Seven Events That Made America America

by Larry Schweikart

  Yet Reagan had shortcomings. His own admitted failing was that he was unable to change the culture in Washington, D.C., in such a way as to reduce the size of government. For that, while he may have been naive—no administration, including some of the earliest small-government advocates such as Thomas Jefferson, had successfully controlled the growth of government for long—he nevertheless fell in line with virtually every one of his predecessors, liberal or conservative. Martin Van Buren, Grover Cleveland, and Calvin Coolidge, all of them dedicated to containing the size of the federal government, all watched per capita spending increase during their tenure. The Gipper fully understood the threat posed by an ever-growing federal bureaucracy, in terms of both weights placed on the nation’s enterprise and, more important, infringements of the freedoms of its people.

  If Reagan’s greatest and most timeless triumph was in foreign policy, so was his greatest error, and, in the latter case, it was a two-fold error. First, he deployed the U.S. Marines in Lebanon as part of a “peacekeeping” mission that not only lacked an attainable goal, but also did not employ rules of engagement sufficient to allow the Marines to protect themselves. Such missions, unfortunately, were common during the Cold War in both Republican and Democratic administrations. After a suicide bomber attacked the Marine barracks in Lebanon, however, Reagan—after attempting to stay the course—finally withdrew the forces. By doing so, he indeed took the prudent military action, and, most likely, made the wisest political choice. Had the marines stayed, there is little evidence that they could have made much of a difference. Unfortunately, the withdrawal of the U.S. forces constituted a second edge of that troubled blade, for it displayed a lack of appreciation for the longer-term threat: the growing danger posed by the rise of Islamic fundamentalism.

  Certainly Ronald Reagan knew radical Islam existed. In An American Life, he wrote:I don’t think you can overstate the importance that the rise of Islamic fundamentalism will have to the rest of the world in the century ahead—especially if, as seems possible, its most fanatical elements get their hands on nuclear and chemical weapons and the means to deliver them against their enemies.1

  He had seen the shah of Iran toppled and Anwar Sadat assassinated by Muslim radicals; he was supremely sensitive to the need to ensure Israel’s survival; and he appreciated the crumbling political situation in Lebanon, with the disputes between its Sunni and Shiite Muslims and Maronite Christians. At least four separate crises would emerge from the Middle East in Reagan’s first term: the ongoing destruction and chaos in Lebanon; the Iran-Iraq War; Israel’s ongoing struggle for security (including the attack on the Iraqi nuclear reactor); and the attempt by Reagan to reach out to Arab “moderates” through such overtures as the sale of Airborne Warning and Control System (AWACS) aircraft to Saudi Arabia in 1981. In his second term, Reagan’s compassion and flawed assessment of the Iranian regime as reasonable parties with whom the United States could deal would provide a final ironic reaction from militant Islam in the form of the Iran-Contra affair.

  One of Reagan’s mistakes in dealing with the Islamic world was that he (and virtually everyone else in government at the time) believed a large number of “moderate Muslims” existed in such hard-core Islamic nations as Saudi Arabia. Operating under this misconception, Reagan approved the AWACS sale, which originated in the Carter administration, to Saudi Arabia. “I was told,” he said, “the planes would not materially change the balance of power in the Arab-Israeli conflict [and] I thought the Arab world would regard it as a gesture showing that we desired to be evenhanded in the Middle East.”2 Reagan saw the AWACS sale as a palliative to the Saudis, tied in part to reducing “the threat of a Soviet move in that direction.” 3 Invoking the language of Richard Nixon and Jimmy Carter, Reagan argued for “stability” and “peace between Israel & the Arab nations.”4 During a meeting with Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin, Reagan argued again that the sale would “bring the Saudis into the peace making process.” 5 Begin was not persuaded, and it “annoyed” Reagan that he lobbied Congress hard against the sale, despite indications to the president that he wouldn’t. Reagan signaled his displeasure through the State Department, noting that he “didn’t like having representatives of any foreign country . . . trying to interfere with . . . our domestic political process and our setting of foreign policy.”6 The AWACS sale, however, was supported overwhelmingly by former national security staffers, twenty-eight of whom came out on October 5, 1981, to support the deal. Reagan came to consider the sale of the AWACS as “a donnybrook” and a fight “we could not afford to lose. I believed it was a battle that had to be won to advance the cause of peace in the Middle East.”7

