The Twilight War: The Secret History of America's Thirty-Year Conflict with Iran (20 page)

The powder keg finally exploded in April 1976, following a failed assassination attempt by the PLO on Pierre Gemayel, the leader of the right-wing Christian Phalange, as he left church. Gemayel’s brutish foot soldiers retaliated by ambushing a bus, killing twenty-seven Palestinian civilians. Lebanon soon split apart along confessional seams in an orgy of slaughters and reprisals. Syria moved troops into Lebanon as peacekeepers, with the scheming Syrian president Hafez al-Assad obtaining a mandate from the Arab League that enabled him to occupy two-thirds of the country. By the time Ronald Reagan took the oath of office, Lebanon was a country in name only. Perhaps one hundred thousand people had died in the six-year civil war. Warring factions divided the country: West Beirut and southern Lebanon were governed by the PLO, left-wing Sunni, and the Shia Amal Party; East Beirut was run by competing Christians; the hills surrounding the city were occupied by Christians and Druze; and the Syrian army controlled the north and west Lebanon with troops entrenched in West Beirut.

In July 1981, an especially bloody exchange between the PLO and Israel left more than five hundred dead and threatened to expand into a wider war with Syria. Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger feared this would erode Arab support for the newly announced CENTCOM, so Reagan dispatched the skilled American negotiator Philip Habib to broker a cease-fire. Habib,
a Lebanese American who grew up in a Jewish neighborhood in Brooklyn, succeeded in getting both the PLO and Israel to agree to a cease-fire in Lebanon. Yet it remained an uneasy peace, and was not popular with many in the right-wing Likud government of Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin, especially his defense minister, Ariel Sharon.

In a 2002 statement to reporters, President George W. Bush famously described Ariel Sharon as “a man of peace,” a description at odds with the Israeli leader’s actions over fifty years.
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In fact, Ariel Sharon was a warrior. He’d joined a paramilitary unit as a teenager, and he eventually rose to senior command, launching Israel’s daring attack across to the west bank of the Suez Canal during the October 1973 war. At times ruthless, he earned the nickname “The Bulldozer” due to his girth and style. Like a hussar of an earlier era, Sharon showed a flare for both brilliance and recklessness.

Sharon and Begin longed for an opportunity to destroy the PLO. “Begin viewed Arafat as little more than Hitler,” said retired senior DIA analyst Jeff White, who worked Lebanon for the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Sharon unilaterally expanded the Lebanon cease-fire to include any attack against a Jew worldwide, arguing that the PLO and Beirut remained the nexus of all terrorism and so it all ultimately went back to their culpability.

Ariel Sharon formulated a plan to solve the Lebanese problem in one great sweep of Israeli armor. Since 1975, Israel had been developing a close military relationship with the Maronite Christians, providing them with arms and equipment. Sharon proposed a combined attack to destroy both the PLO and the Syrians. The vaunted Israeli Defense Forces would drive to Beirut, destroying Arafat’s meager force and, along the way, smashing the Syrian army too. With these two troublemakers out of the way, Bashir Gemayel would assume the presidency and then recognize Israel. In one stroke, Lebanon would move from an Israeli liability to an asset.
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In January 1982, Sharon secretly flew to Beirut to meet with Gemayel and his father, Pierre, to consummate the deal.

The Phalange leader embraced Sharon’s scheme. The Israelis would conduct the major combat operations against the PLO and the Syrians, but the Christians would do the dirty work of cleaning the PLO remnants off the streets and out of the buildings of West Beirut, a mission Sharon was not eager for the casualty-averse Israeli army to undertake.

Both Begin and Sharon worked to garner U.S. support for their plan. Appreciating the Cold War myopia of the American superpower, they repeatedly stressed to Reagan and other senior officials the Soviet hand behind Syria
and the PLO and the important role Israel could play in defeating these clients of Moscow. In February 1982, Israel provided Weinberger with an overview of the proposed operation, which called for occupation of almost half of Lebanon.

