actually siding with one faction, or even just appearing to, would turn neutral Arabs into hostile ones...
...This trend accelerated in September, when domestic pressures on the Begin government peaked, forcing the complete withdrawal of Israeli troops from the Shouf mountains southeast of the Beirut airport...
...This was repeated to them upon their arrival by new Lebanon CIA station chief William Buckley—who was later kidnapped and murdered by the same terrorist crowd the agents were trying to stymie...
...Lebanon was carved out of the old Turkish Empire after World War I and administered by the French under a mandate from the League of Nations...
...In politics, there was a precise formula that reserved the office of president for a Christian, the premiership for a Sunni Moslem, and the speakership of the Parliament for a Shiite Moslem, and that apportioned the Parliament in a way that guaranteed Christians a 6 to 5 ratio over Moslems...
...But they were hanging around the White House and were making those comments to the president...
...Moreover, one word was in the back of almost every senior military mind: Vietnam...
...embassy in Beirut...
...You'd never guess that Scott Shuger is an editor of The Washington Monthly...
...bad" Arabs (unwaveringly hostile), and plenty of Arabs on the fence...
...Or he may have been misled by the Phalangists...
...artillery and tactical aircraft to support the Lebanese army at Suq-al-Gharb, McFarlane also passed along reports of Palestinian and Iranian fighters joining the fight on the side of the Druze, reports fed to him by Lebanese government and army officials...
...The estimates of the opposing force's size that McFarlane passed on to Washington proved to be wildly exaggerated, and no hard evidence of significant Palestinian or Iranian involvement in the fighting at Suq-al-Gharb was ever found...
...Nowhere was the recklessness of the Reagan agenda better represented than at the NSC...
...Now, it could be persuasively argued that by late 1982, there were already so many "bad" Arabs in Lebanon that the Marine peacekeeping mission should never have been attempted in the first place...
...In 1958, fighting between the two factions prompted the Christian president of Lebanon to request American assistance...
...Thus, the NSC hawks kept devising new proposals to expand our military role in Lebanon...
...Only difference was, he knew what he was waiting for...
...The answer arrived at was a multinational force (MNF), comprised of U.S...
...The Marines should be left to rest in peace...
...Having sustained only three fatalities—two of them by drowning during recreational swims—the Marines were back home again in four months...
...The picture of the explosion should be much more famous than it is...
...In a heated phone call with either McFarlane or McFarlane's military advisor (accounts vary), Geraghty shouted that if U.S...
...While Shultz had already made the Marines vulnerable by rendering our diplomacy partisan, McFarlane would finish the job by making our military partisan as well...
...The newly partitioned population was dominated by Christians, but there were a lot of Moslems too...
...and 2) All requests for gunfire support had to come from the top Marine commander at the airport, Colonel Timothy Geraghty...
...McFarlane's disdain for Habib was yet another embodiment of the Reagan ideological spirit—stick to your bias and let the facts be damned...
...It was no longer a question of using U.S...
...There was one Arab girl with a couple of tape recorders, months behind in transcribing the tapes we sent her...
...Moreover, it had to cross his mind that he would be in big trouble if he refused to order the supporting fire and the Lebanese army was then overrun...
...So the Israelis didn't leave then either...
...turn neutral Arabs into hateful ones...
...Jeep thrills The next mistake was made on September 29, 1982, when 1,200 Marines went back in...
...And short...
...Though he's out of the government (and the psychiatric wing) now, you can still catch him on the evening news...
...Shultz thought that if the Israelis got a good enough deal, including tangible political, military, and even economic benefits, they could be convinced to leave Lebanon...
...Shultz was new to the region, and, indeed, new to diplomacy, but Habib was a former foreign service officer who knew the Middle East well—it was Habib who engineered the PLO evacuation...
...The Druze that McFarlane decided to attack at Suq-al-Gharb weren't firing at the U.S...
...New gang in town McFarlane quickly aligned himself with Amin Gemayel's narrow, and widely hated, Phalange faction...
...military in Lebanon had done before...
