When Compromise Is Victory

Lebanon's two-week insurrection sputtered on amid deepening bitterness and futility, and loud talk of intervention from West and East.

On the one side was President Camille Chamoun, a Christian of the Maronite Roman Catholic sect, with all the claims upon U.S. good will of a stoutly pro-Western leader who has led his little country from its Swiss-modeled neutrality at the heart of the Arab world to all-out espousal of the Eisenhower Doctrine. On the other were the rebel politicians, some of them professional Moslems who have been photographed in the forefront of practically every Arab nationalist gathering that Nasser has assembled over the last few years in Cairo. In between was Lebanon's little army, largely Christian-officered, shirking any showdown for fear that pressing any outcome other than compromise, in a community half Christian and half Moslem, would be risking the destruction of the prosperous little republic where West and Middle East meet.

Second Term. After quelling last week's only big outburst of street fighting (20 dead) in Tripoli, the army left the road open so that the leader of the Tripoli rebels could motor unmolested for coffee and peace talks with Chief of Staff Brigadier General Fuad Shehab in Beirut. But efforts to bring the warring parties to compromise came to nothing. U.S. weapons kept arriving for Chamoun's security forces, and rebel bombs kept exploding in Beirut's marketplaces, to keep shops shut and the general strike going.

From his trenched and barricaded stronghold in Beirut's Moslem quarter, ex-Premier Saeb Salam, a rebel in a yellow sport shirt, asserted that his followers were only Lebanese waging a Lebanese feud against a ''tyrant" President who planned to use the two-thirds parliamentary majority he won in last year's "rigged" elections to change the constitution so that he could stand for re-election when his six-year term expires in September.

Donning blue suit and shirt of television blue, President Chamoun called Western reporters and cameramen to his palace to repeat his charge that the rebellion was fomented from Damascus and Cairo, and to proclaim unyieldingly on the second-term issue: "I have never said I would run, and I would never say I would not run."

At this point of deadlock. TIME Correspondent Denis Fodor taxied up into the mountains to call on Rebel Leader Kamal Jumblatt, 39, hereditary chieftain of the Druses, the fiercely dissident Moslem sect who farm and feud along Lebanon's eastern border. Reported Fodor:

"Jumblatt controls 20 villages and an army of about 2,000 wool-capped tribesmen who carry grenades slung from belts and watch fobs, and shoulder Italian submachine guns as casually as hoes. Tall, thin, hawk-nosed, and dressed in slightly rumpled grey suit, Jumblatt himself is a somewhat intellectual mountaineer who studied in Paris, served as a Socialist Deputy and minister in Beirut, took up Gandhian philosophy after a visit to India in 1951, and last year walked out in disgust from Nasser's Afro-Asian Peoples' Solidarity Conference in Cairo on realizing that it was Communist-run. Chamoun's policies, he said, had caused 'the most reactionary as well as the most progressive forces' to band together in united opposition. 'We have never known such corruption. I myself lost my race for Parliament last year merely because my opponent spent more money buying votes. This situation has nothing to do with Nasser. It is entirely an internal Lebanese matter.'

Second Thoughts. As the crisis lengthened, the usefulness of all-out U.S. aid to Chamoun's regime became more and more questionable. The U.S. police gear and tanks arriving by plane and ship seemed unlikely to promote order where order finally depends on a balance between religious, social and political forces none of which is strong enough to dominate the country.

Secretary Dulles publicly supported Chamoun by saying that the Lebanese regime had "what seems to us to be serious evidence" of Nasserite interference in its affairs; but the State Department privately hoped that the Lebanese government would not press its complaint before the U.N. asking investigation of United Arab Republic subversion. Cairo, Moscow and half the Middle East press were crying "American intervention." Two of Chamoun's Moslem ministers resigned in protest at what they called a "betraying" appeal to outsiders against a fellow Arab state.

At week's end Beirut reported that Chamoun himself was showing some disposition to call off his U.N. complaint and accept a peacemaking government headed by his fellow Maronite, Army Chief Shehab. If so, the fundamental U.S. objective of maintaining an independent Lebanon, in delicate Moslem-Christian balance, would be better served than by widening the chaos. In the turbulent world of the Middle East, an ally may sometimes help its friends more by not making them too conspicuously dependent on its help.

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