Delay with Diplomacy

By Marguerite Johnson

The U.S. seeks a solution to the missile confrontation in Lebanon

They stood out like glistening white beacons against the green countryside, their silver warheads gleaming lethally in the sunshine. Beside the main highway from Beirut to Damascus, a dozen of them were poised on a gentle, flower-strewn ridge that overlooks the verdant Bekaa Valley in eastern Lebanon. Farther to the north, outside the airbase at Riyaq where Israeli Phantoms shot down two Syrian helicopters two weeks ago, another dozen were perched on newly dug mounds of earth. These were Syria's Soviet-made SA-6 missiles, one of the most potent antiaircraft weapons in the Syrian armory--and the potentially explosive epicenter of a dangerous new Middle East crisis.

The Syrians made no attempt last week to camouflage the menacing new weaponry they had moved into Lebanon in support of their 22,000 peace-keeping forces in the country. Syrian President Hafez Assad was obviously defying the Israelis, insisting that the missiles were necessary for the defense of his forces and that he had no intention of removing them. With equal vehemence, Israel insisted that the presence of the missiles was an unacceptable violation of the tacitly accepted status quo in Lebanon's complex political equation and that they had to be removed. Warned Prime Minister Menachem Begin: "There are possibilities that the problem will be solved peacefully, or otherwise"--meaning, clearly, by resorting to military action.

As Syria and Israel braced for a violent showdown that could bring war to the region once again--and one, moreover, that conceivably could drag in the superpowers--the U.S. and the Soviet Union moved swiftly to restrain their respective allies. Caught in the middle, as always, battered Lebanon waited anxiously for others to settle its fate.

Frantic diplomatic efforts by the U.S. succeeded in persuading Israel to hold its fire in the dangerous, 72-hr, period after the Israelis discovered the missiles. By that time, Washington had prepared its own initiative to relieve the pressure on both Damascus and Jerusalem. U.S. Ambassador to Israel Samuel Lewis personally hand-carried a 1 1/4-page letter from President Ronald Reagan to Begin. The letter reiterated U.S. assertions that Washington wanted to pursue diplomatic avenues before military action was taken. Begin interpreted the message as a continuing sign of U.S. sympathy for Israel's position on the missiles and agreed to hold off any action for "a reasonable period." Then, last week, Begin sent a letter of his own warning Reagan that the situation was similar to the crisis that preceded the 1967 Six Day war, when Israel took preemptive military action.

In the meantime the White House dispatched Philip Habib, a widely respected career diplomat who had retired in 1978, to mediate with the various parties. Habib promptly got a firsthand view of what the argument was all about. Since Beirut Airport was still closed as a result of shellings last month, he was forced to fly to Damascus and drive to Beirut. His route, as it turned out, took him right past the missile installations along the highway. Once in the Lebanese capital, he huddled with Lebanon's President Elias Sarkis before going on to Damascus and Jerusalem for similar discussions later in the week. His orders were to do more listening than talking at first. The White House hoped that eventually he would begin to shuttle among the three capitals, trying to ease tensions.

Meanwhile, the U.S. and the Soviet Union, in a rare display of joint concern, consulted about the best way of cutting the fuse in Lebanon. Three times in nine days, Soviet Ambassador Anatoli Dobrynin called at the State Department. Moscow also dispatched its own emissary--Georgi Kornienko, First Deputy Foreign Minister --to tour the region in the same fashion as Habib. One Palestinian leader in Lebanon wryly reported that Soviet embassy officials had visited him, asking, "What do you think is going to happen? What does it mean?" He added: "They only come around when they are worried."

For the time being, both the Syrian and the Israelis held their fire. Israel was reported to be massing forces along its northern border with Lebanon and even within the "Free Lebanon" enclave south of the Litani River that is under the control of Major Sa'ad Haddad, a right-wing Christian militia leader. Lebanese officials were fearful lest Israel invade the south and attempt to destroy the Palestinian bases there.

From Damascus, the official news agency, SANA, reported that Syria was staging war games on its own territory to show that its forces were "continuously ready to confront Israel at any time." Rumors that Syria had sent some 4,000 of its peace-keeping forces south of the Beirut-Damascus highway, however, were refuted by U.N. and U.S. observers.

