Failure of a Flawed Policy

By George J. Church.

As the Marines begin pulling out, Lebanon sinks further into chaos

The Druze militiamen swarmed around a U.S.-made armored personnel carrier that had just been abandoned by a fleeing Lebanese Army brigade.

Flashing two-fingered V salutes, the Druze shouted, "Victory is ours!" To cele brate the capture of the strategic crossroads of Khalde, on the coastal highway south of Beirut, one of the militiamen fed abandoned American ammunition into the vehicle's 50-cal. machine gun and fired ear-splitting bursts into the air. A few miles offshore, the menacing shape of the U.S. battleship New Jersey glided slowly past, like a big gray cat circling a bird cage. Its 16-in. guns, which had rained devastation on Druze strongholds in the Chouf Mountains the week before, were silent now, unable to do anything about the rapidly deteriorating situation on shore. The militiamen who bothered to look at the New Jersey just laughed.

Their derision revealed more about the collapse of U.S. policy in Lebanon than did the statements that flowed out of Washington last week. Some of those assertions plumbed new depths of contradiction: Secretary of the Navy John Lehman retracted a pronouncement in less than three hours, and at one point an ashen-faced Secretary of State George Shultz appeared to quarrel with a position just voiced by President Reagan. But the essence of the situation was only too clear: after the expenditure of considerably more than $120 million, the deaths of 265 servicemen and the wounding of 134 more, the U.S. had decided to cut its losses in Lebanon. Neither by diplomacy, nor by the stationing of 1,600 Marines in a now almost surrounded encampment at Beirut airport, nor by naval gunfire had the U.S. been able to prop up the disintegrating government of Lebanese President Amin Gemayel. If that government survived at all, it would be at the sufferance of its Muslim opponents and Soviet-armed Syria. There was little left for Washington to do but announce a timetable for withdrawal of the Marines from what had become Mission Impossible. They were to be loaded onto the ships of the Sixth Fleet "within 30 days," starting last weekend.

By the time the Marines began pulling out, it was obvious that barring a series of miracles, the outcome could no longer be favorable to the U.S. As the week began, Muslim Druze militiamen shattered the 2,000-man Fourth Brigade, long touted as among the best fighting units in the Lebanese Army, in an 18-hour battle and then poured out of the Chouf Mountains onto the flat coastal strip. Bombing and strafing runs by two subsonic Hawker Hunter jet fighters, part of Gemayel's tiny air force, could not stop the Druze even momentarily. After linking up at Khalde with their allies, the Amal militia of Lebanon's dominant Shi'ite Muslim sect, the Druze drove the Fourth Brigade 3 1/2 miles south to the vicinity of Damur. The militiamen stopped there only because they were confronted by Israeli soldiers who had moved north to prevent the Muslims from getting any closer to the Israeli occupation zone south of the Awali River. Some soldiers of the Fourth Brigade fled behind Israeli lines for protection; several hundred others were evacuated by sea, leaving behind some tanks and American armored cars, Jeeps and ammunition.

Gemayel's troops had lost control of West Beirut to the Shi'ite and Druze militias in a vicious battle the week before, and the rout south of the city left his government controlling little more than Christian East Beirut. The Muslims were expected to make their next major thrust at Suq al Gharb in the mountains east of Beirut, where the Lebanese Army held a strategic position overlooking the presidential palace at Baabda, just outside the capital. Fighting did break out around Suq al Gharb and along the "green line" separating West and East Beirut, but at week's end it was indecisive.

Some U.S. officials who had been derisively calling Gemayel "the mayor of Beirut" because of his shrunken domain began referring to him still more sarcastically as "the shah of Baabda." To defend even the areas he still holds, the Christian President has left only about half the army that the U.S. helped train and equip. The melting away of the Fourth Brigade removed 2,000 of the 22,000 to 25,000 combat troops supposedly answering Gemayel's orders at the beginning of February. An additional 10,000 Muslim soldiers are staying in their barracks and refusing to fight their coreligionists.

Moreover, the Druze victory at Khalde broke all connections between the remnants of the Lebanese Army and the Marines at Beirut airport. The Marines' encampment now is ringed north, east and south by Muslim militiamen; on the west the Marines can reach the Mediterranean only by way of a narrow strip of coastal highway between Druze and Amal checkpoints (see box).

