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Mideast Peace Or Wider War

Mideast Peace Or Wider War image Mideast Peace Or Wider War image
Parent Issue
Day
29
Month
July
Year
1976
OCR Text

Is There Hope for Lebanon? 

by Russ Steeler

State Department trouble-shooter L. Dean Brown started off his Monday morning two weeks ago at the grim funeral of the recently assassinated U.S. ambassador to Lebanon. Next on his day's agenda was another found of Congressional testimony, this time before the Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee on the Near East.

Brown was the envoy Presidents Nixon and Ford had sent to the Middle East in the midst of two major crises: "Black September" 1970, when King Hussein of Jordan launched a bloody crackdown on the Palestinian guerrillas in his country; and again this spring, as the Palestinians became the focus of another civil war -- this time in Lebanon.

When Brown reached Capitol Hill that Monday morning, he faced an equally thankless task: that of telling Congress why an American ambassador had been slain, and then justifying what appeared to many observers as a "do-nothing"policy toward Lebanon on the part of the Ford administration.

What Brown told the senators was seemingly straightforward. "The United States has no direct role to play," he testified. "Perhaps all the U.S. can offer now is sympathy."

His explanation was deceptively simple: "The institutions in Lebanon have cracked under the strain of the last eleven months and are probably destroyed forever ... Unless there is a general Middle Eastern settlement, there is hardly any hope for Lebanon."

Brown's final evaluation, tying Lebanon's fate to the resolution of the Arab-Israeli conflict, was classic Kissinger diplomacy. Secretary of State Kissinger's  favorite concept is linkage, and U.S. policy in Lebanon is a case study in its application.

According to this perspective, any crisis anywhere in the Mideast - the Lebanese civil war, Israel's policies in occupied 'Arab lands, or the emergence of guerrillas in the tiny Persian Gulf sultanate of Oman - must  be viewed against the backdrop of wider U.S. interests in the region: domination of strategic waterways like the Suez Canal; friendly access to the vast markets for U.S. military hardware; and predominant influence in the oil-rich states, which are particularly vital to the energy needs of U.S. allies in Western Europe and Japan.

Kissinger's doctrine of linkage has put the Lebanon problem in a whole new light. The basic conflict behind the civil war has been around for over twenty years. A French-run mandate territory between the world wars, Lebanon gained independence in 1943. A national covenant at the time accorded permanent political dominance to the pro-Western Christian communities around Beirut. The last official census - in the 1930's - gave the Christians a slender majority, but the covenant established a permanent Christian majority in the Parliament and decreed that the country's president and top general wouk be Christians.

Ironically, the creation of Israel in 1948 saved Lebanon from economic oblivion. The country's main asset was its ports on the Mediterranean, and their cargo tonnage increased dramtically when the Arab boycott of Israel rerouted goods which had passed through the ports of Palestine in the days of the British mandate there. Lebanon prospered through its ports, became a banking and Communications center of the Middle East, and avoided squandering resources on arms by pursuing an effectively neutral policy in the Arab-Israeli conflict.

In the 1950's, nationalism swept the Arab world. Pro-Western kings were deposed in Egypt and Iraq and threatened in Jordan and Saudi Arabia. Army officers espousing vague socialist doctrines took power in several countries. And Lebanon's Moslem population-with a higher birth-rate than its Christians-claimed majority status, demanding a new census and a reapportioning of parliamentary seats and positions of power.

Moslem demands reached a peak in 1958, shortly after a military coup in Iraq. Lebanon's Christian president at the time, Camille Chamoun, appealed to President Eisenhower, who sent in the Marines to back Washington's allies.

Eighteen years later, Chamoun is still around. He now holds the post of Interior Minister, and he's still appealing for U.S. intervention. His political movement is among the most hard-line right-wing forces in the civil war. But this time his pleas to Washington are falling on deaf ears.

The State Department, still recalling the sobering experience of the 1973 Arab oil embargo, has apparently recognized that the exclusive U.S. allies of the fifties may be liabilities in the seventies. The pro-Western diehards of Lebanon are a minority in a land whose majority population identifies heavily with the rest of the Arab world. In addition, Washington's long-range planners may well have decided that Lebanon has outlived its economie viability.

More and more U.S. businesses have moved their headquarters out of Beirut to capitals like Cairo, Teheran, and Riyadh- where U.S. investment interests are more direct. And if Israel ever gains acceptance among its Arab neighbors- as Washington continues to hope-Lebaoon's ports will have to compete with Tel Aviv and Haifa.

The Ford administration-particularly in a post-Vietnam election year-wishes to avoid any policy smacking of interventionism in the Middle East. Thus, quietly, without fanfare, the State Department this spring has thrown its weight behind forces in the Arab world which it regards as moderate and enduring.

Surprisingly, to most observers, Syria has emerged as a key country in Washington's strategy. Feeling isolated when Egypt's President Sadat signed a separate peace with Israel in last year's Sinai disengagement pact, Syria's President Hafez Assad feared that the successful offensive of the alliance between left-wing Lebanese and Palestinians this winter would provoke Israeli intervention in southern Lebanon-opening up a corridor around the Golan Heights, and permitting Israeli tanks to threaten Damascus from the west.

Israel, in turn, warned Syria to stay out of Lebanon, but as the civil war escalated this spring Syria conveyed to Israel, through U.S. embassies in the respective countries, its decision to intervene to prevent a left-wing, pro-Palestinian victory. Some observers believe there was an explicit deal: Syria agreed to accept Israel's continued occupation of the Golan Heights in return for free rein in Lebanon.

When Syrian troops entered Lebanon in early June, U.S. and Israeli reaction downplayed the significance of the move. Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin eventually told his critics that he couldn't be upset by the intervention because Syria was fighting "Palestinian terrorists"-Israel's greatest enemy . Yasser Arafat, leader of the Palestinians' most independent political faction, Fateh, charged that Syria was trying to assassinate him and replace him with a pro-Syrian figurehead for the Palestinian movement.

Arab League mediators have since tried to patch up the differences between Syria and the Palestinians, to replace Syria's interventionary troops with a joint Arab peacekeeping force, and even to reconcile Syria's disputes with Egypt. Their prospects of success are remove.

Only two possible events could unify the Arab world at this point: U.S. or Israeli intervention. Prudent policy-makers in Tel Aviv and Washington seem to recognize this; they hope to see Arab disunity accentuated by the festering Lebanon crisis. In the resulting disarray, they hope weakened Arab states such as Syria will feel more inclined to make their separate peace individually with Israel.

To some policy planners in Washington, this strategy is the "new realism" of the Kissinger State Department. It is articulated vaguely, even enigmatically, when its proponents meet the press or brief Congress. But if the policy fails, today's flashpoint becomes tomorrow's conflagration - a wider Mideast war, whose international implications can barely be imagined.

Russ Stetler specializes in Middle Eastern affairs for Internews, the Berkeley based news agency which publishes the International Bulletin.