Throughout the Lebanon crisis, Reagan got the rhetoric right—he declared that America would not cower in the face of terror or abandon our friends in the region—but I could tell from our first meeting that formulating a consistent policy was going to be more difficult. It was hard to plant a standard toward a goal when there was little or no solid ground in which to set it.
After our discussion in the Oval Office, President Reagan and I walked to the White House press briefing room, where he introduced me as his special envoy to the Middle East.6 The press began with typical Washington-style queries. They noted that I was Reagan’s third Middle East envoy in three years, the latest diplomat being sent out to undertake the Sisyphean task of rolling a boulder up a never-ending hill. Why, some wondered, would I take such a “no-win job”? I responded that I simply wanted to be helpful, despite the difficulty of the challenge. But what I didn’t say was that I also had to try to manage expectations. As I told George Shultz, “I promise you will never hear out of my mouth the phrase ‘The U.S. seeks a just and lasting peace in the Middle East.’ There is little that is just, and the only things I’ve seen that are lasting are conflict, blackmail and killing—not peace.”7 I thought the best I could hope for was to make some modest progress. Under the circumstances I knew that even keeping things from getting worse in the Middle East could be valuable.8
Because I wasn’t on the federal payroll, I had hoped that would free me from some of the burdens of the federal bureaucracy. That was wishful thinking. A Department of State functionary decided I had to be classified technically as an “unpaid government employee.” As such, a legal title was needed for me so that they could determine which classification applied. Was I a State Department expert or a consultant, or did I fall into some other category? It was finally concluded that I was to be considered an expert. I was uncomfortable with that classification. Anyone who claims to be an expert on the Middle East is starting off on the wrong foot.
I did know Lebanon’s plight was agonizing, and that it had worsened since civil war broke out there in 1975. I had been serving as secretary of defense in the Ford administration when the Department of Defense (DoD) assisted in the evacuation of American citizens from the country. The Lebanese civil war ultimately claimed 150,000 lives, and by 1983, the loss of life was already monumental—“comparable to the United States losing ten million of its citizens,” Reagan declared that December.9 Hundreds of thousands of the most successful and educated Lebanese fled the country. The countryside outside Beirut came under the control of Lebanese militias that had little or no allegiance to the central government.
Complicating matters further, by the time of the 1983 Beirut bombing a large fraction of the country was occupied by Lebanon’s neighboring and rival foreign powers, Syria and Israel. The Syrians had a proprietary attitude toward Lebanon, which they considered part of greater Syria. Israel had invaded in June 1982 to protect its territory from the Palestinian terrorist camps that were operating inside Lebanon. The Syrians resented the Israeli occupation, the Israelis resented the Syrian occupation, and the Lebanese resented being occupied by anyone. In the middle of all this hostility was a small contingent of American military personnel as part of a multinational peacekeeping force.
From a safe distance in Washington, it was easy for American leaders to say that we’d never let terrorists defeat us in Lebanon or push us to withdraw. But it became apparent that fulfilling that pledge would have required far more than Americans were prepared to muster. There was little appetite anywhere—in the administration, in Congress, or among the American people—to increase our military commitment to Lebanon, especially after the outrage over the Beirut bombing dissipated.
Lebanon, I soon learned, was also the subject of intense debate even within the administration. Many in the Pentagon, including Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger, favored an early and complete withdrawal from the country. The American troops still on the ground were in largely indefensible positions and were being targeted by the Syrian-backed extremists. Because of the dangers they faced, the troops’ movements were severely restricted. They were using, as Weinberger later put it, “fruitless tactics in pursuit of unreachable goals.”* During his trip to Beirut after the bombings, even Vice President Bush, who publicly expressed support for our presence, privately characterized the pleas of Lebanon’s president for American support unpersuasive.11
On the other side of the issue was Secretary of State Shultz, who favored maintaining an American military presence to help stabilize the Lebanese government. The unpleasant alternative to that, Shultz pointed out, was to have the country become a client state of Syria or an ungoverned haven for terrorists and extremists. Shultz’s position was bolstered by a number of our strongest allies in the region. King Hussein of Jordan, for example, made it clear that if the United States were to leave Lebanon, we would essentially be out of the Middle East dynamic. Of greater concern, the King felt that without an American counterweight in Lebanon, Syria would likely turn its attention toward Jordan, and then to Saudi Arabia. Saddam Hussein told me during our meeting in Baghdad that he believed the United States had been indifferent to Syria’s initial invasion of Lebanon and had “let this group of lunatics bash each other.”12 It was an experience to be on the receiving end of a lecture from Saddam Hussein, especially when he might have been right.
I gravitated toward Shultz’s view. I believed that since we were there, we should keep some forces on the ground, and do so without specifying a time limit. And we needed to encourage our coalition partners—the British, French, and Italians—to stay for a period as well. It was in all of our interests to try to help the Lebanese build some internal unity and develop the capability to better defend themselves. If the Syrians saw that we would not be run out of Beirut, they might be more amenable to negotiations with the Lebanese government. Importantly, this was where President Reagan had come down as well.