The Muslims last week watched the Marines load equipment onto ships and made no attempt to interfere. "We know they are leaving and we'll let them go quietly," said Abu Khalid, a Druze commander. But in the swirl of Lebanon's sectarian violence, the Marines were dangerously exposed. Even though the Druze and Amal leadership granted them safe passage, there remained the risk that extremists of some stripe would try to interfere with the withdrawal, either out of revenge or for political purposes of their own. No matter how orderly the pullout, it now seemed all but impossible for the Marines to turn over control of the airport to what is left of the Lebanese Army. This had been the U.S. goal only days before. Unless Gemayel chooses to ferry troops from East Beirut by helicopter, the Marines will have to abandon the airport to his Muslim foes.

The impotence of Gemayel's government needed no underlining to Christian residents of the villages south of Beirut. Thousands fled before the advancing Muslim militia into the Israeli occupation zone. Reported TIME Correspondent David Halevy: "They rolled up to the Awali River in cars and trucks of every age and description. The vehicles were crammed with children, mothers and grandmothers and piled high with blankets, mattresses, ancient refrigerators, rusty sewing machines and, here and there, a new color TV or even a Persian carpet. On a single day last week some 4,000 to 6,000 refugees crossed the Awali, rumbling over a bridge and through an Israeli checkpoint at the rate of three cars or trucks a minute from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. Most of the refugees were silent; the only consistent sound was the idling motors of hundreds of cars in long lines waiting to get on the bridge. Said a man from the village of Jiyah, who gave his name only as Simon: 'Lebanon is something that belongs only to fairy tales. I gave up. There is no Lebanon.' " Most of the refugees will settle with relatives already living behind Israeli lines.

Desperate to save his political skin and perhaps even his life, Gemayel late in the week took a step that represented still another blow to U.S. policy. He decided to scrap the agreement his government had signed with Jerusalem last May 17, calling for Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon in return for Lebanese concessions on political and security arrangements in the southern part of the country. The agreement never went into effect, because it was contingent on a simultaneous Syrian pullout from Lebanon that Damascus refused to accept. Nonetheless, the pact, achieved after heavy U.S. prodding of both sides, became a symbol to Gemayel's Muslim foes of what they saw as his subservience to Washington and Jerusalem. The U.S. and Israel stood by the agreement even after it was clearly doomed, believing that it was, at the very least, a symbolic breakthrough toward peace between Israel and its Arab neighbors.

Gemayel made no public announcement that he was scrapping the accord. He simply accepted an eight-point Saudi Arabian peace plan that includes abrogation of the May 17 pact; Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Saud al Faisal then delivered it to the Syrians. Other points called for a ceasefire, a negotiated simultaneous pullout of Israeli and Syrian forces coupled with security guarantees to Israel, and a reconstitution of Gemayel's Christian-dominated government to give a much greater share of power to his Muslim opponents.

Syria rejected the plan, and some of Gemayel's Lebanese enemies dismissed it as too little, too late. In Damascus, Druze Leader Walid Jumblatt insisted that Gemayel must not only resign but be put on trial for "crimes against the Lebanese people." On the other hand, Syria, which is helping to arm Gemayel's foes, is believed amenable to letting the President stay on, and it invited a revised plan which the Saudis proposed and conveyed to Beirut. If Gemayel does cling to office, it may be as the figurehead leader of a drastically reshaped government heavily influenced by Syria and including Muslim forces sharply hostile to the U.S.

Given the virtual collapse of the Lebanese Army, that may be the best the U.S. can now hope for. The probable alternatives are endless civil war or some form of partition of Lebanon between Syrian, Israeli, Christian and Muslim areas. Indeed, if the May 17 agreement is formally broken, Israel may withdraw its forces seven miles from the Awali to the Zahrani River, establishing to the south a semipermanent "North Bank" Israeli administration of the type it runs in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. The one Lebanese outcome that seems almost impossible to imagine is the one the U.S. desires: the emergence of a strong, moderate central government free of all foreign occupation.

The inability of the U.S. to bring that about led last week to more intramural conflict within the Reagan Administration, reflecting disagreements of officials groping for a new policy and unable to find any. "We don't know what we can do next," admitted one State Department official. Another senior diplomat grumbled that because of poor communications with Beirut, Washington is having trouble merely determining what is going on. Said he: "We're hamstrung."

On one point, the Administration did at last get its policy straight. Though Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger initially said the Marines' withdrawal might take four months, Reagan in a report to Congress at midweek set "a tentative goal of completion within 30 days." The Marines, he explained candidly, "have become a target in an area that is no longer under [Lebanese] government control." At week's end Weinberger presented to the White House a specific timetable, which Reagan approved, and the pullout was set to be completed by March 18.

Otherwise, contradictions abounded. Though the Administration long refused to endorse abrogation of the May 17 accord, by last week Reagan had evidently reconciled himself to seeing the pact scrapped. Asked point-blank at a breakfast with reporters whether he would accept discarding of the agreement "if it were necessary for the Gemayel government to survive," the President replied, "We're not a party to it, so there's no way that we should have a position one way or the other on whether it is abrogated or not. That is up to the parties involved."

