Seven Events That Made America America

by Larry Schweikart

  Indeed, UN peacekeeping operations were seldom approved unless, however ironic, peace had already been decided and there was little risk of violence!21 Most of the activities of UN forces have involved monitoring cease-fires, overseeing demilitarized zones, and running fact-finding missions. Virtually all of the rhetoric of the United Nations was directed at a single African state, South Africa, because of its white government and apartheid system.

  Despite the striking ineptitude and callousness of the United Nations, both Truman (in Korea), then Eisenhower (in Korea and Suez) had bought into the notion of collective security involving the UN. Based on the pitiful performance of the League of Nations, not to mention the UN’s own brief history of incompetence, both presidents should at least have been suspicious of such efforts. Outside of the Security Council, the United States still substantially controlled the UN in the early 1950s, and therefore both presidents still saw the UN as a force for genuine security. That would change in the Suez Crisis of 1956, in which Ike superficially and temporarily seemed to achieve a great victory by shuffling off the matter to the United Nations. In reality, he perpetuated an arrangement that, more than ever, opened the United States to the dictates of “world opinion.”

  Briefly, the details of the crisis were as follows: Britain, France, and Israel combined to attack Egypt over Gamal Abdel Nasser’s nationalization of the Suez Canal. That constituted a serious economic blow to Britain, but direct intervention threatened to bring in the United States and other Arab nations. A scheme was hatched (the Protocol of Sèvres) to have Israel invade the Sinai, then Britain and France would generously step in to maintain a safe zone of sixteen kilometers on either side of the canal, wresting control of the canal back from Egypt. In what proved to be a typical Western-versus-non-Western military conflict, the British-French-Israeli units routed the Egyptians, but also drew the ire of the world community. Suez was, after all, a military victory displaying British might; but it also exposed Britain’s moral and political weakness, as Prime Minister Anthony Eden (whom historian Paul Johnson called a “pathetic sacrificial victim”) had no stomach for standing up to world opinion. But Britain’s decline also revealed another undesirable trend: that of allowing the United Nations to act as any kind of neutral arbiter.

  In keeping with the new internationalist tone, and genuinely concerned about the escalation of a regional conflict into a new, hot theater of the Cold War, Ike threw Suez into the UN’s lap, thereby abandoning the British and the French. From then on, all operations involving the United Nations ceased to be about establishing a clear winner or loser (which scholars of so-called peace studies have determined actually shortens wars and reduces casualties).22 Instead, the focus was on borders, truces, negotiations, conferences, agreements, pieces of paper, disarmament, and above all, cooperation. This was the case in Korea, where there was no winner, nor even a final treaty. There remained only an ongoing cease-fire negotiation, which afflicted the world with a dictatorial state well into the twenty-first century. Despite the UN Charter, which authorizes it to use force, the United Nations’ own panel report on peacekeeping operations states that “the United Nations does not wage war,” thus making it nearly impossible to determine a winner, and therefore, bring about a true resolution to the dispute.23 Unlike Korea, however, the Suez affair produced a completely one-sided solution: UN peacekeepers were to be withdrawn at Egypt’s request, which meant that, as soon as the Egyptians had rearmed, Nasser would demand the removal of the peacekeepers so he could attack anew.

  Eisenhower, despite the praise heaped on him by Johnson, who called him “the most successful of America’s twentieth-century presidents” (an astounding comment, given Reagan’s record), had ceded significant control over American foreign policy to the UN. A body increasingly made up of the hate-America crowd, governed by a Security Council arrangement that permitted a single member to issue a veto—thereby empowering the USSR to prevent virtually any action that might limit its expansion—the UN had, by the 1950s, become a mechanism that constrained American influence. It certainly was not a neutral arbiter, or even a force for peace. From 1945 to 2000, there were more than three hundred wars resulting in 22 million deaths. In only two cases did the UN approve military action to counter aggression: North Korea in 1950 and Kuwait in 1990. There had been a minimum of fifty-five civil wars between 1945 and 1973 alone, and by the mid-1990s, largely thanks to “peacemaking” efforts by the United Nations, the number had more than doubled since 1945.24