...Four days later, Bashir Gemayel, the head of the Christian Phalange militia, who, under Israeli sponsorship, was about to be installed as the new president of Lebanon, was blown up by a bomb at his headquarters...
...What McFarlane was now asking for went far beyond anything the U.S...
...Not to mention that he could probably get the Marines taken out of the country with a couple of phone calls...
...Naif Shultz So how, then, was it that we spent the next year doing just that—knocking the Arabs off the fence, in a way that virtually guaranteed the Marines' demise...
...And Lebanese Shiite Moslems— the most downtrodden of all Lebanon's Moslem sects—had initially welcomed the Marines because they were only too happy to be rid of their arch-enemies, the Sunni Palestinians...
...If the U.S...
...participation in the scheme...
...Indeed, the most concrete action to come out of these investigations was the issuing of "nonpunitive letters of caution" to the two senior Marine officers at the airport, effectively ending their careers...
...If Vietnam was at bottom the reason the Defense Department wanted to stay out of Lebanon, it was also the reason the NSC wanted to go in...
...And unlike State or Defense, the NSC was small enough to pack up and take most of its key people "operational" in the field—it could gain the kind of upper hand an organization gets when its top echelons are on the scene...
...But unlike when the Marines evacuated the PLO, this time they had no specific military objective or timetable...
...although he was a former Marine lieutenant colonel, he'd scarcely set foot in the Middle East before...
...Habib's loyalty as a good organization man seems to have overruled any misgivings he may have had about Shultz's plan...
...Their average age was 19...
...This fatal new military involvement came in connection with fighting between Lebanese government troops and Druze forces at the Shouf village of SuqalGharb...
...With the military role expanding, so too was the likelihood of deaths among Moslem civilians...
...People were always stopping you and giving you things...
...By coming back into Lebanon for strictly humanitarian purposes, the U.S...
...And despite the lowkey monotone the press knew him by, those who worked around McFarlane knew that he had in fact always been the antithesis of the cool operator...
...McFarlane's refusal to confer with the area's experts was almost criminal, particularly given his lack of background...
...Not in 24 hours, not in 24 days...
...As Francis "Bing" West, the assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs, later explained in a Kennedy School case study on Lebanon: "[The Marine mission] struck many in the Pentagon as having a high degree of danger, without explicit orders as to what the Marines would do...
...The CIA learned this months before the bombing of the Marine barracks...
...The fuse was lit...
...According to the Kennedy School study, the Washington inner circle at State tended to dismiss the NSC zealots as "a bunch of bright kids hanging around and making comments...
...George Shultz called the agreement a "milestone...
...It's a steady picture, well-centered, and correctly exposed...
...We aren't likely to do better next time until we understand why the U.S...
...But incredibly, the CIA never told the Marines...
...Because the initial arrangements for the Marine mission in Beirut stressed a low-profile presence, and an expanded role for the Lebanese army, the latter was given primary responsibility for vehicle inspections along the airport's outer borders...
...Habib's role in the Shultz strategy is not totally clear...
...The fuse was white-hot now...
...At one point they came up with a plan calling for the deployment there of 63,000 U.S...
...Morris Draper, who had been Habib's assistant, recalls how closeminded McFarlane was during his arrival in July...
...Because the people truly responsible were at much higher levels of government...
...Each of these measures further imperiled the peacekeeping mission and put the Marines in further danger...
...began violating its image of impartiality, driving more Arabs into the "bad" camp, the need for good intelligence only grew stronger...
...As one senior officer put it, "The top echelons of the military had formed a 'Never Again Club.' " But the Pentagon dovishness on Lebanon was finally outweighed by the hawkishness of the NSC, which, under Ronald Reagan, had taken on a crazy cowboy quality...
...But its vagueness set the stage for later tragedy, since it provided cover for military adventurers like McFarlane, who would later distort the mission from bipartisan peacekeeping into active military support for the Gemayel government...
...In June 1982, Israel reacted to what it viewed as the intolerably expanded Lebanese operations of the PLO and Syria with a massive invasion of Lebanon...
