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ANALYSIS
Iraq: The ghost of Lebanon
past
By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON -
"What I saw from my perch in the Pentagon," wrote Colin
Powell, a major general in 1982, in his memoirs about
Washington's brief but disastrous sojourn in Lebanon 20
years ago, "was America sticking its hand into a
thousand-year-old hornet's nest."
That memory
undoubtedly fuels Powell's determination to fight off
hardliners in the administration of President George W
Bush who are equally determined to attack and occupy
Iraq, even without United Nations or allied support, if
necessary.
As pointed out recently by military
analyst William Arkin in the Los Angeles Times, what
happened in Lebanon 20 years ago may tell us a lot about
the hopes, fears and delusions of US policymakers about
what could happen in Iraq. Indeed, many of the people
who applauded Israel's invasion of Lebanon in June 1982
and deplored the Reagan administration's decision to
withdraw US peacekeepers after a series of deadly
terrorist attacks are now arguing for an invasion of
Iraq, and for many of the same reasons.
As today
with Baghdad, they argued then that the road to peace in
the Middle East ran through Beirut, and that, working
together, Israeli and US military power could
permanently alter the political balance of power in the
entire Middle East in favor of the West.
The
story is straightforward. Seizing on the attempted
assassination of its ambassador to London by anti-PLO
Abu Nidal gunmen, Israel's Likud government launched an
invasion of Lebanon aimed at destroying the Palestine
Liberation Organization (PLO) presence there once and
for all.
Prominent US neo-conservatives hailed
the invasion, noting in language that is strikingly
similar to that used today about Iraq that the end of
the PLO and the installation of a pro-Western government
in Beirut would transform the Middle East by dealing a
fatal blow to Arab "rejectionists" such as Syria, Iraq
and Saudi Arabia.
"'Liberation' is a word that
has been much abused in recent years," wrote William
Safire, a New York Times columnist and today a leading
hawk on Iraq. "But liberation, not invasion, is what is
taking place in Lebanon today."
Initially,
Safire's observation appeared correct. Greeted with
flowers and celebration by the largely Shi'ite Muslim
population of southern Lebanon, Israeli forces under
defense minister (now prime minister) Ariel Sharon,
routed PLO and Syrian resistance and swept north in a
matter of days to the outskirts of West Beirut. They
laid siege to the city until US Marines and other NATO
forces evacuated Arafat and thousands of Palestinian
guerrillas to Tunis and other destinations scattered
around the Arab world.
The Reagan
administration, already committed to a "strategic
alliance" with Israel, winked at the invasion. It
believed that the PLO's removal from Lebanon and the
establishment of a stable, pro-US government opened up
great possibilities, including the withdrawal of Syrian
troops from Lebanon, the signing of a peace treaty
between Israel and Lebanon, and a final Arab-Israeli
peace accord based on the acceptance by non-PLO
Palestinians of autonomy "in association with Jordan" in
exchange for a permanent freeze on Israeli settlements
in the occupied territories.
But none of that
was to be. US, British, French and Italian troops
returned to Beirut almost immediately after the massacre
of hundreds of unarmed Palestinians in Sabra and Shatila
refugee camps by Israeli-backed Christian militia in
mid-September 1982 to keep the peace and help the new
president, Amin Gemayel, consolidate and expand the
central government's authority.
The latter
mission provoked hostility and, eventually, violence by
religious, political and ethnic factions opposed to the
Maronite-dominated government, proving the wisdom of
Lebanese historian Kamal Salih's injunction that "great
powers should not get involved in the politics of small
tribes".
Anti-government militias began shooting
at the Marines, provoking shelling by US battleships
off-shore, which in turn only intensified the
determination of the opposition to evict the Americans.
In April 1983, Hizbollah suicide bombers blew up the US
embassy in Beirut. Six months later, 241 Marines died in
the truck bombing of the airport barracks. Nonetheless,
pro-Likud neo-conservatives called on the Reagan
administration to hold on, mocking the growing warnings
in Congress that Lebanon was turning into a Vietnam.
"There will be no decade-long war of attrition
in a tropical jungle against a unified enemy with a long
history of successful anti-colonial struggle," argued
the Washington Post's Charles Krauthammer, today a
leading Iraq hawk. "In Lebanon everything is different:
the terrain, the players, the tactics, the goals and the
intentions of American leaders."
But three
months later, the last Marines boarded amphibious craft
to sail for home, even as the fleet was still pounding
enemy targets in the hills. Left behind were a Lebanese
army crippled by factional loyalties and desertions, a
moribund peace treaty between Lebanon and Israel, and
rising resistance against Israeli troops in southern
Lebanon by the same Shi'ite population that had greeted
them with such enthusiasm less than two years before.
The political post-mortems were predictable. The
hawks claimed that there had been a "failure of will" on
the part of Congress and the administration, as in
Vietnam. The administration was bitterly divided, with
the Pentagon complaining about deploying the military in
poorly defined, open-ended political missions and the
State Department siding with the hawks in a curious
reversal of the present debate over Iraq.
President Jimmy Carter's national security
adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, wrote that the entire
enterprise was misconceived in that the administration,
with very little appreciation for local realities, had
permitted itself to become "a proxy of Israeli foreign
policy" in Lebanon and a patsy for Likud's aim of
diverting international attention to Lebanon and away
from Israeli's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza.
"The more militant [Likud] leaders bent on
incorporating the West Bank into Israel certainly
welcome developments that have the effect of making the
United States a direct military antagonist of the
Arabs," Brzezinski complained in the Times in an
argument that he has made more recently with regard to
invading Iraq.
Of course, today's hawks reject
any notion the challenges faced by the United States in
a US-occupied Iraq are anything like those of Lebanon 20
years ago. The size and mandate of the mission in Iraq
will be nothing like Lebanon, and, of course, the Soviet
Union is not around to act as a possible constraint on
US freedom of action.
Washington will no longer
rely on giant artillery shells to quell resistance
either, but will have "smart bombs", helicopter gunships
and special forces, not to mention much more aggressive
rules of engagement.
And, as the hawks never
tire of repeating, US forces are likely to be welcomed
with flowers and celebrations by ethnic, political and
religious minorities that have suffered enormously under
Saddam Hussein - just like the Israelis were received by
the Shi'ites in southern Lebanon 21 years ago.
(Inter Press Service)
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