The Answer Is Independence

During Dag Hammarskjold's swift peacemaking mission to the Middle East last week, somebody in Beirut, who knew he was coming, baked him a cake. Presented at the presidential palace, the cake bore these words: "United Nations Save Lebanon." Commented the world's No. 1 international civil servant: "Only the Lebanese can save Lebanon."

The conflict that threatened to destroy Lebanon--and to embroil the U.S.--was not exactly total war. In Beirut harbor, water skiing, yachting and bikini bathing went on unabated last week. The curfew's chief effect on the diplomatic set was to move up cocktail parties from 7 to 5, and to make luncheons more popular than dinner parties. Diners stopped rushing out for a look when bombs went off, merely glanced at their watches so that they could see which bomb it was in the newspaper next morning. Daily papers printed want ads for apartments "in the calmest quarter of Beirut," as well as the broadcast times and wave lengths for three rebel radio stations that had sprung up.

Using the Phone. Yet, in this odd, disorganized and sporadic little war, which had too many undisciplined young volunteers wandering the streets, Lebanese had died in considerable numbers--an estimated 1,400 since the troubles began on May 9. The rebel opposition held out not only in large chunks of the countryside but in the Moslem quarters of Beirut and Tripoli, where their leaders tapped their telephone wires into neighbors' lines and regularly negotiated cease-fires with government forces by telephone. In Tripoli, most Moslem of Lebanese cities, after the week's roughest scrap (eight dead), the rebels as usual phoned a hospital in the government area to ask for an ambulance to fetch the wounded.

Hammarskjold had brought his group of 94 U.N. observers in white jeeps to the Lebanese border country because the Lebanese government had complained of "massive" infiltration and gunrunning from the United Arab Republic. Last week, after visiting Cairo and making a strong pitch to Nasser to use his influence with the rebels to calm the situation, Hammarskjold said that he was "optimistic" that his thin line of border watchers could eventually put a stop to meddling from the Syrian side.

More important, Hammarskjold seems to have concluded that the U.A.R.'s undoubted tampering with trouble was not so critical a factor in the Lebanese deadlock as the Lebanese government claimed. "The Observation Group believes," said his U.N. group's first report from Beirut, "that the progressive implementation of its mandate will contribute greatly to the creation within Lebanon of conditions which will make possible the solution by the Lebanese people themselves of the internal problems which face the country at the present time."

Upsetting the Balance. From the outset, one man inside the country has insisted on turning Lebanon's internal troubles into an international crisis--President Camille Chamoun. The country he presides over became independent in 1946, after 400 years of Ottoman Turkish rule and 26 years of French control. By a compact of mutual racial and religious coexistence, its Maronite Roman Catholics, Sunni Moslems, Shiite Moslems, Druses, Greek Orthodox, Armenians and Jews undertook to live together in peace and order. By keeping that compact of compromise, Lebanon won a prosperity, stability and influence that filled the little country with banks, universities and nightclubs, and made it a mercantile and cultural meeting place for the Arabs and the West unique in the Middle East.

Chamoun upset this traditional balance at a time when Nasser was launching his drive for one united Arab nation under Nasser's own thumb. Chamoun abandoned Lebanon's traditionally neutral foreign policy for a close alignment with the West, though several key Moslem leaders resigned from his Cabinet over his action. A few months later Chamoun piled up a three-fourths majority in Parliament. The elections were corrupt -- though, in fairness to Chamoun, not for the first time. Feeling ran high in Beirut, where eight died in pre-election rioting.

Early this year Chamoun's friends prepared to use his three-fourths majority to ram through a constitutional amendment that would permit him to stand for a second presidential term. In the outraged eyes of his opponents, both Christian as well as Moslem, Chamoun was trying to use U.S. support to further his political ambitions. When fighting broke out in May, Chamoun at once shouted for Western help.

Nerves at Night. A friend of the U.S. was in danger. He pleaded that his troubles stemmed largely from signing the Eisenhower Doctrine. To be sure, the Eisenhower Doctrine might not technically apply (the U.S. pledged itself to go to the rescue of any Middle East nation threatened by a "country dominated by international Communism," which is not fully provable in Syria's case) ; but as Chamoun knew, the real issue would be whether the U.S. stood by its friends. After wrestling briefly with its misgivings, the U.S. told Chamoun that if 1) U.S. lives and property were endangered; 2) his own forces had been fully committed without avail; 3) the U.N. had tried to help and failed, and 4) he then appealed once again to the U.N., then the U.S. would back him with troops. With that pledge in his pocket, Chamoun took his stand.

His stand was to do nothing, brushing aside all suggestions of compromise and waiting for international intervention to unfold. Mornings he was cocky and confident, but as the crisis continues, his nerves seem to fray later in the day, and by evening he is eager to send for the U.S. Sixth Fleet. The U.S. has sent ammunition within 36 hours after he has requested it, and has expedited tank shipments. It has supported him at the U.N. The arms have not been used. Chamoun has taken no decisive action to smash a single rebel enclave. When asked last week why the army does not at least clean out the flimsy barricades in Beirut's Moslem quarter, the President ducked lamely: "I wish I had more military background."

Tribal & Local. After two months of civil war, he still refuses to say that he will not seek reelection, points only to his Premier's statement of last May that his government will not press this goal. "Since the crisis began," says a Beirut observer, "Chamoun has not said one word to his people. He talks only to foreign diplomats and foreign newsmen." He has declined to call Parliament into session; he has rejected repeated rebel -- and third force -- offers to compromise. He insisted last week that he has "a substantial majority in the country."

But, in his drive for political dominance, he has alienated far more than the fanatical Nasser lovers. Last week ex-Foreign Ministry Secretary Fuad Ammoun, a Christian, claimed that six of Lebanon's eight political parties, all the religious leaders, all the former Presidents, Premiers, Foreign Ministers and Speakers of Parliament have taken a stand against the Chamoun regime. Anger at Chamoun is the only single force that unites the divided rebel leadership, much of which is tribal and local and asserts its authority now largely because the government does not or cannot. Many leaders of the Moslem Arabs themselves are politicians used to playing Lebanese politics according to the rules that Chamoun has tried to change, and are by no means eager to submerge themselves, and the economic advantages of being Lebanese, into Nasser's economically desperate empire.

The fact that neither side has shown the willingness or ability to go all out, the fact that the real-estate holding of every faction has remained fairly constant since the rebellion's beginning, are signs of an urge to compromise. But the U.S. has yet to persuade Chamoun that he is not free simply to press the panic button in order to have the U.S. Marines rescue his political career (his term expires Sept. 23). If he learned that the U.S. was committed to the integrity, independence and sovereignty of Lebanon rather than to his own political fortunes, then a way might be found to end an inconclusive war that now serves only to benefit the hopeful heirs to anarchy and agitation, the Nasserites and the Communists.

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