Unfortunately, the administration’s strategy faced another major impediment, namely the United States Congress. During the late phase of the Vietnam War, Congress had passed the War Powers Resolution, which required a withdrawal of American military forces deployed to another country within sixty to ninety days absent the explicit authorization of Congress.* The resolution, despite its questionable and still untested constitutionality, undercut the President’s ability to convince troublemakers of America’s staying power. It was clear to anyone with a newspaper that Congress wanted out.
So with the Reagan administration internally split over the policy, with Syria poised to exploit Lebanon’s chaos, with American deaths from the attack on the Marine barracks still being mourned, and with a ticking clock in the form of Congress ever present in our minds, I was sent to Lebanon to try to work out the problem. It brought to mind an observation former Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres once made to me: “If a problem has no solution, it is not a problem to be solved but a fact to be coped with over time.”
CHAPTER 2
Into the Swamp
For years, Beirut had been known as the “Paris of the Middle East”—a favored destination of Western and Arab tourists. Its high-rise hotels along the Corniche and its magnificent port made it a symbol of a modern Middle East. That, of course, was before their civil war began in 1975. I thought I had been prepared for what I would see on my arrival in Beirut eight years later, but the physical devastation was much worse than I had expected. By the time of my visit in late 1983, large sections of downtown and portions of the port had been reduced to rubble. Once elegant hotels were pockmarked from rockets and bullets. Even the presidential palace was scarred by rocket attacks. That was where I first met Lebanon’s beleaguered leader, who was struggling to hold his shattered country together.
I traveled throughout the region five times during my brief tenure as President Reagan’s Middle East envoy.
Amine Gemayel was not supposed to have been president but assumed the position upon the death of his brother, Bashir. Bashi
r Gemayel had been a radical politician for the Middle East: a young dynamic leader who vowed to reform the Lebanese political system and even broached the prospect of peace with israel. That was the sort of thinking that didn’t win friends among the potentates of the Arab League. Bashir’s assassination—linked to a Syrian terror group—resulted in his reserved, serious-minded brother taking charge of the shaken nation.
President Gemayel had been in office for a little over a year when I first met him. He was impeccably dressed—a reminder that had he wished to, he and his family had the resources to join other wealthy émigrés on the French Riviera.
Gemayel spoke for long periods at a time. He knew his country’s prospects, as well as his own, were precarious. Everywhere he turned he was faced by adversaries and rivals, both within and outside his own government. I was struck by his raw emotion. Gemayel had come to believe that the only hope for his government’s survival, and for his country, lay with the United States. As long as American and other multinational forces were in Lebanon to hold Syria at bay, Gemayel felt he might have the breathing room needed to fashion a coalition government and expand the government’s authority outside of Beirut.
I believed that as well, at least initially. But I also sensed that as the security situation in Lebanon deteriorated, the Lebanese had become increasingly dependent on the United States. America, for instance, was playing a pivotal role in training the Lebanese military, which had degraded badly during their internal struggles. Yet I wasn’t sure our well-intentioned efforts were enough. On one trip I went to visit the Lebanese military headquarters, where I met with their leadership and our American trainers. Our people seemed to be training the Lebanese for conventional actions against professional combat units rather than for engagements with militias and small terrorist cells. As I wrote Secretary Shultz, I wondered if we were preparing the Lebanese military to fight the right battles.1
I also wondered whether the United States was playing too prominent a role in Lebanese politics. By the time I arrived on the scene, there seemed to be an expectation that we would help select the Lebanese cabinet, notwithstanding our country’s limited familiarity with the intricacies of Lebanese politics. To me, this was the diplomatic equivalent of amateur brain surgery. The likely result would be having a government seen as a puppet of the United States. As their dependence was increasing, a growing number of Americans back home weren’t sure how much they were willing to put on the line for that small country so far away.
Lebanon’s President sensed this. Although the Reagan administration spoke of its commitment to his country, Gemayel was unconvinced—and understandably so. He could not be certain that the United States would fulfill its promise to protect the Lebanese. As a result, Gemayel feared he could be forced to choose between making an arrangement with either Israel or Syria to try to keep his government intact. Neither of those choices was acceptable to large factions of the Lebanese people. An arrangement with israel would damage Lebanon’s relations with its neighboring Arab nations. Gemayel, like most of his countrymen, also was wary of the Israelis and their intentions, and expressed the fear that Israel could devour his country “like a mouthful of bread.” Being at Syria’s mercy was an even worse alternative; mercy was not a defining characteristic of the Syrian regime. I noted that if Israel could eat Lebanon like a mouthful of bread, the Syrians could gobble up Lebanon like a potato chip.2
During my first twelve days in my new post, I held twenty-six official meetings in nine countries, traveling over twenty-five thousand miles, to develop a better understanding of America’s options for our involvement in Lebanon. On the twelfth evening, weary and not feeling particularly enlightened, I put down some initial thoughts on the situation in a cable to Secretary Shultz I titled “The Swamp.”3 It was not a cheerful title; but it conveyed my sense of the region as a dangerous, shifting place inhospitable to American interests. My initial assessment was that we needed to lighten our hand somewhat in the Middle East, but to proceed carefully so as not to further upset the situation. specifically, I wrote Shultz that we should:
close the gap between inflated perceptions of our abilities and reality;
never use U.S. troops as a “peacekeeping force,” we were too big a target; and
keep reminding ourselves that it is easier to get into something than it is to get out of it.
