From Colony to Superpower: U.S. Foreign Relations Since 1776 (142 page)

Reagan's diplomacy was at its worst in the Middle East. United States policies lacked clear direction and purpose. They were often naive in conception and amateurish in execution. They veered between intervention and abstention. Designed on occasion to demonstrate America's toughness, they frequently underscored its weakness. The best that can be said is that the administration had the good sense—belatedly—to disentangle from a hopeless mess in Lebanon and to avoid rash actions elsewhere.

The tone was established at the outset. More divided on the Middle East than on any other issue, U.S. officials could not agree where to go with the Camp David peace process inherited from Carter. They therefore decided to put the Arab-Israeli dispute on hold. A "Hollywood pool-side Zionist," in the words of David Schoenbaum, Reagan had long admired Israel's steadfast defense of its sovereignty. As an actor and rising politician, he had supported fair treatment of Jews. He had also become a spokesperson for an emerging group of zealously pro-Israel evangelical Christians. Thus, not surprisingly, the administration set out to revive the special relationship with Israel and repair the damage done by Carter's alleged evenhandedness. But its main concern in the Middle East, as elsewhere, was the Soviet Union. In the words of a top State Department official, the Arab-Israeli conflict should be put in a "strategic framework that recognizes and is responsible to the
larger threat
of Soviet expansionism." Ignoring the messy realities of Middle Eastern politics, Reagan officials reasoned that since Israel, Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia were all friends of the United States, they could be united in a "strategic consensus" to check Soviet advances in a vital region.
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The scheme was doomed to fail. The administration's proposed sale of advanced AWAC aircraft to Saudi Arabia to help defend against Iran and Iraq unleashed the full fury of the Israel lobby. Only after a prolonged and at times nasty debate did the Senate in late October approve the sale by a mere two votes. To appease Israel, the administration offered a memorandum of understanding providing for large U.S. purchases of Israeli products, joint military exercises, and "readiness activities." These moves antagonized the Arabs. In June 1981, Israeli jets bombed Iraq's
Osiraq nuclear installation, a step that U.S. officials may have secretly applauded and even abetted but that had been taken without consultation and thus aroused concern about the consequences of Israeli independence. More seriously, despite U.S. appeals for restraint, Israel in December annexed the Golan Heights, an area it deemed essential to defend against Syria. The administration responded by rescinding the memorandum of understanding and shutting off military aid. "What kind of talk is this—'penalizing' Israel?" Prime Minister Menachem Begin snarled. "Are we a banana republic?" Begin answered his own question six months later, again over U.S. protests, by invading Lebanon. "Boy, that guy makes it hard for you to be his friend," a befuddled Reagan moaned.
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By then, U.S.-Israeli relations were as strained as at any time in years. America's Arab friends held it responsible for Israeli aggression. The strategic consensus collapsed amidst Middle Eastern recriminations. By late 1982, the administration was moving back toward the Camp David Accords.

A crisis in Lebanon thwarted any new initiatives. Using a terrorist assassination attempt against its ambassador to Britain as the pretext for a move it had long been considering, Israel in June 1982 invaded neighboring Lebanon to eliminate Syrian influence, strike a "knockout blow" against Yasser Arafat's Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) based there, and establish a friendly Christian government. The attack came during a lull in terrorist activities and at a time when the threat to Israel had eased. It brought worldwide condemnation. The reaction was even more hostile when Israeli units drove into Beirut, igniting the powder keg of hatreds that was Lebanon. What Israel had hoped would be a quick and decisive strike became a quagmire, a modern nation with the most up-to-date military hardware combating fifteen thousand guerrillas in a city of one half million people in a war it could not win.
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Lebanon became for the United States, in the words of Reagan biographer Lou Cannon, a "case study of foreign policy calamity," a "catastrophe born of good intentions."
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If it had not given Israel the go-ahead, the administration had at least left the light blinking a bright yellow. In the aftermath, reading from note cards, a coolly detached Reagan could do little more than scold an unrepentant Begin. To make the best of a bad situation, a deeply divided administration, without careful analysis or preparation, more or less adopted Israel's goals as its own, seeking to use the invasion to
get Soviet-backed Syria out of Lebanon, weaken the PLO, make Lebanon genuinely independent, and persuade it to sign a peace treaty with Israel. The United States staunchly backed the efforts of Amin Gemayel to establish an independent Lebanese government. For the first time Reagan got tough with Begin, insisting that Israel stop bombing the Palestinians while they were withdrawing. "Menachem, this is a holocaust," he berated the Israeli leader. "Mr. President, I think I know what a holocaust is," Begin sarcastically retorted.
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At the urging of new secretary of state George Shultz and over the vigorous objections of Weinberger and the military, Reagan, without a clear idea what they were to accomplish or how they would go about it, agreed in July 1982 to send a detachment of eight hundred U.S. Marines to join a multinational peacekeeping force in Lebanon.

