An American Life

by Ronald Reagan

  How do you deal with a people driven by such a religious zeal that they are willing to sacrifice their lives in order to kill an enemy simply because he doesn’t worship the same God they do? People who believe that if they do that, they’ll go instantly to heaven? In the Iran-Iraq war, radical Islamic fundamentalists sent more than a thousand young boys—teenagers and younger—to their deaths by telling them to charge and detonate land mines—and the boys did so joyously because they believed, “Tonight, we will be in Paradise.”

  In early November, a new problem cropped up in the Middle East: Iran began threatening to close the Gulf of Hormuz, a vital corridor for the shipment of oil from the Persian Gulf. I said that if they followed through with this threat, it would constitute an illegal interference with navigation of the sea, and we would use force to keep the corridor open. Meanwhile, another development promised to bring change to the Middle East: Menachem Begin, deeply depressed after the death of his beloved wife and apparently devoid of the spirit he once had to continue fighting against Israel’s Arab enemies and its serious economic problems, resigned as prime minister.

  King Fahd of Saudi Arabia, perhaps thinking American resolve on behalf of Israel might have been diminished by the horrendous human loss in Beirut, approached us with a new peace proposal that he said could end the warfare in Lebanon, and also take Syria out of the Soviet camp and put it in ours. But the proposal would have required us to reduce our commitment to Israel, and I said no thanks.

  I still believed that it was essential to continue working with moderate Arabs to find a solution to the Middle East’s problem, and that we should make selective sales of American weapons to the moderate Arabs as proof of our friendship. In this I was constantly frustrated, following the AWACS sale, by strong resistance from Israel’s supporters in Congress. That undermined our efforts to improve relations with the moderate Arabs. At the same time, I was beginning to have doubts whether the Arab world, with its ancient tribal rivalries, centuries of internecine strife, and almost pathological hatred of Israel, was as serious about supporting our peace efforts in the Middle East as King Fahd of Saudi Arabia and King Hussein of Jordan said they were. I believed these two monarchs were sincere when they said they were applying pressure on Syria to leave Lebanon, as we renewed our efforts to convince the Israelis to leave. But the Arab world was anything but united on this issue—as on many other issues—and I was beginning to wonder how much we could count on it to help us achieve success.

  In any case, Israel wouldn’t budge; and Syria, with its new Soviet weapons and advisors, was growing more arrogant than ever, and rejected several proposals by the Saudis aimed at getting them out of Lebanon.

  Our intelligence experts found it difficult to establish conclusively who was responsible for the attack on the barracks. Although several air strikes were planned against possible culprits, I canceled them because our experts said they were not absolutely sure they were the right targets. I didn’t want to kill innocent people. While our intelligence people resumed their efforts to confirm that we had the right targets, Israeli and French forces, convinced they had sufficient information, raided the same Shiite Muslim redoubts in the mountains that we had considered attacking.

  When Druse militiamen began a new round of shelling of the marines several weeks after the bombing at the airport, we had to decide whether to ignore it or respond with firepower and escalate our role in the Lebanese war. “We’re a divided group,” I wrote in my journal after a National Security Council meeting held to discuss the renewed shelling in early December. “I happen to believe taking out a few batteries might give them pause to think. Joint Chiefs believe it might drastically alter our mission and lead to major increases in troops for Lebanon . . .” The next day, I wrote:

  A hectic three quarters of a day with contentious staff and cabinet members on both sides of a couple of issues. One with N.S.C. had to do with attacking Syrian targets around Beirut in response to shelling of our Marines. Some wanted to do this whether they were responsible for the shelling or not. I came down on the side of only responding if we knew our target was the source unless that target was in a populated area—then take a nearby target if it was of the same organization such as Druse or P.L.O. etc. Fire at Syrians only if they had fired at us.

