Posing the Right Question

So urgent were the portents of the civil war in Lebanon that cries of panic and defeat resounded throughout the West, increased by hints of "volunteers'' from the East. Headlines, further exaggerating newspapers' excited stories, spoke of tanks, planes and troops locked in "raging" battle for Lebanon and the whole Arab world. Wherever diplomats drank, voices were heard forecasting that the West was headed for a second Suez, and demanding to know when the West was going to face up to Nasser. U.S. Senator John Kennedy declared that the U.S. stood on the brink of war, while Columnist Joe Alsop cried that another Munich was in the offing. Some argued that it would be madness to send in Western forces to save President Chamoun's regime in Lebanon; others said it would be fatal cowardice not to.

The alarms were real: the West could indeed lose its oldest and most strategic lodgment point in the Arab Middle East, and defeat there would make precarious the fortunes of those Arab leaders in Iraq and Jordan who had identified themselves with the West. The question was not whether the survival of Lebanon is important; it is. The question was how best to save it from the double-headed threat of Nasserism and Communism, both working against the West, though not necessarily for common ends.* To force Lebanon into a choice of who is for Chamoun, v. who is for Nasser would be to force many who did not want to be for Nasser into choosing Arab nationalism over a too heavy dependence on the West. The better way for the West to put the question was: Who is for an independent and stable Lebanon? That way, those who answered aye would include many of the rebels who are in arms against the Chamoun regime.

The urgent problem of Lebanon had indeed been aggravated by the shrill symphony of hate orchestrated from Radio Cairo, and the rebels had been mischievously bolstered by arms and men smuggled in from Nasser's Syria, but the solution to most of Lebanon's troubles was still to be found inside its own border.

* At this particular tense juncture of the Kremlin's hue and cry against Yugoslavia, Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser last week took off in King Farouk's old yacht for a long-scheduled reunion with Marshal Tito.

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