Contrary to what I expected when I first departed for Beirut, and despite my sympathy for the Lebanese people, I was left with the sense that there was little upside to our engagement. “My nose tells me that the odds are strongly stacked against us,” I advised Shultz. “I wish we hadn’t gone in. We need to be looking for a reasonably graceful way to get out.”4
The ensuing months saw more violence in Lebanon, as extremists linked to Syria and Iran hoped to accelerate a U.S. withdrawal. In early 1984, terrorists murdered one of the most prominent Americans in Lebanon—Dr. Malcolm Kerr, president of the American University of Beirut. Since we also had to be near the top of the terrorists’ wish list in the region, those charged with providing security for our team were particularly attentive.* Being assigned to stand inches away from high value American targets in the region was not exactly a formula for a long life.
I normally would have worked from the U.S. embassy in Beirut. But it had been closed after a bombing several months earlier that had killed sixty-three people. So instead my staff and I worked out of the American ambassador’s residence some distance from the capital. Unfortunately, the ambassador’s residence was hardly more secure than the embassy had been. It was shelled periodically, but there was no basement or shelter. As a result, during some of the attacks we spent time working under a staircase, which provided the best available cover.
One evening I left the ambassador’s residence to go to a small shack in the complex that contained the communications equipment needed to contact Washington, D.C. Our mission’s indispensable chief of staff, Tom Miller, and Ambassador Reg Bartholomew were with me. The shack contained two small rooms, a phone, and several radios. There was a small window with an air-conditioning unit in it. Just outside the shack, a SUV was parked near a tree.
When I made contact with the Secretary of State, he told me that he just had spoken with my wife, Joyce, who had been seeing reports on Chicago television and in the newspapers about the bombing and rocket attacks in Beirut, some of them in the areas where I was located.
“I talked with Joyce and reassured her,” Shultz said confidently. “I told her you had the best security possible and you were safe.”
At almost that exact moment, there was a loud explosion. A 122 millimeter Soviet-made Grad rocket hit the car just outside the shack. The impact of the explosion blew the air conditioner out of the window and across Tom Miller’s shoulder. A typewriter flew between Bartholomew’s and my heads, and I was thrown to the floor. As I scrambled back to continue the call with Shultz, I realized the phone line was dead. We, fortunately, were not.
In late December 1983, Secretary of Defense Weinberger received crucial support for a prompt and complete withdrawal of U.S. forces from Lebanon in a study commissioned by the Pentagon. It placed responsibility on the military commanders on the ground for failing to have adequate security safeguards and noted that the Marine force “was not trained, organized, staffed, or supported to deal effectively with the terrorist threat in Lebanon.”6 The report recommended that the Marines in Lebanon be withdrawn.
After the report was published, President Reagan acknowledged that the Marines’ mission in Lebanon was difficult. “We recognized the fact at the beginning,” Reagan said, “and we’re painfully mindful of it today. But the point is that our forces have already contributed to achievements that lay the foundation for a future peace, the restoration of a central government, and the establishment of an effective national Lebanese Army.”7 Asked if the United States planned to stay in Lebanon to see this work through, the President responded, “[W]hile there’s hope for peace we have to remain.”8
My own doubts about our ability to remain were growing. As I often do when dealing with a seemingly intractable problem, I developed an options paper. In the case of Lebanon, the exercise helped me think through whether we should persevere or, conversely, recognize that the potential for a positive outcome was limited and look for the best way to reduce American forces with as little damage to Lebanon and to our friends in the region as possible. In tough national security decisions, I’ve often found that there are seldom good options—only the least bad. This was the case in Lebanon. I estimated that we had a roughly 60 percent chance of accomplishing our goals in some form. These were not great odds, but I felt they were better than the alternative of a hasty withdrawal that would leave Lebanon to the control of the Syrians and further damage the reputation of our country. This was, after all, not quite a decade after our hasty withdrawal from Saigon at the end of the Vietnam War.
At the same time, a vigorous public debate was going on in Congress about whether to extend the mandate for U.S. troops in Lebanon—and if so, for how long. The Middle Eastern parties with whom we were negotiating learned all the details about the congressional debate by reading our newspapers. The Syrians were in effect being alerted that they probably had a winning hand.
Republican Senator Barry Goldwater was never one who had to be coaxed to offer his opinion. “We’re not helping one bit,” he said bluntly, “risking the lives of American Marines serving over there, trying to keep peace, when they’ve got a bunch of jackasses who want to kill each other. I’d get out of there and let them shoot.”9
Also troubling was the position of Illinois Senator Charles Percy, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. He was from the opposite end of the Republican spectrum from Goldwater and had previously been inclined to stick it out in Lebanon. But Percy was now saying withdrawal from Lebanon should take place “as soon as possible.”10 Indeed, there was a growing impression that a withdrawal might be ordered at any moment.
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