  Acting on intelligence that an Iraqi nuclear plant was developing fissionable materials, the Israeli air force used F-15As, sold by the United States to Israel on the condition that they not be used for offensive purposes, to destroy the Iraqi Osirak reactor in a raid (“Operation Opera”). The attack only strengthened the Saudi arguments that they needed the AWACS, helping Reagan win the fight. (Later, Reagan wrote that he “spent more time in one-on-one meetings and on the telephone attempting to win on this measure than on any other.”)8 Dealing with Begin over the bombing of the Iraqi nuclear facility, however, was a different matter. The Israelis had not given Reagan advance warning of their attack on the reactor, which irritated him greatly. The prime minister, he wrote in his diary, “should have told us & the French, [and] we could have done something to remove the threat.”9 Of course, Begin had only seen Reagan in action for a few months, and despite his high hopes for the new administration, he had only the Carter record of doing nothing to remove the threat upon which to base his decision.

  On Wednesday, June 10, 1981, Reagan held more meetings about the Osirak bombing and resolved to ask Congress to investigate whether or not the condition of sale had been violated. He wrote in his diary, “Frankly, if Cong. should decide [a violation occurred], I’ll grant a Presidential waiver. Iraq is technically still at war with Israel & I believe they were preparing to build an atom bomb.”10 Saddam Hussein, in Reagan’s view, was a “no good nut,” who “was trying to build a nuclear weapon” so he could “be the leader of the Arab world—that’s why he invaded Iran.”11

  As Reagan tried to ease tensions created by the Israeli raid, Lebanon continued to fester. Lebanon had had a volatile history since France had promised it independence in 1943, and upon the eviction of the Vichy forces in 1946, the nation achieved fully independent status. After the creation of the state of Israel and the first Arab-Israeli war in 1947-48, refugees from Palestine moved to Lebanon as a long-term tactic by Arab states to create a “Palestinian refugee crisis” that they blamed on Israel (despite the fact that the Arab states themselves never invited refugees to settle in their countries). During the Suez Crisis of 1956, the pro-Western Lebanese president Camille Chamoun maintained diplomatic relations with the United States, Britain, and France in the face of hostility from Egypt and Syria. At first the militia of the Christian Phalange Party supported Chamoun and Prime Minister Rashid Karami, but after Muslim demonstrators threatened the government in 1958, the Phalangists overthrew the Karami administration and installed their own dictatorship. Meanwhile, Palestinians residing in neighboring Jordan had been evicted, and thousands crossed the border, joining the 400,000 Palestinians already in camps there, to form a “state within a state” inside Lebanon under the loose control of Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) strongman Yasir Arafat. The PLO soon gained complete control over western Lebanon, and the Lebanese army, composed of fixed ratios of different religious groups, found itself helpless to control the growing power of the militias. Maronite Christians, Phalangists, Shiites, Sunnis, the Communist-backed Druze, and the PLO all had their own militias.

  Arafat’s PLO militias began to stage attacks against Israel from inside Lebanon. Between 1969 and 1975, the PLO violated numerous truces, treaties, agreements, and arrangements with the tacit approval of neighboring Muslim states. Violenc
e erupted between Sunnis and Phalangists, followed by Phalangist counterstrikes against PLO fighters, which led to the Black Saturday killings of Christians and the reprisals in which virtually all Muslim travelers attempting to cross Phalangist roadblocks were killed. An assault on a PLO camp in January 1976 was followed by the PLO assault on the nonmilitarized Christian town of Damour, in which one thousand helpless Christians were slaughtered. People of every stripe and religion then fled for their lives. President Suleiman Frangieh, a centrist with support from Muslims and Christians, invited Syria, out of desperation, to enter and restore order. Ultimately, after an Arab League summit gave Syria a mandate to keep the peace, a large Syrian force remained in Lebanon, controlling the Bekaa Valley. The nation was divided into a PLO-controlled southern section and a Christian-controlled section of eastern Beirut. Oddly, Syria supported the Christian militias because of the threat to Syria by PLO-related terror groups, and Syria found itself all but allied with the Christians and Israelis against the Palestinians, Druze, and Muslim militias. When the leader of the antigovernment Druze, Kamal Jumblatt, was assassinated in 1977, the Syrians were blamed, further shuffling the alliances. PLO attacks across the Lebanese border into Israel escalated, leading to a quick Israeli invasion, followed by a withdrawal.