An Israeli invasion of Lebanon alarmed most of official Washington. The CIA feared it could trigger a Soviet intervention. Bing West at Defense argued that military action would not solve Israel’s long-term problem. “Palestinian nationalism to say nothing of Arab nationalism or Islamic fundamentalism will not die with the PLO infrastructure,” he wrote Weinberger. The defense secretary was even more strident, recommending to Reagan that the United States dissuade the Israelis by threatening to withhold further weapons sales.
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The professional diplomats at the State Department shared this view. “The primary effort should be directed toward deterring the Israeli action, but concurrently we must cut our losses by clearly dissociating the United States before the fact from any action Israel may take in Lebanon,” wrote L. Paul Bremer, then a senior official in the secretary of state’s office.
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But Bremer’s boss, Alexander Haig, who’d graduated from senior general in Europe to secretary of state, did not agree. A staunch supporter of the Jewish state, he viewed the Arab-Israeli crisis in Cold War terms, pitting the American proxy against the Soviet-backed Arabs. Neither the historic roots of the conflict nor the sectarian milieu that fostered the Lebanese Civil War entered into Haig’s calculations. Lebanon was a Cold War battleground, and he saw Israeli victory entirely in that light. Critics later accused Haig of privately giving the Israelis a green light for their attack. But Haig always denied the charge, and the documentary evidence supports his view. During a meeting with Israeli general Uri Sagi, Haig repeatedly cautioned that an unprovoked Israeli attack would have “grave” implications for U.S.-Israeli relations.
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Nonetheless, Haig clearly favored a robust Israeli attack on the PLO, if based on a legitimate provocation.

Following one meeting between Sharon and Haig, the American secretary of state enthusiastically pointed to a map of Lebanon and said, “You see, if they have to go in, their plan would be to link up the group here in the south with the Christians up here.”

The normally reticent diplomat Morris Draper blurted out, “For Christ’s sake, Mr. Secretary, there’s a million and a half Muslims between them, and at least a million of them are Shia!” This fact came as a surprise to Al Haig.
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Sharon got his casus belli on June 4, 1982, when the Israeli ambassador in London was shot and seriously wounded. The fact that the culprits were from Abu Nidal’s splinter organization and bitterly opposed to Arafat made no difference. Two days later, on Sunday morning, June 6, Israeli troops poured into Lebanon in three giant columns swiftly moving north.

Israeli officials reassured the United States that they had no intention of advancing to Beirut or starting a war with Syria. Prime Minister Begin personally assured President Reagan that his army would not move more than forty kilometers into Lebanon—just far enough to drive the PLO away from rocket range of northern Israel. Israel’s ambassador told Weinberger a similar story.
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On June 9, after meeting with Begin, Philip Habib flew to Damascus to assure President al-Assad that Israel had no interest in a war with Syria. But the Israelis’ words failed to match their army’s actions. While Habib was still talking with al-Assad, Sharon ordered an attack on Syrian air-to-air missile sites in the Bekaa Valley. The unprepared and outclassed Syrian air force rose to challenge the Israeli jets. In a massive daylong dogfight the Jewish pilots decimated the Syrians, knocking eighty-two jets out of the sky without a single loss of their own. A dismayed Habib cabled back to Haig, “I am astounded and dismayed by what happened today. The prime minister of Israel really sent me off on a wild goose chase.”
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The Soviet premier sent Reagan a message via the hotline between Washington and Moscow warning that the Israeli attack created an “extremely dangerous situation.” He warned that it risked a wider war between the superpowers. Alarmed, Reagan called for a cease-fire to take effect the next day at six a.m. local (Lebanese) time. The president then sent a warning to the Israeli prime minister: “Menachem, Israel’s refusal to agree to this cease-fire would aggravate what is already a great threat to world peace and place a permanent stain on a relationship I truly treasure. Sincerely, Ron.”
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Begin accepted the American cease-fire in name, but he refused to halt the army’s advance northward, calling it a “rolling” cease-fire. “Show us in the president’s message where it says ‘in place’?” Begin demanded of Habib following the latter’s arrival in Tel Aviv from Damascus, having secured al-Assad’s backing for the cease-fire.