But Shultz, who helped to negotiate the pact and views it as the only tangible accomplishment of his diplomacy in the Middle East, fought for it past the bitter end (see following story). Appearing before reporters hours after Reagan's breakfast retreat from the accord, the Secretary of State insisted with an unaccustomed quaver in his voice that it was a "good agreement" that should be preserved. Said Shultz: "Those who would dispense with it must bear the responsibility to find alternative formulas for Israeli withdrawal." Another State Department official made the same point, only more bluntly: "We were asked to negotiate an Israeli withdrawal, and we did it. If the Gemayel government chooses to abrogate that, then somebody else can figure out how to accomplish it. We've done our bit."

Worse confusion surrounded the extent and purpose of U.S. naval gunfire into Lebanon. During the battle for West Beirut two weeks ago, the New Jersey lobbed 290 16-in. shells, each weighing about a ton, into the hills behind the capital. Word spread that Weinberger had been "surprised and depressed" by the scale of the shelling and ordered it reduced. The Secretary of Defense was supposedly worried that so ferocious a bombardment would provoke hatred for the U.S. without changing the course of the battle and could possibly invite retaliation against the Marines hunkered down at the airport. Weinberger's aides denied the stories, but the shelling was in fact scaled down. The New Jersey's guns were silent last week, though the U.S. destroyer Claude V. Ricketts did fire several dozen rounds of 5-in. shells at Druze positions.

Why? Navy Secretary Lehman told reporters that the destroyer's salvos signified "a definite shift in emphasis. We are supporting [Gemayel's] Lebanese Armed Forces" in their battles with Muslim militia. As the White House speedily reminded Lehman, that contradicted repeated statements from Reagan that naval gunfire is supposed only to protect the Marines' encampment and other U.S. positions around Beirut, like the embassy compound, by silencing artillery and missile batteries that have fired on them. Less than three hours later, Lehman issued a six-line statement asserting that "the correct policy is ... as the President has stated."

The difference is much more than semantic. Naval gunfire to protect the Marines is allowed under a resolution that Congress passed last September authorizing the President to keep U.S. forces in Lebanon until April 1985; shelling to help Gemayel's forces win the Lebanese civil war is not. Reagan emphatically does not need any more trouble with Congress, where many Republicans as well as Democrats are grumbling that he got the U.S. into a no-win situation in Lebanon. Says G.O.P. Senator John Chafee of Rhode Island: "That shelling is terrible, completely contrary to what we stand for." Congress, however, is unlikely to do much except complain when it reconvenes this week after an eleven-day recess. Democrats are thanking their luck that they never brought to a vote resolutions mandating a pullout of the Marines, since Reagan could have then blamed them for a retreat that he later had to order on his own. Nor do they see much point in framing new resolutions that might be "overtaken by events."

Whatever the purpose, the naval bombardments had no discernible effect on the fighting onshore. "They can shell us as much as they like," said one Druze militiaman last week. "They are just using the fleet to mask the shame of having lost." The Pentagon has not produced a "battle damage assessment" disclosing just what targets have been hit by the shells. Lehman insists that American forces track the trajectory of shells and missiles striking the Marines' encampment and other targets in the Beirut area, both visually and by a shore-based electronic apparatus, and that the ships fire only at the sources of those projectiles. But Lehman concedes he "cannot guarantee" that no civilians have been killed.

In fact, some almost certainly have been. The only weapons possessed by the 100 residents of the village of Btibyat, 15 miles inland from the Mediterranean in the Chouf Mountains, are some shotguns used to hunt birds. Western correspondents visiting last week could find no signs that there had ever been artillery or missile emplacements anywhere near by. Nonetheless, on the afternoon of Feb. 8, at least eight shells so enormous that they presumably came from the New Jersey tore into Btibyat and surrounding woods, breaking nearly every window in the village, downing power lines and splintering pine trees into matchsticks. One crashed into a squat stone house, demolishing half of it and leaving the rest tilted at a crazy angle behind a crater big enough to swallow a car; it also blew down a wall of a house 18 yds. away and destroyed a car parked down the street. One villager was killed and 15 others injured. Said one man, pointing to the glass littering the floor of his house: "I haven't cleaned it up because I am too angry. Why are they doing this to us?"