  Then, the Syrians took an action that more or less made our decision for us: Late the next day, a gray and cold Saturday when Nancy and I were at Camp David, Bud McFarlane and Cap Weinberger separately called me with the news that Syria had launched a ground-to-air missile at one of our unarmed reconnaissance planes during a routine sweep over Beirut. Although there was some resistance from Cap and the Joint Chiefs over whether we should retaliate, I told him to give the order for an air strike against the offending antiaircraft batteries.

  We had previously let the Syrians know that our reconnaissance operations in support of the marines were only defensive in nature. Our marines were not adversaries in the conflict, and any offensive act directed against them would be replied to. The following morning, more than two dozen navy aircraft carried out the mission. One crewman was killed and another captured by the Syrians. Our planes subsequently took out almost a dozen Syrian antiaircraft and missile-launching sites, a radar installation, and an ammo dump. When the Syrians fired again at one of our reconnaissance aircraft, I gave the order to fire the sixteen-inch guns of the battleship New Jersey on them.

  Two days later, we had a new cease-fire in Lebanon, a result, I’m sure, of the pressure of the long guns of the New Jersey—but, like almost all the other cease-fires in Beirut, it didn’t last long.

  Several weeks after the bombing at the barracks, Cap Weinberger sent me a report that he said he was planning to make public. The report blamed the barracks massacre on negligence by the marines’ commanding officers in Beirut. However, I wanted to accept full blame for the tragedy.

  I was worried about the effects the report would have on families who had lost loved ones in Beirut, and I thought how it would probably spur the press to pillory the marine commanders, who, I believed, had thought they were doing the best they could for their men under difficult conditions, and who in their own hearts had probably already suffered greatly for what had happened. So I took the full responsibility; I was the one who had sent them there.

  As 1984 began, it was becoming clearer that the Lebanese army was either unwilling or unable to end the civil war into which we had been dragged reluctantly. It was clear that the war was likely to go on for an extended period of time. As the sniping and shelling of their camp continued, I gave an order to evacuate all the marines to ships anchored off Lebanon. At the end of March, the ships of the Sixth Fleet and the marines who had fought to keep peace in Lebanon moved on to other assignments.

  We had to pull out. By then, there was no question about it: Our policy wasn’t working. We couldn’t stay there and run the risk of another suicide attack on the marines. No one wanted to commit our troops to a full-scale war in the Middle East. But we couldn’t remain in Lebanon and be in the war on a halfway basis, leaving our men vulnerable to terrorists with one hand tied behind their backs.

  We hadn’t committed the marines to Beirut in a snap decision, and we weren’t alone. France, Italy, and Britain were also part of the multinational force, and we all thought it was a good plan. And for a while, as I’ve said, it had been working.

  I’m not sure how we could have anticipated the catastrophe at the marine barracks. Perhaps we didn’t appreciate fully enough the depth of the hatred and the complexity of the problems that make the Middle East such a jungle. Perhaps the idea of a suicide car bomber committing mass murder to gain instant entry to Paradise was so foreign to our own values and consciousness that it did not create in us the concern for the marines’ safety that it should have. Perhaps we should have anticipated that members of the Lebanese military whom we were trying to assist would simply lay down their arms and refuse to fight their own countrymen. In any case, the sending of the marin
es to Beirut was the source of my greatest regret and my greatest sorrow as president.

  Every day since the death of those boys, I have prayed for them and their loved ones.

  In the months and the years that followed, our experience in Lebanon led to the adoption by the administration of a set of principles to guide America in the application of military force abroad, and I would recommend it to future presidents. The policy we adopted included these principles:

  1. The United States should not commit its forces to military action overseas unless the cause is vital to our national interest.

  2. If the decision is made to commit our forces to combat abroad, it must be done with the clear intent and support needed to win. It should not be a halfway or tentative commitment, and there must be clearly defined and realistic objectives.

  3. Before we commit our troops to combat, there must be reasonable assurance that the cause we are fighting for and the actions we take will have the support of the American people and Congress. (We all felt that the Vietnam War had turned into such a tragedy because military action had been undertaken without sufficient assurances that the American people were behind it.)

