by H. W. Brands
REAGAN WAS DISAPPOINTED at Begin’s hard line, which the president feared would produce only more violence. His fears proved true sooner than he anticipated. On September 14 a bomb blast killed Lebanon’s president-elect, Bashir Gemayel. The assassination alarmed the Israelis and prompted them to occupy West Beirut. Four days later, Lebanese militiamen entered two Palestinian refugee camps in the sector now controlled by the Israeli army and slaughtered hundreds of men, women, and children. The Israeli forces stood by.
Reagan was appalled and said so publicly. “I was horrified to learn this morning of the killing of Palestinians which has taken place in Beirut,” the president declared. “All people of decency must share our outrage and revulsion over the murders, which included women and children.” He didn’t directly blame the Israelis for the killings, but he asserted their complicity. “During the negotiations leading to the PLO withdrawal from Beirut, we were assured that Israeli forces would not enter West Beirut. We also understood that following withdrawal, Lebanese Army units would establish control over the city. They were thwarted in this effort by the Israeli occupation that took place beginning on Wednesday. We strongly opposed Israel’s move into West Beirut following the assassination of President-elect Gemayel, both because we believed it wrong in principle and for fear that it would provoke further fighting. Israel, by yes terday in military control of Beirut, claimed that its moves would prevent the kind of tragedy which has now occurred.”
Reagan decided that the only way to get Israel out of Lebanon was to put America more firmly in. He convened the NSC for consideration of next steps. The discussion didn’t move fast enough for him. “I finally told our group we should go for broke,” he recorded that evening. He advocated sending the multinational force, including the American contingent, back into Lebanon to prevent further violence. The administration would pressure the Israelis to leave Lebanon and would rely on various Arab states to talk Syria into withdrawing. Meanwhile, the Lebanese government would build up its military to the point where it could defend the country. “No more half way gestures,” Reagan wrote. “Clear the whole situation while the MNF is on hand to ensure order.”
George Shultz and Jeane Kirkpatrick enthusiastically endorsed the president’s proposal. No one at the meeting expressed opposition. Reagan was pleased. “The wheels are now in motion,” he wrote.
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THE STRENGTH OF Reagan’s approach to foreign policy as a whole was his weakness in policy toward the Middle East. Reagan kept his eye on the big picture, meaning the struggle with Soviet communism, and in that realm he eventually succeeded beyond any other president. But his big-picture orientation diminished his ability to deal with smaller issues, such as the war in Lebanon. He lacked expertise in the personalities and prejudices that made that country one of the most complicated and vexed on earth. Success in Middle Eastern diplomacy required attention to detail Reagan was simply incapable of. It was no coincidence that the one president to make a lasting mark on the Middle East was Reagan’s polar opposite in temperament and approach: Jimmy Carter. Carter was often derided, by Reagan among many others, for micromanaging policy. But without that attention to detail, Carter would never have achieved the breakthrough Camp David agreement between Egypt and Israel.
Reagan nonetheless hoped for something similar. And he hoped the return of American forces to Lebanon would make it possible. The landing and deployment went smoothly, encouraging Reagan to bring several Arab leaders to Washington. “The big day!” he wrote on October 22. King Hassan of Morocco led the delegation. Hassan knew that the American government had consistently said it would not deal directly with the PLO until the PLO acknowledged Israel’s right to exist. Hassan thought he could get PLO head Yasser Arafat to utter the required words. “He offered a sample of what Arafat should say,” Reagan noted. “And I agreed it was good enough. Then he indicated he thought he could deliver that in three weeks or a month.”
The Israelis provided less encouragement. Begin refused to withdraw Israeli forces from Beirut, contending that the PLO would simply return. Reagan met with Phil Habib, who was growing more frustrated with Begin by the day. The Israeli occupation of Lebanon—now opposed by the government of Amine Gemayel, brother of the murdered Bashir Gemayel—confirmed Arab skepticism of Israel’s intentions. And it played into the hands of Palestinian extremists. Reagan sent Habib back to the Middle East with a message for Israel’s government: If Israel failed to leave Lebanon, it might lose America’s support.