  Various free agents were also adding to the chaos, including the Abu Nidal Organization, which attempted to assassinate Israeli ambassador Shlomo Argov in London in 1982. Abu Nidal was protected and supported by Saddam Hussein’s Iraq (and continued to be sponsored by Iraq long after critics of George W. Bush claimed there were “no terrorists in Iraq”).12 Nevertheless, in 1982, after further attacks into Israeli territory from Lebanon, Israel invaded southern Lebanon to clear out the PLO rocket bases. Moving to the outskirts of Beirut, the Israeli units crushed the PLO and left Arafat desperate for a negotiated truce to save what was left of his military. The United Nations obliged on June 26 with a Security Council resolution that demanded a withdrawal of the Israeli and PLO forces. At that time, a bipartisan group of U.S. senators had written Reagan urging him to dismantle the PLO in Lebanon and to force all Syrian troops out. Clearly, there was great concern about both the PLO and Syria, less so than about Israel. Reagan dispatched Philip Habib to negotiate a truce and finally, in 1982, he got the various groups to agree to a cease-fire. Meanwhile, throughout the cease-fire, the PLO continued to shell Israel in more than 270 documented attacks.

  The claims and counterclaims in the region were astounding and insurmountable. Naturally, the Arab-Israeli struggle for the territory once called Judaea (then renamed “Palestine” by the Romans) was the best known, but at the same time Syria claimed it had an ancestral right to Lebanon, which it deemed a creation of France. Christian minorities, of course, were so small as to be unsafe under the control of almost any Muslim state. Just a few hundred miles to the east, Iraq and Iran engaged in a war of stunning carnage. No Muslim nation—not Jordan, not Syria, not Egypt, and not Saudi Arabia—wanted the “Palestinian refugees,” as they would constitute a festering abscess inside the host country, posing not only a drain on all social services (such as they were in Muslim countries), but more important a constant threat of political insurrection. So as the PLO demanded the extermination of Israel, Syria worked to crush the PLO and Christian militias in Lebanon. Saudi Arabia funded Arab violence against Israel, all the while stomping on radicals within its own borders.

  Reagan’s approach to most issues was direct and simple, focused on cutting through the obfuscation to arrive at an action item. This tactic would produce some of his greatest victories: cutting taxes created jobs and boosted the economy; confronting the Soviets and matching their military buildup brought down the Evil Empire; deploying cruise and Pershing missiles forced Gorbachev into the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty. Thus, when it came to the difficulties in Lebanon, Reagan relied on a surprisingly leftist maxim, namely that if the parties would just “talk it out,” they could reach an agreement. Moreover, he had felt the need to reprimand Israel again and again, first over the surprise raid on the Osirak facility, then in December 1981, when the Israelis annexed the Golan Heights (a hilly range of strategic importance to Israel), then again during Begin’s meddling in the AWACS debates. After the Golan rebuke, Begin blasted Reagan with an “angry letter” in which he invoked Vietnam and told Reagan the United States had no business telling Israel how to behave. According to Reagan’s autobiography, An American Life, Begin’s response was “Mind your own business.”13

  Unwilling to heed Reagan’s calls for restraint, the Israelis advanced to Beirut in an apparent effort to crush the PLO completely. In June, Israeli forces laid siege to Beirut, until finally, after entire neighborhoods were leveled from both sides’ shelling, the UN passed a resolution vetoed by the United States because it maintained the PLO as a “viable political force” in Lebanon. 14 Reagan again dispatched Philip Habib, who arranged a truce on August 12 that called for the withdrawal of both Israeli and PLO elements, to be replaced by a multinational force of Marines assisted by French and Italian military units. Reagan’s defense secretary, Caspar Weinberger, opposed the involvement of Americans because, as he saw it, there was no clear mission to accomplish. Years later, he told PBS, “there hadn’t been an agreement of that kind [supposedly reached on May 17 through Habib],” and while “a buffer force is fine if you insert it between two warring factions that have agreed there should be a buffer force in there,” if the two factions had no such agreement, the force “would be in very grave peril.”15 Moreover, he argued, the recommended forces were too lightly armed. He would later note that “Marines that are properly armed and have the rules of engagement that allow them to defend themselves are quite a different thing than Marines who are forced to sit on a Beirut Airport and do nothing effectively.” 16 But Weinberger lost the argument. He later blamed himself for his failure to persuade the president on the issue, noting that it resulted in “a force that was almost a sitting duck in one of the most dangerous spots in the Mideast . . . unable to protect itself.”17 The Multinational Force (MNF) arrived on August 20. Ronald Reagan had just made the biggest mistake of his eight-year presidency.