  4. Even after all these other tests are met, our troops should be committed to combat abroad only as a last resort, when no other choice is available.

  After the marines left Beirut, we continued a search for peace and a diplomatic solution to the problems in the Middle East. But the war in Lebanon grew even more violent, the Arab-Israeli conflict became more bitter, and the Middle East continued to be a source of problems for me and our country.

  PART FIVE

  Iran-Contra

  62

  FOR EIGHT YEARS the press called me the “Great Communicator.” Well, one of my greatest frustrations during those eight years was my inability to communicate to the American people and to Congress the seriousness of the threat we faced in Central America.

  In the early 1980s, Soviet Communism was not just another competing economic system run by people who happened to disagree with us about the merits of capitalism and free enterprise: It was a predatory system of absolute, authoritarian rule that had an insatiable appetite for expansion; it was determined to impose tyranny wherever it went, rob people of fundamental human rights, destroy democratic governments, subvert churches and labor unions, turn the courts and the press into instruments of dictatorship, forbid free elections, imprison and execute critics without charge or trial, and reward the few at the top of the monolith with the spoils of corruption and dictatorial rule. In short, it was against everything Americans have stood for for more than two hundred years.

  I wasn’t the first president concerned about conspiracies and machinations by distant powers in the western hemisphere. Since 1823, when our fifth president enunciated the Monroe Doctrine, the United States has stood firmly against interference by European nations in the affairs of the Americas.

  The Soviet Union had violated the Monroe Doctrine and gotten away with it twice, first in Cuba, then in Nicaragua. In 1959, Fidel Castro had marched into Havana to create a Soviet satellite within ninety miles of our shores. In 1962, John F. Kennedy stood up to Castro and Moscow and blocked the establishment on Cuban soil of a Soviet missile base capable of hurling nuclear weapons at the United States. Nevertheless, twenty years later, Cuba was, in effect, serving the very function that had caused President Kennedy to face off against Khrushchev: It was a de facto base, if needed, for Soviet missile submarines and aircraft capable of delivering nuclear devastation to the United States. We got confirmation of this in 1981, with the arrival in Cuban waters of a Soviet ship designed with a single purpose: to neutralize American efforts to detect Soviet missile submarines near our shores.

  I’ve always thought it was a tragic error for President Kennedy to abandon the Cuban freedom fighters during the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion. If he hadn’t done so, perhaps history would have been much different in Central America. Training of the invasion force, all Cuban refugees, had started under President Eisenhower. The master plan he had approved called for covert American forces to provide air support for the refugees against Castro’s tanks, aircraft, and heavy weapons, and to bomb the airport where his military aircraft were based, while the refugees invaded Cuba. Everything was going according to schedule—the Cuban fighting force had landed and our carriers were waiting offshore with the support aircraft—when Adlai Stevenson, our UN representative, came storming down from New York and told President Kennedy: “I have promised the United Nations that we are not going to in any way interfere in Cuba . . .”

  After the Cuban freedom fighters had already landed, an order went out to the carriers: Don’t send the planes. President Kennedy had been talked into stranding those courageous men on the beach, letting them die or be captured. The least he could have done was to let the planes come in and rescue them.

  By the time I got to the White House, Cuba was well entrenched as an advance base for furthering Soviet colonization of the Americas. It had Latin America’s largest army, billions of dollars’ worth of Soviet arms, and military training centers devoted to the exportation of Communism, terror, and revolution throughout the Caribbean and Central America, not to mention Angola, Mozambique, and Ethiopia.

  Twenty years after Castro’s victory, Marxism achieved its second triumph in the New World: the Sandinista takeover of Nicaragua. Dictator Anastasio Somoza was brought down by a coalition of Nicaraguans unhappy with his despotic reign; then, as soon as he stepped down, the Sandinistas, the best organized of the groups, moved in and stole the revolution.