Reagan continued to be more favorably impressed by the Arabs than by the Israelis. King Hussein of Jordan arrived in Washington in late December. “I really like him,” Reagan noted. “He is our hope to lead the Arab side and the PLO in negotiating with the Israelis.” Reagan gave Hussein every encouragement. President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt followed Hussein. “We had good meetings and affirmed our solid relationship,” Reagan wrote. Mubarak warned that Israel’s intransigence in Lebanon could make any peace settlement impossible and that Israel and Syria, though enemies, seemed to have the common goal of dividing Lebanon between them. “I share his concern,” Reagan observed.
REAGAN’S FRUSTRATION WITH Israel continued to mount during the first quarter of 1983. Ariel Sharon’s resignation as defense minister following an investigative commission’s finding of culpability in the massacres at the Palestinian refugee camps briefly gave Reagan reason to think things might improve. Yet while a March visit by Yitzhak Shamir, the Israeli foreign minister, included fewer angry words than Reagan’s exchanges with Begin, it brought no greater progress. “Still Israel dragging their feet,” Reagan muttered.
April yielded a new shock and further reason for discouragement. On April 18 a car bomb exploded outside the American embassy in Beirut. More than sixty people were killed, including seventeen Americans. Among the American dead were several State Department and CIA officials and a marine guard. Never had an American embassy suffered such intentional damage. A faction linked to Iran claimed responsibility for the bombing.
“D--n them,” Reagan wrote in his diary. The next day, following an NSC meeting at which he learned more details, he added, “Lord forgive me for the hatred I feel for the humans who can do such a cruel but cowardly deed.”
Four days later the president met the plane bringing home the bodies of the slain Americans. “There can be no sadder duty for one who holds the office I hold than to pay tribute to Americans who have given their lives in the service of their country,” he told the families and the broader public. “These gallant Americans understood the danger they faced, and yet they went willingly to Beirut. And the dastardly deed, the act of unparalleled cowardice that took their lives, was an attack on all of us, on our way of life and on the values we hold dear.” For this reason, Reagan said, the mission in Lebanon was more important than ever. “We would indeed fail them if we let that act deter us from carrying on their mission of brotherhood and peace … Let us here in their presence serve notice to the cowardly, skulking barbarians in the world that they will not have their way.”
“MR. PRESIDENT,” A reporter had asked at the outset of the intervention, “do you have a plan for getting the United States out of Lebanon if fighting should break out there. Or could the marine presence there lead to another long entanglement such as Vietnam?”
The specter of Vietnam hovered over every American intervention after the 1970s. Presidents routinely denied the analogy, and Reagan denied it now. “I don’t see anything of that kind taking place there at all,” he said. Yet the very need to deny it testified to its power in the American imagination. American voters learn lessons slowly in foreign policy, but they learn them well. The lesson of the 1930s, that appeasement must be shunned and aggression resisted, became the basis for forty years of policy toward the Soviet Union and its allies. The lesson of Vietnam, that other countries’ wars could become quagmires for the United States, caused presidents from Jimmy Carter forward to deny that their interventions were anything like the inte
rvention in Vietnam. Sometimes it led to decisions to let revolutions run their course, as Carter did in Nicaragua. Sometimes it led to covert warfare, like that Reagan waged in Central America by means of the contras. Always it produced a defensive reaction when reporters or other skeptics raised the Vietnam issue.
“The marines are going in there, into a situation with a definite understanding as to what we’re supposed to do,” Reagan elaborated. “I believe that we are going to be successful in seeing the other foreign forces leave Lebanon. And then at such time as Lebanon says that they have the situation well in hand, why, we’ll depart.”
The reporters weren’t convinced. “Sir, if fighting should break out again, would you pull the marines out?” another asked.
“You’re asking a hypothetical question, and I’ve found out that I never get in trouble if I don’t answer one of those,” Reagan said.
BUT THE BOMBING of the embassy wasn’t hypothetical. It underscored the dangers to the United States of involvement in Lebanon’s troubles, and it drove Reagan to intensify his efforts to find a solution. He sent George Shultz to the Middle East to spell the weary Habib and add the prestige of Shultz’s office to the negotiations. Initial reports on the secretary’s dealings with the Israelis were good. Shultz cabled Reagan saying the Israelis seemed close to an agreement to withdraw.