...McFarlane's war Because of McFarlane's partisanship and because of the Iranian recruiting campaign among Lebanese Shiites—which that partisanship helped make more successful—by the late summer of 1983, Lebanon's anti-American population was growing fast...
...Indeed, when daily jeep and foot patrols into the neighboring predominantly Shiite suburbs started in November, they were a big hit...
...Christians 6, Moslems 5 Once you start probing the whole Beirut affair, it becomes clear why official Washington was satisfied with such an artificially narrow look at it...
...For the Marine mission to Lebanon to have any chance for success, we had to scrupulously avoid knocking Arabs off the fence...
...Exhibit A of that need came on April 18, 1983, when a bomb-laden kamikaze truck blew up the U.S...
...But there were other Moslem factions implacably hostile no matter what the U.S...
...By involving himself with a high-visibility negotiation, Shultz could gain the stature that had proven so elusive for some of his recent predecessors at State—recall how William Rogers was eclipsed by Henry Kissinger...
...Moreover, there was an incredible "side agreement" provision that meant that for all these palpable drawbacks, nothing had truly been gained after all: not one word of the agreement took effect unless Syria removed its troops—something Syria's Assad immediately refused to do...
...He finally gave in...
...But not only was Gemayel failing to open up his army and government to Moslems...
...And that's where the U.S...
...Responsibility for the act was claimed by a previously unknown Shiite group, pleding allegiance to the Ayatollah Khomeini...
...In retrospect, it was a millstone...
...With their image of neutrality shattered, and with the shells falling, only one sensible option remained: McFarlane should have ordered the Marines out of the airport and back onto their ships...
...Despite these pluses, the airport was a disastrous choice for regular military operations...
...The failure to understand began in earnest with George Shultz...
...But when, despite this warning, the incoming rounds kept slamming into the Marine bunkers at the rate of four a minute, the Marines used live artillery fire in response for the first time, silencing the Druze weapons...
...peacekeeping mission would have one absolutely inviolable requirement—zealously guarding our image of nonpartisanship among all the neutral Arabs...
...McFarlane had managed to get himself and his deputy brought into Lebanon above Dillon in the diplomatic chain...
...With the passive William Clark holding the post of national security advisor, McFarlane, and his like-thinking aides Geoffrey Kemp and Howard Teicher, were able to dominate the small staff...
...intelligence was letting them down...
...At the end of August, the Marines at the airport suffered their first fatalities from Moslem fire...
...These features played very badly in much of the Arab world—the dominant Arab perception was that this U.S.-forged agreement forced Lebanon to recognize Israel, while ceding the Israelis real power...
...This system stayed in place long after the demographics had changed dramatically...
...Syrian army units originally entered the fighting at the invitation of the Christians, but by the early 1980s, they were slugging it out in enormous artillery duels with Christian forces, duels that continue to this day...
...After these two bloody developments, Amin Gemayel—who replaced his slain brother as the head of the Phalange militia and of the fledgling Lebanese government—requested that the MNF return to Beirut for an indefinite period to provide stability...
...Once the U.S...
...There was never any such thing as an "administration line" on Lebanon...
...And in that superior position, McFarlane went alone to talk with Amin Gemayelsomething Habib would never have done—and then at Gemayel's urging, ordered Dillon to break off all communications with the leader of the Druze militia...
...The Marine commander who knew in his bones that calling U.S...
...And it wasn't long before the new gang was shooting at the Marines...
...Two days after that, revenge-seeking Phalangist troops entered the West Beirut Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila and murdered hundreds of innocent civilians...
...Throughout the crisis, the NSC's more cavalier staff members spoke of the chance to overcome, once and for all, the "post-Vietnam syndrome," which they saw as paralyzing U.S...
...But if the Marines were to go in, it's clear that any U.S...
...This was the background for the accord between Lebanon and Israel—personally presided over by Shultz—which became known as the May 17 agreement...
...This was, after all, the outcome of the first major foray into foreign diplomacy by George Shultz and Robert "Bud" McFarlane...
...to throw its military weight around in Lebanon that he usually avoided even consulting anyone who might counsel differently...
...One night not too long ago, you could flip on "MacNeil/Lehrer" and watch McFarlane explain how we should deal with Lebanon...