  While the evidence would mount after Lebanon, it was already becoming clear that “peacekeeping” was not only a failure, but likely produced more deaths and continuing carnage than would otherwise have occurred. One authority on peacekeeping noted, “We may [assume] that only a ‘just’ settlement will really assure a lasting peace, but the empirical evidence for this proposition is unclear.”25 Civil wars rarely ended in negotiated settlements: the obvious problem of how people lived and worked with those who had recently killed their families and burned their towns was, to say the least, thorny. When the research finally surfaced—years after Ike or Reagan participated in UN missions—the scholarship concluded that civil wars were less likely to end in negotiated settlements than other wars.26 Moreover, soldiers, whose training and primary purpose is to kill people and break things, became “peacekeepers,” human shields set between warring tribes, unable to effect a solution and often prevented from defending the innocent. That is, of course, much clearer in hindsight.

  At the time, however, much of the impetus behind taking the Korean and Suez conflicts to the UN was grounded in a genuine optimistic belief that the United States could use the organization to build a broad anti-Communist consensus. Of course, this hope was based on the misconception that UN leaders actually opposed communism. Led by the guilt-ridden, stoic, moralistic, Naderesque Swede Dag Hammarskjöld, who once described himself as the vessel of a “thirsty” God, and who, like Jimmy Carter after him, ignored realpolitik in favor of a de-Westernized reordering of the world, the UN refused to condemn the Egyptian seizure of the Suez Canal. Instead, it sided repeatedly with the Muslim powers and upbraided the British and French, whose investment had been stolen. But was there any condemnation of the Soviet invasion of Hungary? Nothing to compare with the contempt for the Western powers that Hammarskjöld exuded.

  By 1982, then, Reagan had inherited a presidential tradition of inviting the United Nations to participate in U.S. national security decisions. That tradition had gained moral credibility during the Vietnam War, which, critics sermonized, showed the “limits of American power.” Reagan didn’t buy that line, of course, and his primary focus from the 1980 campaign onward was to restore America’s military presence and pressure the Soviet Union, thereby, perhaps, causing the Communist state to crumble internally. The struggle with the USSR colored everything. It lay behind Reagan’s invasion of the Caribbean island of Grenada, just two days after the Marine barracks was truck-bombed, to expel the Cubans. It drove his decision to deploy Pershing and cruise missiles to counter the Soviet SS-20s that had been placed in western Russia to threaten Europe. Nevertheless, there were limits to how much even Reagan could do unilaterally or with only a handful of allies. The situation in Lebanon therefore seemed a proper forum for diplomacy and collective peacekeeping.

  Jimmy Carter’s one successful foreign policy venture, the Camp David Accords, which led to a peace treaty between Egypt and Israel, had also led Reagan to believe that eventually the arrangements could be expanded to moderate Arab states, leading to a “final resolution of the great problems bedeviling the Middle East. . . .”27 On September 1, 1982, a few weeks after Philip Habib had secured his truce calling for a multinational force to protect Lebanese civilians, Reagan sent a letter to Menachem Begin, arguing that the “population in the north of Israel is now secure,” and that the PLO was “militarily weakened and the Soviet Union shown once again to have minimal impact on the truly significant developments” in the region. 28 Calling
for a new comprehensive peace proposal, Reagan forwarded his plans to Jordan and Saudi Arabia, and almost simultaneously Begin’s cabinet rejected his overtures. The Israelis indirectly continued to encourage other groups to winnow the PLO’s ranks. On September 16, two days after the assassination of Lebanese Phalangist leader Bachir Gemayel, the Israelis allowed some 1,500 Phalange militia to enter the PLO camps and kill more than 1,000 PLO and civilians. (Israeli defense minister Ariel Sharon, who was investigated for allowing the Phalangists into the camps, was forced to resign.)