“What are you talking about?!” an incredulous Phil Habib asked the prime minister during a tense meeting. “A cease-fire is a cease-fire in place!”
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Begin finally agreed to the cease-fire, but not before Sharon drove one column into Syrian-controlled Lebanon, where the forces manhandled an
armor division that had been moved to try to block the Israeli advance. In just eight days, the Israelis linked up with Gemayel’s forces, trapping in West Beirut not only the PLO, but Syrian military personnel. The Israelis imposed a blockade and began shelling the PLO-controlled West Beirut in an intense bombardment that on one day rained a thousand hundred-pound artillery shells down on a densely packed area of only six square miles.

The wanton carnage and the Israeli deception about the true scope of their war aims raised the ire of President Reagan. CIA Director William Casey recommended cutting off intelligence support to Israel, which Weinberger supported. Richard Armitage suggested the United States should consider suspending “normal” diplomatic relations and push for a Security Council resolution condemning the Israeli attack. When Begin came to Washington on June 21, the president chastised the prime minister for Israel’s actions.

Haig harbored no such desire to rein in the Israelis. With Yasser Arafat cornered, he shared Sharon’s impulse to kill the quarry. “By God,” said a furious Al Haig after Reagan’s dressing-down of the Israeli prime minister, “I’m going to tell Begin to go into Be-rut and finish the job.”
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Haig countered that the United States needed to support Israel, force the Syrians out, and help Gemayel form a new government in Lebanon. The secretary advocated deploying a large peacekeeping force of perhaps fourteen thousand men to help prop up the new Phalange government.
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“The quick Israeli victory posed an opportunity to strengthen our position,” he wrote to Reagan.

Weinberger and General John Vessey steadfastly opposed sending any American peacekeepers into the boiling cauldron of Lebanon. “Any introduction of U.S. forces without an agreement would put U.S. lives at risk in a possible continuous low-level warfare from every extremist faction in the area.” Both feared it could lead to greater Iranian or Syrian involvement.

The haughty secretary of state chafed at both the Defense Department’s views and their meddling in Lebanon policy. His personal relationships quickly deteriorated within the administration, including with the White House staff. On June 25, the thin-skinned Al Haig resigned, citing differences on foreign policy. While Reagan actually leaned toward Haig’s views at the time, he was not sorry to see the imperious general go. Writing in his diary, Reagan noted, “Actually the only disagreement was over whether I made policy or the secretary of state did.”
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The president replaced Haig with a former combat marine and
Republican stalwart, George P. Shultz. The new secretary of state shared many of Haig’s views on the Middle East, but had a less prickly persona. Smart, serious, and composed, he was slow to anger, but when he did get angry, his eyes narrowed conspicuously as his voice grew stern. In bureaucratic infighting, Shultz proved stubborn, every bit the equal of the mule Caspar Weinberger, and the two men were soon at loggerheads on a host of policy questions, including Lebanon.

Habib brokered an agreement to evacuate the PLO. Arafat and his five thousand PLO fighters left for Tunisia, embarked on Western ships, as U.S. Marines and French and Italian peacekeepers deployed around Beirut to provide a buffer between the antagonists until the PLO’s departure. It was not an easy sell to the Israelis, requiring another threatening communiqué from Reagan to Begin to bring it about: “There must be an end to the unnecessary bloodshed particularly among innocent civilians. I insist upon a cease-fire now and until the PLO have left Beirut. The relationship between our two nations is at stake.”
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Neither Weinberger nor Vessey supported the Habib plan. “By putting U.S. forces between the PLO and the Israelis we might as well be pouring burning gasoline on an already difficult situation rather than putting oil on troubled waters,” General Vessey wrote to the defense secretary.

With Arafat gone, the peacekeeping troops were withdrawn, but the situation around Beirut remained tense. Sharon champed at the bit to get into West Beirut, and he remained convinced that many PLO fighters had stayed behind in the city and in the Palestinian refugee camps south of Beirut. While Arafat had escaped his noose, Sharon’s grand design to remake Lebanon appeared within reach. Only American intransigence prevented him from seeing it to completion.

Despite the president’s anger at Begin, to bring stability back to Lebanon, the Reagan administration plan largely parroted Sharon’s scheme. Washington would prop up the Lebanese government by strengthening its army, traditionally the least sectarian organization within the country. As the Lebanese military capacity increased, it would gradually expand its control outside of Beirut. And the man the United States backed as the new Lebanese president was none other than Bashir Gemayel.