...And it wasn't as if McFarlane had no leverage over Gemayel...
...And, indeed, no sooner had Shultz arrived in the Middle East than Time was reporting that "the secretary appears to be conducting a one-man negotiation," and that the Israelis thought he had "asked all the right questions...
...A Washington Post editorial caught the mood: Sending in the Marines again demonstrated that "the United State was still prepared to do its duty as a leader of the community of free nations...
...As the Marines took up their new post, they were being watched by enemies accustomed to playing by the region's "Hama rules" (Thomas Friedman's phrase)—including about 1,000 Iranian Revolutionary Guards, sent by the Ayatollah Khomeini to recruit Lebanese Shiites as anti-American terrorists...
...And if the Israelis left, Shultz reasoned, then Syria could be persuaded to follow suit...
...forces to stop the war in Lebanon...
...Together, the Shiites and Druze constituted, as one of the Marine commanders said later, "a new gang in town...
...By this time, as a result of the growing U.S...
...In doing so, he would be obliterating the Marines' last pretense of bipartisanship...
...In short, the real extent of the government's look at itself in the Beirut debacle was that a colonel and a lieutenant colonel got fired...
...And, given their untenable geographic position, there was no way to win an artillery exchange...
...Exposed on their low, open ground, the Marines were now subject to nearly constant artillery and mortar barrages...
...During the first months of renewed U.S...
...This made it particularly hard for Geraghty since nobody else talking to him was purporting to represent this ultimate level of authority...
...With the PLO surrounded and its back to the sea, Yassir Arafat wanted his fighters out of Lebanon...
...Under the French, a system of government evolved that guaranteed the supremacy of Christians in every facet of Lebanese life...
...There were Lebanese Druze, Lebanese Shiites, and Syrians and Palestinians and Iranians...
...There before Robert MacNeil's respectful gaze, discoursing on world affairs...
...When I came back, no one debriefed us," he remembers...
...Some diplomats believe that Habib expressed skepticism about it to Shultz in private...
...It was quite a struggle...
...According to Charles William Maynes, editor of Foreign Policy, the accord "showed what a naif Shultz was...
...But once Shultz fixed on his course of action, he could not be deterred...
...The Lebanon CIA people were so uninformed that they weren't even able to protect themselves...
...The incredible noise and the shock wave was all it took to alert the photographer that it was almost time to click the shutter...
...special envoy, Philip Habib...
...troops...
...The fuzzy language was vintage State Department—emphasizing that we were only there at the request of the host government...
...There were two official government investigations of the bombing of the Marines at the Beirut airport—the report issued by the House armed services investigations subcommittee, and the report issued on behalf of the Department of Defense by an ad hoc collection of retired senior military officers called the Long Commission...
...It's a two-part question really: a)How did the U.S...
...The last shreds of Marine neutrality were destroyed with the first naval salvo...
...The accord put strict limits on the number of Lebanese forces allowed in southern Lebanon while yielding control of the area to the Israeli-sponsored South Lebanon Army...
...he controlled huge amounts in military aid that Gemayel wanted desperately...
...And that may have been the habit that cost them their lives...
...According to the agreement, in return for withdrawing its troops, Israel was granted de facto recognition by Lebanon, while still retaining considerable control over the military situation inside southern Lebanon...
...Cowboys in the saddle Now it was the turn of Ronald Reagan's National Security Council to make things worse...
...In the second week of September, McFarlane became convinced that the fighting at SuqalGharb was an all-or-nothing Druze offensive, and that if the Lebanese army was not strongly supported by American firepower in response, the town and even the government itself might, as he put it in a message back to the White House, be routed "within 24 hours...
...know about the dangers posed to its Lebanon mission by this large and growing antiAmericanism...
...He went on to become National Security Advisor, and, in that post, brought us Iran-Contra...
...Having done their job, the MNF forces left Beirut in early September 1982...
...he certainly couldn't control the Moslem factions and Syria and Israel...
...failed so miserably in Lebanon the last time...