In Washington the question was how to save what might be salvageable from the wreckage in Lebanon and cover the policy failure with a modicum of grace. U.S. partners in the four-country Multi-National Force (MNF) are also looking to extricate themselves from Lebanon. Britain has already withdrawn its 115-man contingent, and the 1,200 Italian troops now stationed in Beirut's southern suburbs are expected to leave within two weeks. France, eager to preserve some influence in its former mandate, for the moment is keeping 1,250 troops in Beirut proper. But Paris introduced a resolution in the United Nations Security Council calling for replacement of the MNF by a U.N. force made up of troops from nations that are not permanent members of the Council, meaning that soldiers from the U.S., the Soviet Union, Britain, France and China would be excluded. French Premier Pierre Mauroy reportedly broached the idea to new Soviet Leader Konstantin Chernenko while in Moscow for Yuri Andropov's funeral, and got the impression that the Soviets could be persuaded not to kill the plan with a Security Council veto.

Reagan promptly backed the general idea. Said the President at his breakfast with reporters: "That I would have preferred from the beginning. It was the [threat of a] Russian veto and the Russian objection that made it necessary for us to turn to something other than a U.N. force." The proposal, however, has the very considerable disadvantage of making the Western powers negotiate with the Soviets on the terms of a U.N. force's deployment, thus giving Moscow a louder direct voice in Middle Eastern politics. Initially, Richard Ovinnikov, Soviet representative on the Security Council, set conditions totally unacceptable to the U.S., and France too for that matter. Among them: the nations that sent the MNF to Lebanon must not only remove their troops but pledge implicitly never to send them back.

Whether the Soviets intended these conditions seriously, or put them forth primarily to torment the U.S. a bit before bargaining in earnest, probably will not become clear until the Security Council resumes debate this week. In any case, Shultz pointed out some other obstacles to deployment of a U.N. force. Said he: "A significant U.N. role presupposes a return of stability, a balance of forces and some measure of political accord." In other words, creation of a U.N. peace-keeping force presumes there will be a peace for it to keep, and in Lebanon that is about the shakiest assumption anyone can make.

Reagan also attempted last week to refocus attention from the immediate problem of Lebanon to his longer-range goal, negotiating a general Arab-Israeli peace based on an "association" of the Israeli-occupied West Bank and Gaza with Jordan. Reagan first welcomed Jordan's King Hussein to the White House and assured him that the pullout of the Marines from Beirut implied no weakening of U.S. support for Jordan against its unfriendly neighbor Syria. The President then invited Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, who also was in Washington, to join him and Hussein at lunch.

Afterward Reagan again called on Israel to make "an exchange of territory for peace."

Reagan's efforts did not get very far. Israel, fearful that the three heads of state were cooking up some kind of deal at its expense, was anything but reassured by Mubarak's comment at the end of the lunch. As Reagan stood by in silent disapproval, the Egyptian President called on the U.S. to deal directly with the Palestine Liberation Organization. "You can't control the statement of a departing chief of state," said one Reagan lieutenant, who judged Mubarak's statement a public relations "disaster" for Reagan.

Was the involvement in Lebanon also a disaster? In answer, Administration officials last week borrowed a line from the late Beatle John Lennon, saying again and again that they had only been trying to "give peace a chance." The U.S. attempt to create a strong, moderate, peaceful government, they said, was meant as a first step toward stability in the Middle East. And if the goal proved out of reach, well, better to fail than not to try. Said Reagan: "I don't know what we could have done differently, and our search was for peace and I think we were right in doing that. If that is to be denied, if they [the contending factions] cannot bring about that peace there, I don't have any regret about having tried. It was a legitimate effort."

True enough. But the military resources needed for such a task were well beyond what the U.S. was able or willing to commit. In the judgment of one Pentagon official, bringing enough order to Lebanon to enable formation of a true central government would have required not 1,600 Marines but 100,000 U.S. troops--and even then, the depth of sectarian hatreds, which Washington appears to have totally misjudged, might have made the task impossible.

A ghastly reminder of the intensity of those hatreds came last week when Druze militiamen escorted Western reporters and TV crews into the village of Kafr Matta, southeast of Beirut, which they had just recaptured from the Christian Phalangist militia. The badly decomposed bodies of more than 100 Druze men, women and even babies, apparently victims of a massacre five months ago, were found in houses, streets and fields. Some were grouped around tables still bearing the remnants of what had been their last meal; others were frozen in postures indicating they had been gunned down while attempting to flee. Faced with passions deep enough to have produced such grisly scenes as those, peace seems never to have had any chance at all. --By George J. Church.

Reported by Laurence I. Barrett and Johanna McGeary/Washington and John Borrell/Beirut

With reporting by Laurence I. Barrett, Johanna McGeary/Washington, John Borrell/Beirut