  Here, the ghosts of both Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower haunted America, shaping Ronald Reagan’s response to the threat. Truman had employed the United Nations to thwart the invasion of South Korea in 1950 by the North. That was a clear-cut case of aggression, and if a situation ever demanded “collective action,” Korea was an early, and crucial, test. In taking the invasion of South Korea by the North to the UN, Truman wanted to build a broad anti-Communist consensus. By a stroke of luck, the Soviets were boycotting the Security Council when the vote was taken, permitting one of only two uses of the UN for military action between 1947 and 2000.

  Yet Truman’s broader objective of using the UN as a buffer against communism was patently impossible in the emerging “Bandung Generation” (as Paul Johnson labeled it, referring to the 1955 Bandung Conference) characterized by tin-pot dictators and Communist thugs, most of whom identified with the Soviets’ view of “social justice.” These were leaders immersed in anti-imperialism, ready to exert retribution on the former capitalist occupiers and extract reparations by nationalizing industries and socializing their economies. Cloaked with a fig leaf of democracy—indeed, often bequeathed an astounding structure of representation by the colonial powers (some possessing more legislators per person than America or England)—the Third World states often collapsed into barbaric dictatorships overnight. Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana had his chief justice arrested in 1963 for acquitting suspected traitors, and the judge died in jail. By that time, Nkrumah was not only encouraging his followers to refer to him as “The Redeemer,” but had claimed, “I represent Africa and . . . speak in her name. Therefore, no African can have an opinion that differs from mine.”18 What made Nkrumah’s ascension particularly odious was that Ghana had been considered a model state, buttressed by a court system, commissions, and councils; it possessed virtually a
ll the trappings of Western representative government without any of the substance. Nigeria, little more than a collection of tribes, was forced into nation-state status, only to split apart with the Biafran civil war of the mid-1960s. No sooner had Belgium handed over control of the Congo to the locals than former post-office clerk and beer salesman Patrice Lumumba, the new prime minister, issued an edict that raised the pay of all government employees, save those in the army. A mutiny immediately erupted, with soldiers pillaging throughout Léopoldville. They booted the UN staff out of their hotel rooms while the United Nations sat on its hands. Gangs and looters overran the country, Europeans fled in droves, and Katanga province declared its independence under Moise Tshombe.

  When Dag Hammarskjöld, the UN secretary-general, finally ordered in “peacekeepers” (drawn largely from the inefficient and exceptionally unprofessional militaries of the “nonaligned” nations rather than from the West), they became part of the problem. To a significant degree, Hammarskjöld himself was “played” by the Congolese rebels. Before long, Col. Joseph Mobutu (later Mobutu Sésé Seko) overthrew Lumumba, who was under house arrest and “protected” by the UN, in a coup. Convinced he had the numbers to defeat Mobutu, Lumumba ordered his supporters to stage a jail-break and attempted to set up his own state in Stanleyville. There, Mobutu’s men captured him and transported him to Katanga, where he was executed. Tshombe soon left the country he helped create to assume the position of prime minister in the Congo, before being dismissed a year later.

  Such intrigue and brutal power politics were the norm in postcolonial Africa: Togo experienced a coup in 1963 (its president was murdered); mutinies occurred in Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania in 1964; the president of Gabon was overthrown that same year before French paratroopers saved his government; Dahomey (now Benin), the Central African Republic, and Upper Volta (now Burkina Faso) all suffered coups in 1965; and by 1968, sub-Saharan Africa had witnessed more than sixty coups, mutinies, military takeovers, or attempted revolts.19 In less than a decade, Dahomey, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Ghana, Togo, Upper Volta, Zaire, and Congo-Brazzaville suffered a total of twenty-two coups, and within fifteen years, just under half of the newly independent African states were ruled by dictatorships or military juntas. With this abominable record, the UN should have had abundant “peacekeeping” opportunities, yet was AWOL for most of these events. In the Congo—the one time UN peacekeepers genuinely attempted to enforce a peace—the cost was high. A RAND Corporation report concluded:U.N. achievements in the Congo came at considerable cost in men lost, money spent, and controversy raised. . . . As a result of these costs and controversies, neither the United Nations’ leadership nor its member nations were eager to repeat the experience. For the next 25 years the United Nations restricted its military interventions to interpositional peacekeeping, policing ceasefires, and patrolling disengagement zones in circumstances where all parties invited its presence and armed force was to be used by U.N. troops only in self-defense.20