...Their guiding thought was: "What was the point of the big Reagan defense buildup if our renewed military capacity couldn't be used in situations like Lebanon...
...and 2,000 more Marines were added to the Navy fleet just offshore...
...Even if McFarlane intended to change the region's policy, and even if he considered 90 percent of the professional diplomats' views to be fudge, he still could have learned a tremendous amount by putting questions to the smartest people...
...But McFarlane would not settle for that...
...After all, since coming to Lebanon, he'd been operating constantly on adrenaline and two hours' sleep...
...A month later, 241 Marines and their four-story building disappeared beneath the towering toadstool...
...Both investigations were limited to questions pertinent to operations within the military...
...Last year, he pled guilty to four counts of withholding information from Congress...
...Even before leaving Washington, the CIA agents who undertook the embassy bombing investigation were ordered not to cooperate with the teams the FBI sent to Lebanon to investigate...
...came in again in 1982...
...War-weary Lebanese of many factions were glad to have them there, viewing them as friends and protectors...
...Two days after the Marine bombing, the Reagan administration found a more docile setting to fight a war—Grenada...
...Similar mechanisms were in force in the civil service and the army...
...support for the Gemayel government, the Druze were pretty soured on the Americans...
...so did every one of Shultz's ambassadors to a major Arab state, at a closed-door meeting before the final round of Lebanon negotiations...
...But Shultz made him...
...He thought it was a country like any other, but it's not a country—it's a collection of tribes...
...had managed to lose its standing as a neutral broker...
...So, crudely put, where America was concerned, Lebanon had "good" Arabs (sympathetic to the U.S...
...As a result of the PLO's expulsion from Jordan, Palestinians were flooding into the country, but Lebanon's Christians were still trying to dominate the growing Moslem majority...
...On September 19, a cruiser, two destroyers, and a frigate fired 338 five-inch rounds into the mountains above the airport...
...As disastrous as these new U.S...
...Two days later, the Marine jeep patrols into the towns adjacent to the airport, which a few months before were still being enthusiastically greeted by the Lebanese, were called off...
...Not understanding a) was like lighting a fuse...
...Before McFarlane could engineer his disastrous military expansion at Suq-al-Gharb, he had a two-fold bureaucratic problem: 1) The "rules of engagement" under which the deployed American forces were operating— dictated by the constraints imposed by the War Powers Act—only permitted hostile fire as a means of self-defense...
...In subsequent months, intelligence blunders compounded...
...When one of those agents returned to Washington briefly before leaving on his next assignment, it became inescapably clear that at CIA headquarters as well, the prevailing attitude towards the embassy bombing investigation was apathy...
...The problem was their location: they took up positions in and around the Beirut airport, which was chosen for its distance from Beirut's mean streets and its closeness to the sea, which facilitated supply and, if need be, quick evacuation...
...To cite just one example: earlier that same year, Hafez al-Assad, the president of Syria, had, in the throes of a sectarian feud, unleashed an artillery assault on a Syrian town called Hama that killed 20,000 of his own countrymen...
...McFarlane, then deputy director of the NSC, was tapped for the job...
...And the Israelis, fearful of a less than thorough evacuation, insisted on U.S...
...got off to a good start on this count, but by pressing for an agreement that gave voice to many of Israel's strongest demands about Lebanon, Shultz's diplomacy was undercutting our stance as peacemaker...
...The fuse was burning brightly now...
...And although the blast was non-nuclear, it was nearly as large as the ones that ended World War II...
...Making nearly constant use of satellite communications with the White House, McFarlane soon won approval for a number of expanded military measures: Navy fighters from carriers off the coast began flying reconnaissance missions over the Shouf...
...Way above colonel...
...military presence in Lebanon, the newlyinstalled secretary of state made most of the decisions on Lebanon, working closely with the U.S...
...McFarlane finessed 1) by stressing for Washington the idea that Suq-al-Gharb was the linchpin for the security of the American forces in Lebanon...
...Their official orders merely stated that their mission was to provide "a presence in Beirut, that would in turn help establish the stability necessary for the Lebanese government to regain control of their [sic] capital...