  Following these attacks, “world opinion” erupted against Israel. Throughout Europe, demonstrators staged protests. In Italy, they wore badges with the Star of David and the swastika intertwined; in France, there was a school strike against Israel and bar mitzvahs were canceled. Arab scholar Bernard Lewis noted the convenient double standard: There is no evidence that the teachers of [the Lycée Voltaire] had ever been moved to such action by events in Poland or Uganda, Central America or Afghanistan, South Africa and Southeast Asia, or for that matter in the Middle East where the massacre of Sabra and Shatila . . . lacked neither precedents nor parallels. 29

  Earlier that year, the Syrian army massacred between seven thousand and ten thousand Muslim residents in the town of Hama, but, judging from the lack of outrage, it seems the international community barely even noticed. Thomas Friedman of The New York Times described favorably the ending of the threats of Muslim extremists against supposedly “moderate” Arab governments.30 According to this logic, Muslim governments are fully justified in massacring civilians if it ensures their security. But as Lewis pointed out, there was a key distinction: “In Hama, [the] possibility [of blaming Israel] did not exist; therefore the mass slaughter of Arabs by Arabs went unremarked, unnoticed, and unprotested.”31

  On Wednesday, September 28, a force of 1,746 United States Marines arrived on the shores of Lebanon along with approximately the same number of French and Italian troops. As the Israelis finally withdrew from the region, Muslim and Druze militias began to battle openly, and the Lebanese army disintegrated. Scarcely two days earlier, two UN observers hit a land mine and were killed, demonstrating just how deadly peacekeeping could be. Despite having opposed the mission from the beginning, Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger arranged for the Marines to stay at the Beirut Airport. But they were not the only new visitors to Beirut: Shiite Muslims from Iran had arrived to extend their Islamic revolution into Lebanon.32 Five months earlier, one of their operatives had detonated a car bomb at the U.S. embassy in Beirut, killing sixteen Americans (including the top CIA Middle East researcher). That act should have tipped off Reagan’s usually acute antennae that no conventional peace deal would be possible there. After meeting with the families of the victims at Andrews Air Force Base, Reagan might have reconsidered, if it hadn’t been for a crucial substitution of negotiators. Habib, who had been quite successful, informed Reagan he wanted to retire. In his place, Reagan sent George Shultz.

  As secretary of state, Shultz had proven reliable, but he was a throw-back to Eisenhower-style diplomacy. Reagan biographer Edmund Morris characterized him as having a “face as blank as a slot machine’s,” and Nixon warned Reagan to “watch out for him. . . . after a while he’ll be disloyal.”33 He bought into the notion that the USSR was economically sound. A conciliator by nature, Shultz cringed at Reagan’s confrontational tone with the Soviets. He opposed Reagan’s economic restrictions on credits for building the Trans-Siberian pipeline as unduly controversial for our allies. Informed only a few days before the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) speech in March 1983, Shultz and his State Department aides opposed “not just the way the missile defense was introduced; evidence suggests they believed that the initiative was an ill-thought-out idea.”34 Shultz at the time feared “destabilization,” although later he came to admit that SDI struck fear into the hearts of the Soviet leaders, thereby providing extreme leverage in negotiations.

  Shultz scoffed at Reagan’s vision of a world without nuclear weapons, a view that most of his associates at State shared. “Doesn’t he understand the realities?” Shultz’s aide Richard Burt asked.35 At a Monday meeting prior to Reagan’s Wednesday SDI speech, Shultz and presidential science adviser George Keyworth discussed “Star Wars” in front of the president. “Shultz called me a lunatic,” Keyworth recalled, and said it would destroy NATO and “was the idea of a blooming madman.”36 The Gipper was too polite to tell Shultz the idea for an SDI program was entirely his own. Throughout the SDI announcement, Reagan anticipated that even many of his closest advisers would react the same way as Shultz and would, in Margaret Thatcher’s words, “go wobbly.” By necessity Shultz had to be involved in the Lebanese mission, but only at the last minute.