"Lebanon is a harsh teacher," Middle East expert William Quandt has written. "Those who try to ignore its harsh realities . . . usually end up paying a high price."
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As many as twenty-five armed factions waged unrelenting war with each other in a country made up of a bewildering array of political, religious, and ethnic groups: Maronite and other Christians, Sunni and Shiite Muslims, fierce Druze mountain tribesmen, an offshoot of the Shi'as, seventeen different sects in all. Arrival of U.S. forces in August 1982 was followed by a deceptive calm, but the country soon exploded. Israel sent Christian militia into West Beirut to root out remaining elements of the PLO, causing a bloody massacre of a thousand Palestinians that further destabilized Lebanon, drew widespread international criticism, and discredited both Israel and the United States. Supporting the ineffectual Gemayel plunged the United States into the middle of a hopelessly complicated civil war. In April 1983, a terrorist bomb blew up the U.S. embassy in Beirut, killing seventeen Americans. The United States responded with air attacks and naval bombardment against locations suspected of harboring terrorists. Withdrawn to their ships after their apparent initial success and then sent back into the maelstrom, the marines, now 1,400 strong, found themselves in the late summer of 1983 hunkered down in the midst of intense and hopelessly confused fighting in Beirut. In the early morning hours of October 23, 1983, a truck bomb with the explosive force of twelve thousand tons of TNT, the largest non-nuclear blast to this time, destroyed marine headquarters, killing 241 of its sleeping occupants. The normally buoyant Reagan recalled it as the "saddest day of my presidency, perhaps the saddest day of my life."
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The bloody Sunday in Beirut ended the Lebanon intervention. Critical of the operation from the start, Weinberger and U.S. military leaders pushed for immediate evacuation of the marines. Shultz urged that they stay, and Reagan was reluctant to be pushed out. The administration thus set out to extricate them without losing face. It skillfully used the contemporaneous and successful invasion of tiny Grenada in the Caribbean to distract attention from the humiliation and grief of Beirut. But as the Lebanese army collapsed and pressures at home mounted for withdrawal, U.S. officials had little choice but to liquidate an ill-conceived venture. In February 1984, the marines were "redeployed" to their ships. Spokespersons now downplayed the importance of a country to which just recently they had attached the greatest significance. The United States had stuck "its hand into a thousand-year-old hornet's nest with the expectation that our mere presence might pacify the hornets," Army Col. Colin Powell, a top military adviser to Weinberger, later recalled.
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Powell and his boss immediately set out to prevent such deployments in the future. Over the next year, the two of them crafted a long list of conditions under which U.S. forces should be deployed. What came to be called the Weinberger or Powell Doctrine was an immediate response to the debacle in Lebanon and also to the secretary of defense's nasty, ongoing feud with Shultz over the commitment of military forces abroad. Weinberger later conceded that it also reflected the "terrible mistake" of sending forces to Vietnam without ensuring popular support and providing them the means to win. Made public in late 1984, the "doctrine" provided that U.S. troops must be committed only as a last resort and if it was in the national interest. Objectives must be clearly defined and attainable. Public support must be assured, and the means provided to ensure victory. The doctrine provoked a bloody fight within the Reagan administration—Shultz labeled it the "Vietnam Syndrome in spades." It was never given official sanction. But top military officers staunchly supported it, and as Joint Chiefs chairman in the 1990s Powell would fight vigorously for the application of what had become a doctrine bearing his name.
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The U.S. withdrawal left Lebanon more conflict-ridden than ever. Driven out of Beirut, the PLO scattered across the Middle East, and Arafat's position was badly damaged. The Israeli government was torn by internal crisis. Peace seemed more remote than before its ill-fated invasion.

Libya and its mercurial leader, Muammar el-Qaddafi, proved yet another headache for the United States. A devout Muslim, passionately anti-colonial, the colonel had seized power in a 1969 coup that eliminated a pro-Western regime. Qaddafi entertained Nasser-like visions of leading the Arab world in triumph against the West; he had decidedly un-Nasser-like dreams of restoring Islamic fundamentalism. He closed down U.S. and British military bases, accepted Soviet aid, nationalized foreign holdings, and used oil revenues to finance terrorism and revolution. An inveterate foe of Israel, he supported Arab extremists in Syria and opposed moderates friendly to the United States in Egypt and Jordan. He also subverted his African neighbors Chad, Sudan, and Niger. By the mid-1970s, the colonel had moved to the top of America's enemies list. In 1980, Carter broke diplomatic relations.
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Because Qaddafi took special delight in tweaking the American eagle's beak, the Reagan administration became obsessed with him. Haig labeled him a "cancer that had to be cut out," Reagan a "mad dog." The administration also saw his provocations as a pretext to demonstrate that the United States would no longer be pushed around.

In 1981, it took steps to housebreak the mad dog. The navy conducted "training exercises" in the Gulf of Sidra to challenge Qaddafi's claim to a 120-mile "Zone of Death" off Libyan shores. When Libyan planes attacked U.S. jets, the Americans, to the president's delight, shot them down. Qaddafi retaliated by widening his terrorist attacks. In response to intelligence reports of Libyan death threats against Reagan and other U.S. officials, some of them of dubious reliability, the administration prepared for military retaliation. A top-secret task force searched for ways to get rid of Qaddafi without violating restrictions against assassination of foreign leaders. It ordered all Americans out of Libya. In February 1982, the United States stopped purchasing Libyan oil.

The linkage of Qaddafi with international terrorism in Reagan's second term furnished the excuse for action long on the drawing board. Terrorism traditionally has been the weapon of the weak. The use of violence to further political aims, with innocent civilians often the victims, had roots as deep as humankind. The growing frustration of Arabs and especially Palestinians after the Six-Day War brought terrorism full force to the Middle East. Its proliferation in the 1970s elevated it to the top of U.S. foreign policy concerns.
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Reagan vowed "swift and effective retribution" against terrorists but found himself handcuffed in doing anything. The administration had been embarrassed by the way terrorists had driven it from Lebanon, and seven Americans were held captive there after the withdrawal. In June 1985, a TWA flight was hijacked, and in the full glare of publicity thirty-nine Americans were held captive for seventeen days. During the Christmas holidays, terrorists exploded bombs in airports in Rome and Vienna, killing five Americans. Reagan was stunned by the December attacks. Libya was a handy target. The smoking gun came in the form of intelligence linking Qaddafi to the December 1985 bombing of a West German discotheque in which one GI was killed, fifty injured.
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