For all the bona fide concerns on both sides, the crisis also had some elements of a political game whose players, perhaps unwittingly, had let the stakes get out of hand. Syria, for example, could not hope to win a war with Israel. Yet there it was deploying its missiles in the most provocative fashion possible. As one British intelligence specialist observed: "It's hard to take too seriously a line of missiles drawn up as if on the playground, without any semblance of camouflage."

So what was Syria up to? One theory was that President Assad was trying to bolster his political image at home while easing his isolation in the Arab world brought about in part by his backing of non-Arab Iran in its war with Iraq. Last week the 21-nation Arab League, which originally approved Syria's presence in Lebanon to enforce the 1976 armistice in the civil war but has grown increasingly concerned about Assad's belligerence, gave the President a pledge of support in the event of war with Israel.

As for Prime Minister Begin, he may have believed he would gain by ringing the patriotic bells of crisis in the midst of his uphill campaign for reelection. Trouble was that an increasing number of Israelis last week were beginning to question whether the attack on the Syrian helicopters had not been rash. Begin's version of the attack was sharply contradicted by one of Israel's most respected military correspondents, Zeev Schiff. Begin had claimed that the helicopters were gunships shot down to "save the Christians of northern Lebanon from collapse." Schiff reported that the helicopters were in fact transporting equipment, just as Syria had claimed all along. British intelligence sources confirmed the report. Even more worrisome was the admission by an Israeli official that "we anticipated when we had to strike the choppers that the Syrians would move in the missiles."

As some Israelis fretted that the country could be dragged inadvertently into a "little Viet Nam" in Lebanon, Chaim Herzog, former Israeli Ambassador to the U.S. and a likely Cabinet choice if the Labor Party wins the June 30 election, vigorously attacked the entire Begin government's approach to the crisis. Herzog was the first major public figure to question the validity of Begin's assertion that Israel acted to prevent the Syrians from committing "genocide" against the Christians.

As the week went by, Western miltary experts wondered why the Israelis were so strenuously protesting the presence of the SA-6 missiles in the Bekaa Valley. To be sure, the SA-6 is a sophisticated missile that is effective at altitudes up to 30,000 ft., riding an electronic beam to its target that is sought out by ground-based radar. The Syrians used the missiles with deadly effect against Israeli jets during the opening days of the 1973 October War. But the U.S. had quickly rushed electronic "black boxes" to the Israelis that confounded the missiles. Still, the Israelis argued that any threat at all to its aerial reconnaissance of Palestinian strongholds and activities in Lebanon was insupportable.

An intriguing background issue to the dispute was whether or not the presence of the SA-6s violated a so-called red line agreement worked out by Israel and the U.S. about the deployment of forces in Lebanon. Syria took no part in the discussion and, understandably, denies that it has any bearing on its conduct. Begin also denies the existence of a red line, but former Israeli Ambassador to the U.S. Simcha Dinitz told TIME last week that he and Yigal Allon, then Israel's Foreign Minister, had negotiated its terms with then Secretary of State Henry Kissinger.

According to Dinitz, Syria was to have no more than one infantry brigade south of a line between Beirut and Damascus, to engage in no naval operations on the Lebanese coast or air activity against Syrian opponents, and to deploy no missiles in Lebanon. Helicopters were not mentioned. Dinitz added that it was left up to the U.S. to convey the terms to Syria. "Since it was not a formal agreement with the Syrians," Dinitz added, "there was no indication from them of consent to it. But we made it clear that we would not tolerate any breach of those terms." By this account, it would appear that Syria had not violated Israel's own red line when it used helicopters in Lebanon. Once the helicopters were shot down, the Syrians moved in the missiles and the crisis grew.

At week's end Habib declined to make any comment on his exhaustive round of talks except to note that the situation was still "dangerous." Even as sporadic explosions echoed throughout war-torn Beirut, Habib met with Christian Leaders Pierre and Bashir Gemayel, Walid Jumblatt, head of the leftist alliance, and former President Camille Chamoun, titular head of the right-wing Lebanese Front. The two groups have had an uneasy relationship since the end of the civil war between them in 1976. The talks were regarded as a sign that the U.S. intended to involve itself not only in the current missile standoff between Syria and Israel but in Lebanon's own agonizing internal situation as well. It was a crisis that had gone on far too long, and far too dangerously.

-- By Marguerite Johnson.

Reported by David Aikman/ Jerusalem and William Stewart/Beirut

With reporting by DAVID AIKMAN, William Stewart

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