Suddenly Syria became the obstacle to a settlement. Oddly, this afforded Reagan a certain relief. Reagan’s big picture of a world divided between democracy and communism had struggled with the local factionalism, sectarianism, and personalism of Lebanese politics. But Syria had ties to the Soviet Union, which made it part of the big picture. It also gave Reagan an opportunity to lecture Leonid Brezhnev, an exercise he found much more congenial than lecturing Menachem Begin. Brezhnev had blamed Israel for the violence in Lebanon. “Israel is pursuing a regular war against Lebanon,” Brezhnev declared in a letter to Reagan. “Israel began this war with an act unprecedented in its impudence and contempt for the norms of the international community”—namely crossing lines established by United Nations forces. “Israel is continuing its large scale aggression against a sovereign country, a member of the UN. Blood is being shed, thousands of people are tragically perishing, the peaceful population of the country—Lebanese, Palestinians—are experiencing unbelievable suffering.” Brezhnev held Reagan responsible—“in view of the well known fact that the United States has at its disposal major possibilities of influencing Israel.” And he went on to warn the American president that the Kremlin would not stand idly by. “The Soviet Union watches with utmost attention developments of the situation in this region which is located in the immediate proximity of our southern borders and where we have no shortage of friends.” The Soviet Union would act to protect its interests. “Unless the war of Israel against Lebanon and the UN is immediately stopped, the consequences may prove unpredictable.”
Reagan liked feeling indignant as much as most people do, and Brezhnev’s blaming gave him an opportunity. The president didn’t take seriously the implied threat in Brezhnev’s letter; Lebanon was hardly on the border of the Soviet Union, and Moscow in fact suffered from a shortage of friends in the region, especially after the Camp David accords caused Egypt to look to the United States rather than the Soviet Union for aid. Reagan ignored that part of Brezhnev’s letter. Instead, he challenged Brezhnev’s good faith and his assignment of blame. “Your expressions of concern for the suffering of the people of Lebanon cannot but appear ironic in view of the fact that the Soviet Union has provided immense quantities of weapons to elements which have actively worked to undermine the political stability of Lebanon and provoked Israeli retaliation by attacking Israel’s northern territories.” He told Brezhnev to cut the claptrap and get to work on a solution. “I will continue to use my personal influence to that end and expect that you will press a similar course on those forces with which the Soviet Union enjoys influence.”
THE EXCHANGE WITH Brezhnev was satisfying for Reagan, but it didn’t get at the root of the Lebanon problem, which was intensely local. And it was deep, far deeper than the comparatively recent struggle between democracy and communism. Sometimes Reagan sensed roots that ran to biblical times. At a moment of particular exasperation with Syria, he wrote in his diary, “Armageddon in the prophecies begins with the gates of Damascus being assailed.”
Reagan didn’t really think Armageddon was about to start, but he didn’t want to take any chances. He ordered Shultz and Robert McFarlane, who replaced Habib as Reagan’s special envoy to the Middle East, to step up their mediation efforts. For a time they reported progress.
But then the factional war in Lebanon heated up again, with the factions splintering into new factions and the Lebanese government becoming merely one contestant among the many. The United States still recognized the government and hoped to bolster it. Reagan met with President Gemayel and assured him he wouldn’t be abandoned. Reagan promised Gemayel weapons that would help the government fend off its opponents.
Reagan considered himself an honest broker in the Lebanon conflict, but his aid to Gemayel, not to mention the much longer and broader American support for Israel, made American soldiers seem like combatants to those who opposed the government and the Israelis. In August 1983, Reagan received a cable informing him that American marines at the Beirut airport had come under artillery attack. The news reminded him, as if a reminder were necessary, what a hard problem the Middle East was. He remarked wistfully, “The world must have been simpler in the days of gunboat diplomacy.”