...In making his request to Washington for U.S...
...Kept in the dark, the Marines continued to rely on Lebanese government officials and soldiers...
...In 1975, the conflict erupted into civil war...
...The Marine unit's official report of the day's events marked the disastrous turn of events with a subtle change: that day, for the first time, it referred to the antigovernment forces as the "enemy...
...forces in Lebanon on the offensive...
...While George Shultz wanted to send the Marines into Lebanon to bolster his diplomacy, the Pentagon desperately wanted to keep them out...
...And as for the imminence of it all, well, Suq-al-Gharb never fell...
...The man looking through the viewfinder was probably an Amal militiaman who, like the Marines below him, had been waiting, waiting, waiting...
...Referring to McFarlane's later suicide attempt in the wake of the Iran-Contra scandal, one NSC source thinks Lebanon was where McFarlane "first began to become unwrapped...
...He didn't even control all of West Beirut...
...Yes, the Christian militias and the Lebanese government they dominated were mostly pro-Western and proAmerican, but the Moslem side of the equation was more complex...
...Neutrality in shreds At Suq-al-Gharb, McFarlane may have consciously manipulated his accounts of the situation to further unleash his own desires for battle...
...that its only aim in doing so was to provide a security zone for its northern border, in the operation Israel destroyed a quarter of the Syrian air force and some 300 Syrian tanks...
...But Geraghty was in effect arguing with the White House...
...Virtually the entire CIA contingent for Lebanon was killed inside the embassy when it blew up...
...he once actually had that job...
...With the Israelis out of the Shouf, Syrian-sponsored Druze militias, as well as the increasingly hostile Shiite groups, began to infiltrate the western and southern suburbs of Beirut and the high ground to the east overlooking the Marines...
...They were done in by Bud McFarlane...
...They weren't shooting at the nearby Lebanese positions and hitting Marines with a few stray rounds by mistake...
...by Scott Shuger The picture was taken from the southern suburbs of the city...
...There were even Shiite units in the Lebanese army receiving U.S...
...so a new presidential envoy was needed...
...Silent spooks Meanwhile, as U.S...
...Not understanding b) was like standing around and watching it burn...
...But he never took that view in any wider forum...
...I tried to reach him for this story, but he was busy...
...Instead, McFarlane plunged into the new fighting up to his eyeballs...
...Handling 2) required him to go toe-to-toe with Geraghty...
...fire into the hills would seal the fate of his men, trying to hold off the former artillery officer who seemed to think he was back in his old Marine job, not heading up a negotiating team...
...It took a week of shouting matches, with McFarlane frequently using his role as presidential envoy to invoke the wishes of the "Commander-inChief...
...No one knows for sure how the bomb-truck got into the airport, but the best guess is that it came through the Lebanese army checkpoints along the highway...
...Without really changing anything on the ground, the U.S...
...The need for good intelligence in Lebanon should have been obvious from the start, since no matter what the U.S...
...McFarlane now wanted them to join it...
...In fact, in linking Israeli withdrawal to Syrian cooperation, the accord gave Syria new power to keep the Israelis bogged down and doomed any hope of a quick Marine withdrawal...
...He had his own views and didn't want to hear others...
...But perhaps regular military operations didn't seem too relevant at the outset of the Marines' deployment...
...The Pentagon ignored the news...
...did, there would be large numbers of "bad" Arabs out to get us—and willing to play by Hama rules...
...Shultz's tack corroded America's appearance of evenhandedness when he should have been jealously guarding it...
...Whatever Shultz's motivation, by the spring of 1983 it was clear his approach was off the mark...
...had successfully pursued with the Camp David accords between Israel and Egypt, but to Shultz it may have had other appeals as well...
...Since a key part of the deal to evacuate the PLO had been the U.S.'s written promise that the Palestinian civilians left behind would not be harmed by the Lebanese Christian militias or Israeli troops, the request to reenter Lebanon was received with a considerable amount of American guilt...
...And, measured in the Middle East, "implacably hostile" takes on new meaning...
...No one even asked us to file a written report...
...Traveling in Europe...
...Or perhaps he just panicked...