  Previously, the Nicaraguan rebels had asked the Organization of American States to ask Somoza to step down to end the civil war and the killing. The OAS had asked the rebels what their goals were. Their answer: self-determination for the Nicaraguan people, free elections, free trade unions, a free press, and a constitution patterned after that of the United States. But as soon as Somoza was gone, the Sandinistas imposed rigid military rule and ousted the leaders of the other factions that had fought with them in the revolution—and they announced that their revolution wouldn’t stop at Nicaragua’s borders.

  Now the Soviets had a second satellite in the Americas. If we didn’t already have enough proof of their intentions, we captured secret papers on Grenada that documented how the USSR and Cuba were acting in concert to make the Caribbean a Communist lake.

  Why did I believe Americans should be concerned by this? Putting aside the Monroe Doctrine and the fact that Americans have always accepted a special responsibility to help others achieve and preserve the democratic freedoms we enjoy, there were reasons of national self-interest that made the events in Central America worth worrying about: Almost half of U.S. exports and imports, including close to half of our essential petroleum imports, traveled through this region. Two out of three ships transiting the Panama Canal carried goods to or from the U.S. Central America was not only a source of imports, but a customer for our products. There was the security of our borders to think about, and the question of our economy’s ability to absorb an endless flow of refugees: If Communism prevailed in Latin America, it would end any hope of achieving the social and economic progress needed to bring prosperity to the region; and this would accelerate the flow of illegal immigrants who, propelled by poverty, were already overwhelming welfare agencies and schools in some parts of our nation. There was another reason for us to have concern: Under Castro, Cuba had become not only a satellite of Moscow but a potential jumping off spot for terrorists directed by his cohort and fellow Soviet client, Colonel Qaddafi.

  If the Soviet Union and its allies were allowed to continue subverting democracy with terrorism and fomenting so-called “wars of national liberation” in Central America, it wouldn’t stop there: It would spread into the continent of South America and north to Mexico. Then, as I was told that Lenin once said: “Once we have Latin America, we won’t have to take the United States, the last bastion of capitalism, because it will fall into our o
utstretched hands like overripe fruit. . .”

  During my first few months in the White House, as I’ve mentioned, our intelligence experts obtained conclusive proof that the Sandinistas were receiving an ever-increasing flow of Soviet and Cuban money and arms, and were in turn supporting guerrillas in El Salvador as well as infiltrating Honduras, Guatemala, and Costa Rica. In late 1981, I authorized Bill Casey to undertake a program of covert operations aimed at cutting the flow of arms to Nicaragua and other Central American countries.

  It was obvious that poverty, social inequities, and abuses of human rights would make Latin American countries ripe for revolution from the left or the right. It would take more than our limited covert operation to hold back the tide: The region’s future was wavering between Marxism on the one hand and dictatorial rule by the extreme right on the other. The only long-term solution was economic development of these countries, a better standard of living for their people, democratic rule, and more social justice.

  In the past, the United States had spent a lot of money on programs aimed at improving the lot of its Latin neighbors, with little success: Our programs had done very little to stimulate entrepreneurship or broaden economic opportunity for the common people. According to one study by the administration, the U.S. provided more than half the funding for the governments of Central America. But we were seeing scant return where it would have counted most: in economic development.

  In early 1982, we launched the Caribbean Basin Initiative. Through tax incentives for investments in the region, direct financial aid, technical assistance, reduced trade restrictions, and other steps, we hoped to help our neighbors south of the border help themselves. At about the same time, through quiet diplomacy, I made overtures to Fidel Castro to encourage him to rejoin the orbit of the western hemisphere. I thought Cuba’s deepening economic problems and the lure of U.S. trade might persuade him to come over to our side. But he told my emissary, General Vernon Walters, that he wasn’t interested—and he continued bankrolling guerrillas in the region.