PERHAPS THE WISH was father to the ensuing reality, for Reagan shortly authorized the use of American naval power in the Lebanon war. The president’s military advisers insisted that the marines be defended. They advocated sending the battleship New Jersey to the Lebanese coast to shell the positions from which the attacks against the marines originated. Reagan had to think the matter through. “This could be seen as putting us in the war,” he acknowledged. Yet he allowed himself to be persuaded. “This can be explained as protection of our marines,” he reasoned. “If it doesn’t work, then we’ll have to decide between pulling out or going to the Congress and making a case for greater involvement.”
The decision was indeed seen as putting the United States in the war. The New Jersey bombarded the heights above the Beirut airport with sixteen-inch shells that weighed over a ton. The destruction was immense, and it silenced the artillery attacks against the marines at the airport. But it was often indiscriminate, killing noncombatants, destroying their homes, and expanding the ranks of people who considered the Americans their enemies.
Those ranks included a suicide bomber who in late October crashed a truck filled with explosives into the airport building that served as a barracks for the marines. The blast leveled the concrete structure and killed 241 American servicemen. A second, almost simultaneous attack on a French barracks a few miles away killed 58 French soldiers.
“The president’s face turned ashen when I told him the news,” Robert McFarlane recalled. “He looked like a man, a 72-year-old man, who had just received a blow to the chest. All the air seemed to go out of him. ‘How could this happen?’ he asked disbelievingly.”
Reagan recovered sufficiently to issue a statement to reporters. “There are no words to properly express our outrage,” he said. He added his condolences to the families of the deceased. And he reaffirmed his commitment to the cause for which they had died. “We should all recognize that these deeds make so evident the bestial nature of those who would assume power if they could have their way and drive us out of that area. We must be more determined than ever.”
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HOURS AFTER HEARING the terrible news from Beirut, Reagan launched a military operation that seemed to have nothing to do with the conflict in Lebanon. Most Americans had never heard of Grenada before Reagan became president; even American newscasters required time to get the pronunciation right (gre-NAY-da). The invasion of this tiny island country in the eastern
Caribbean took the American public by such surprise that Reagan’s critics hardly had time to react before the deed was done.
Reagan intended things that way. Since entering office, he had been looking for an opportunity to demonstrate his and America’s decisiveness in foreign affairs, in particular to exorcise the ghost of Vietnam and dispel the impression that the United States would not act forcefully in defense of its interests. Latin America seemed a likely place for the kind of demonstration Reagan intended. Fidel Castro and his leftist allies in the region needed a chastening, Reagan judged, and in Latin America the United States enjoyed an overwhelming military advantage over any conceivable foe.
Suriname briefly caught his eye. In December 1982 soldiers in the service of military strongman Desi Bouterse killed fifteen political dissidents in that former Dutch colony. Bouterse then made statements that struck Reagan’s ear as suggesting he was cozying up to Castro. “This must not be allowed,” Reagan wrote confidentially. “We have to find a way to stop him.” The president considered sending in the marines but decided against it. “We’d lose all we’ve gained with the other Latin American countries.”
So instead he plotted covert warfare. In the spring of 1983, Reagan’s national security team developed a plan for neutralizing or toppling Bouterse. “Based on the President’s directives at the NSPG meeting yesterday, we suggest the following possible actions,” staffers Alfonso Sapia-Bosch and Oliver North wrote: “That a Presidential emissary travel to Venezuela and Brazil this week to meet with the respective presidents to brief them in detail on what is now taking place in Suriname and what the result is likely to be, e.g., the Cubanization of Surinamese society. Furthermore this will allow the establishment of a Cuban and Soviet base on the tip of South America that will give improved access to the South Caribbean and a base from which to extend their influence with South America. Northeastern Brazil will then be open to propaganda infiltration at the very least. Venezuela will have another unfriendly country near its border.” Sapia-Bosch and North recommended briefing not only the president of Venezuela, Luis Herrera Campins, but also his probable successor, Jaime Lusinchi. “Herrera Campins feels very vulnerable because of ineptitude, financial problems, corruption, etc. By bringing Lusinchi into the loop, we would reduce pressure on Herrera Campins.” In Brazil the approach should be straightforward. “President Figueiredo must be made to understand the threat that Cubans and Soviets will present when they are on his northern border. He is an army general and should recognize the problem.”