...It would be directed against the Marines—who, tied to their low ground, remained in easy reach...
...And as Jim McGee of The Miami Herald later reported, after the embassy bombing, the CIA sent two officers into Lebanon who discovered that a five-man, Iranian-financed ring did the deed and that the key member of the plot was a very high-level official of the Phalange—the group that dominated the Lebanese government...
...A bit of history is central to the story...
...Taken just seconds after detonation, the picture reveals the dread mushroom shape already towering above a wounded city—a deadly copy of its instantly recognizable Hiroshima cousin...
...more Navy ships started returning fire against Druze positions...
...Within days Israeli troops were in the suburbs of Beirut...
...Nicholas Veliotes, the assistant secretary of state in charge of the whole Middle East, told Shultz the plan wouldn't work...
...In the 1970s, Lebanese strife went from bad to a horrible form of worse...
...But the questions should be raised...
...Most military leaders had serious misgivings about a "presence" mission, with no clear goals...
...Each country—a sworn enemy of the other—was wary of the burgeoning Palestinian presence there, and each wanted to bring Lebanon into its own sphere of influence...
...The power struggle between Lebanon's Moslems and Christians only intensified after the French left in 1946, and would punctuate the next 40-plus years...
...Also, it was hoped that the Marines could keep the airport open—a superficial but commonly cited index of normality in turbulent locations...
...Gemayel certainly couldn't speak for all of Lebanon in addressing Israel because he didn't control all of Lebanon...
...At that meeting, for example, Robert Dillon, the ambassador to Lebanon, argued that the strategy was doomed because Gemayel's support inside Lebanon was much more narrow than the Shultz/Habib strategy presupposed...
...McFarlane was so anxious for the U.S...
...Any hope the Marines ever had for playing peacekeeper was now lost...
...It was low, open ground—completely vulnerable to hostile artillery fire from the nearby Shouf mountains...
...was to serve as a regional peacemaker, that meant coming across to all sides as scrupulously fair...
...Bud Lite The NSC's compact size makes it a particuarly dangerous agency with hawks at the helm...
...By contrast, Habib had spent much of his career mastering its intracies...
...And we were just watching it glow...
...The U.S...
...At first, the Marines and an offshore Navy cruiser responded by firing nonlethal illumination rounds over the guilty Druze position...
...Dillon, the former ambassador to Lebanon, says McFarlane and his aides refused to talk with Habib for fear of being "tainted...
...tactics were, they were at least self-defense...
...After the May 17 agreement, Syria's Assad would no longer talk to Habib, citing the agreement as a personal betrayal...
...He saved his most perverse move for last—he put the U.S...
...and b)Why didn't the U.S...
...They were shooting at the Marines...
...The Druze repeatedly claimed that as long as the Marines and the Israelis left them alone, their only quarrel was with the Christians...
...He didn't even want to be briefed [by the outgoing envoy team]," Draper said...
...Below that is what's left of American Middle East policy for 1983-241 dead Marines and a lot of questions...
...We felt really appreciated...
...In June, a special Defense Department team returned from a trip to Beirut with word that the Marines were not being given adequate intelligence about terrorists...
...Bud McFarlane thought he could supply it...
...Could any Lebanese Moslem now be expected to remain neutral towards them...
...Lebanon's sectarian battles presented problems and opportunities for Syria, to the east and north, and for Israel, to the south...
...diplomacy was setting the Marines up, U.S...
...Also, in offering the Israelis so much of what they wanted, Shultz could silence other critics, too—those who thought his previous career at Bechtel, which does a lot of business in Arab countries, had left him with an anti-Israeli bias...
...The Washington turf battles over Lebanon cried out for resolution...
...He just didn't understand Lebanon...
...Even so, Lebanon in 1982-83 was not a simple place for any country trying to make peace, not to mention for America trying to make peace...
...Below several hundred feet of grey-white toadstool puff is a much more formless smoke-storm of nasty black...
...in attempting to assert government control over West Beirut, he was arresting them in wholesale numbers, and dynamiting their homes...
Vol. 21 • October 1989 • No. 9
