Error and Betrayal in Lebanon

By George W. Ball. Washington, D.C.: Foundation for Middle East Peace, 1984. 158 pp. $9.95 (paper).

Reviewed by Donald Neff

George Wildman Ball has been in and out of Washington since the 1930s, first as a counsel with the Treasury Department and last as the Undersecretary of State and Ambassador to the U.N. during the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations. He has, in other words, just about seen it all. Now 72, he is living an active retirement in Princeton, from where he regularly voices his perceptive and often caustic views on a wide range of world problems.

Mr. Ball's opposition in the 1960s to America's growing involvement in Vietnam has earned him high praise from historians. His was a lonely voice in those days, so lonely that he later seemed like something of a prophet for so clearly and so early seeing what others only later comprehended. Now, nearly two decades later, Mir. Ball's voice again is speaking out loudly about what he sees as another looming tragedy for the United States: America's growingly complex and costly relationship with Israel.

Case Study of U.S. Failures

Mr. Ball's latest book, a stunning tour de force called Error and Betrayal in Lebanon, chronicles the dolorous events preceding and following Israel's disastrous invasion of Lebanon in 1982. Mr. Ball has catalogued the errors and betrayals by Israel and the U.S., and they make a sorry spectacle of America's failure to live up to its own ideals or to be a restraining force on a friend embarked on a disastrous course. As Mr. Ball concludes, the whole messy affair "provides a case study in how not to conduct foreign policy."

Indeed, though he does not emphasize the point in an historical context, it becomes clear from Mr. Ball's list of U.S. errors that the Reagan Administration already may have the dubious distinction of being the worst in a long line of rudderless administrations in its handling of the Middle East. It is perfectly clear by now that Secretary of State Haig should have been fired for his conduct of Middle East policy alone. Mr. Ball notes that Haig's views on the Middle East were "remarkably incoherent"—and after reading Mr. Ball's recounting of Haig's inchoate actions that characterization sounds like understatement. By his own admission, Haig made no serious attempt to deter the Israeli invasion—and, in fact, there is considerable evidence that the U.S. may have tacitly given its approval. Then after the invasion Haig actively opposed within the Administration any effort to pressure Israel to stop its murderous march to Beirut.

Haig's successor, Secretary of State George P. Shultz, has hardly been an improvement. After recklessly committing his and the country's prestige on the ill-considered May 17, 1983, withdrawal agreement that Syria was able scornfully to abrogate, he then presided over that misshapen product of misperceptions called the Strategic Cooperation Agreement. This was formalized between the U.S. and Israel on November 29, 1983—after Israel's illegal use of U.S. cluster bombs in Lebanon, after 241 Marines were killed in a Beirut car-bombing, after Prime Minister Begin's contemptuous rejection of Mr. Reagan's peace plan and prevarication about Israeli war aims, and after Israel's use of U.S. planes to bomb Iraq's nuclear facility in 1981. "With incomprehensible perverseness," Mr. Ball notes tartly, President Reagan approved the agreement "as though Israel deserved an award for involving in Lebanon."

U.S. and Israel: Unnatural Allies

The result of that agreement is to draw the U.S. ever closer to Israel, a nation that Mr. Ball argues is not a natural ally of America as long as it remains at war with the Arabs. Instead, U.S. and Israeli interests are frequently at odds as in the two countries' conflicting relations with the Arabs and their differing views of Israel's retention of territories captured by force. By alienating 100 million Arabs with their strategic oil supplies, the U. S. loses far more than it gains from an alliance with Israel, which has no means to project its force beyond the immediate region.

While opposing a formal alliance relationship with Israel, Mr. Ball is not at all opposed to some sort of special arrangement between the two countries. But it should be based on self-respect and a clear-eyed understanding that each country has its own interests. That is certainly riot the relationship now, Mr. Ball writes. The two countries now have an "upside-down relationship unique in history"—and it is Israel which is on the upside.

But Mr. Ball, ever the diplomatic realist, to have his doubts that anything will change soon. In fact, he writes, as long as Israel continues its present policies of "hegemonic designs," he cannot "see how anyone can view Israel's future with optimism..." Up to now Israel has been able to assure its security on two external assets, bountiful U.S. aid and Arab lethargy, Mr. Ball observes. But how long will this last? The Israeli calculation that the Arabs can be beaten into accepting the Jewish state is a bad miscalculation, as five wars have proved.

To assure its future security, Mr. Ball argues, Israel must trade territory for peace. Otherwise it may follow the fate of the crusaders. They were in Jerusalem for 88 years. But, concludes Mr. Ball on a chilling note: "Where are they now?"

Donald Neff is the author of Warriors at Suez and Warriors for Jerusalem.