  Shultz still thought in terms of grand agreements, replete with the signatures of powerful people. He believed no problem was insurmountable if people of goodwill could just talk to each other, and this reasoning certainly rubbed off on Reagan. Shultz and Deputy National Security Advisor Bud McFarlane won Reagan’s ear on this issue, and so Reagan continued twisting arms for his earlier Lebanon peace proposal, persuading King Hussein of Jordan “to work on the Syrians.”37 Reagan came to like Hussein a great deal—“His Majesty is a solid citizen,” he wrote in his diary.38 “He is our hope to lead the Arab side and the P.L.O. [Reagan always inserted periods] in negotiating with the Israelis.”39 Not only did Reagan feel he could trust Hussein, but he made important inroads with Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak, who admitted privately that both Israel and Syria “may be playing a game . . . cutting up Lebanon between them.”40 Well into September, the “Lebanon Working Group” continued to place Lebanon strategy in the context of Syrian aggression and warned about a “suicidal attempt to go after a U.S. vessel in the Med.”41 Advising that the Syrian strategy through such a move was to “draw [in] the U.S.” and “hurt the IMF,” the working group warned that the Syrians would “lay the trap” and “force [the] US to escalate.” For that reason, the “US cannot reverse [itself], can not withdraw.”42

  Lost in the stream of analysis was the larger issue, which, at the time, all but the Syrians had ignored. The biggest menace was that of a rising Islamic fundamentalism that threatened some of the most oppressive Muslim dictatorships in the region, not to mention Israel and the United States. Jihad was not “business as usual,” not just routine violence in the Middle East. A profound reordering of much of Islamic society had occurred since the Second World War, much of it of course related to the founding of Israel. But that was only an excuse, the rowdy drunk in the bar obscuring a room full of inebriates. At a much deeper level, the stunningly rapid expansion in prosperity in the West and parts of Japan had, literally, left the Muslim states in the dirt. A few nations, such as Saudi Arabia, had vast oil wealth dispersed among a handful of families. Other Islamic countries—Egypt, Yemen, Morocco, Algeria, and Syria, all of which lacked substantial oil reserves—received second-class treatment from their Muslim brothers. Those nations remained pitifully backward. Western prosperity encompassed Israel, which in a matter of years had built resorts and farms on land the Arabs had left barren for centuries.

  Israel provided a convenient scapegoat for these states and their virtual dictators. Government schools propagandized against the Jews relentlessly. Nonie Darwish, an Egyptian whose father was killed supervising Gaza, recalled of her education, “The hatred of Israel and our obligation to pursue jihad was somehow worked into every subject we discussed in school. In fact, clearly, the main goal of our education was to instill a commitment to destroy Israel.”43 Jews were “portrayed as devils, pigs, and an evil, occupying force.”44 The foundation of Israel, however, only focused Muslim anger—it didn’t create it. Instead, a new brand of fundamentalist Islam had arisen since World War II, lodged primarily in the Wahhabi teachings, but also in the Shiite school of thought. Politically, hatred of the West was funneled into the Muslim Brotherhood, the forerunner of al-Qaeda, founded by Sayyid al-Qutb. Ironically, i
t was not the founding of Israel that kicked al-Qutb over the railings into radicalism, but his visit to the United States in 1948, specifically, his time as a college student at the Colorado State College of Education (now Northern Colorado University) in Greeley. There, this middle-class former Egyptian bureaucrat (again disproving the maxim that terrorists are pushed into their activities because of privation and lack of education) and lover of Hollywood films confronted sexual liberation such as he had never seen in his native country. The “main enemy of salvation,” he later intoned, was sex. Sexual “mixing led inevitably to perversion.”45 By the time he boarded a boat bound for Egypt in 1950, al-Qutb was a full-blown radical and bigot, obsessed with “the white man in Europe or America” who was “our number-one enemy.”46 Nor were Muslims who rejected jihad to be spared. A “Muslim community” did not exist, only an Islamic revival that would sweep the world, beginning with his home country. Promptly, then, he was arrested, tried, and finally executed by the Egyptian government.