What the US Can & Can't Do in Lebanon

By Richard H. Curtiss

"Lebanon has been battered by 14 years of civil war, an Israeli invasion and a seemingly endless cycle of factional feuding in which at least 150,000 people have been killed and 1 million people—one quarter of the population—displaced." —Associated Press, May, 1989.

I first saw Lebanon on a mild evening in November 1958, when I flew in from Turkey with a printing order for the US Information Agency plant that once was in East Beirut. The Americans who met me at the airport described over a drink in the bar of the Commodore Hotel the just-completed withdrawal of US Marines that marked the end of the brief civil war that had gripped the country throughout the summer of 1958.

I hadn't eaten and, after my hosts left, I walked out of the hotel looking for a coffee shop or snack bar. The streets were dark and suddenly gunfire erupted. I looked for a shop to duck into, but every door was locked. I became so disoriented that, for 15 frantic minutes, I couldn't even find my way back to the hotel. When I finally burst into the lobby I asked the night clerk: Who's doing all the shooting? I thought your war was over."

"Probably the Armenians," he answered casually. I went to bed hungry.

In 1962, when I was assigned to the Arabic language school in the American Embassy in West Beirut, my family and I moved into a pleasant apartment in the middle of the city. The rent was low because it was right on the line that had divided the Christians and Muslims during the 1958 shootout. "If it starts again," the Syrian building owner said cheerily, "you'll be okay unless you stand shaving in front of an open window like one of my tenants did, or take a wrong turn toward a roadblock instead of away from it like an Englishman across the street did. They were both killed."

We had a pleasant year and a half in a quiet Beirut, although I didn't loiter in front of open windows and I was careful to know exactly where I wanted to go whenever I drove the car. I learned which neighborhoods were inhabited (separately) by Druze, Sunni and Shia Muslims and which predominantly by Maronite, Orthodox, and Melchite Christians. Also which streets, blocks or neighborhoods were enclaves for Kurds, Jews, Armenians and Assyrians. Only in the West Beirut neighborhoods that had grown up around the American University of Beirut were the religious communities mixed.

Just like Beirut's traditional neighborhoods, the Lebanese government was organized according to a sectarian mosaic system, only a step removed from feudalism. It had worked when Ottoman Turks ruled the Middle East, although there had been massacres and communal fighting between Druze and Maronites in the Shuf and Mount Lebanon in 1841, 1845 and 1860. At the breakup of the Ottoman Empire during World War I, the French had taken over Syria and carved out Lebanon as a Christian enclave. In an excess of generosity they had attached to the Christian state-to-be large Muslim areas, so that at the time Lebanon achieved its independence in 1943, Christians were no longer so clearly in the majority. The 1958 fighting had been the first warning that Muslims, who had a higher birthrate, were no longer content with a system which gave a six-to-five edge in parliament and government positions to Christians, who had a higher emigration rate.

We returned to Beirut in 1969 and took a seafront apartment for the school year so that our children could attend the American school there, while I shuttled between the Voice of America Arabic programming center in Greece, and its Cairo and Beirut subcenters. To the growing demographic disparity a new element had been added—heavily armed Palestinian commandos.

Palestinians entered the calculations of Lebanese politicians when the first wave of refugees, barred by Israelis from returning to their homes after the 1948 fighting, inundated Lebanon. At first wealthy Christians from Haifa or Jerusalem found few problems obtaining Lebanese citizenship. Then, there were periods when Sunni Muslim Palestinians also were permitted to obtain the identity cards that turned them, technically, into Lebanese.

It was not the Palestinians who became Lebanese who preoccupied the politicians, however, but the predominantly Muslim masses in squalid refugee camps on the outskirts of Beirut, Tripoli and Sidon. If Lebanon's Maronite leaders eyed them uneasily, they represented opportunity to Muslim politicians.

Strikes and curfews cast shadows over my visits to the family in Beirut. The issue was whether the fighters recruited from the camps by the various Palestinian commando groups would be allowed to carry their weapons. Just before we moved to Greece, in 1970, at a Lebanese-Palestinian meeting in Cairo, it was agreed they would not, except in the area of the Israeli border.

In 1973 we moved back joyously to what our children, who had been boarders at the American Community School while we were in Greece, considered their "hometown." By then, however, it was a very different Beirut.

On Sundays there were huge traffic jams as the Lebanese, in their new Dodges and Mercedes, thronged out of town to the beaches, mountain villages, and archeological splendors that, along with its Mediterranean climate, made Lebanon a paradise for all who could afford it. Beirut's population also was swollen with job seekers from the villages of Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan. In summer, mountain resorts filled with vacationers from all over the Arab world. As the economy grew, so did the gulf between the haves and have nots.

As for gun-toting, the Cairo agreement was forgotten after Israelis made two highly visible raids into the heart of Beirut. On the first they blew up all of the commercial jetliners on the tarmac at Beirut airport.

On the second raid in April 1973, only three months before our return, Israelis disguised as foreign tourists had rented cars for "hit squads" which then drove by night to the apartments of three PLO officials and assassinated them, along with neighbors who opened their doors to see what was happening. The Israelis had departed by sea, taking with them whatever confidence the Palestinians might have had that Lebanese authorities could or would protect them in Beirut. Uniformed Palestinians now carried their sidearms and Kalashnikovs openly, as did soldiers of the proliferating Christian, or "rightist," and predominantly Muslim, or "leftist," militias.

For me, as US Embassy spokesman, every day brought a new problem. Did the US have any idea who was responsible for mysterious arms caches that turned up along Lebanon's coasts? Did the US have any comment on the latest Israeli jet strikes on Palestinian refugee camps, teeming with children, whose crushed and torn bodies were pictured over and over again in the newspapers? We were even shown booby-trapped toys allegedly found in the camps after raids. Were they actually dropped by the Israeli planes, or were they placed there by local provocateurs? To mutilated children, it would if t make any difference. To journalists, however, it would provide clues as to who was behind the spiraling violence in this country which was still home to 25,000 Americans.

Our oldest British friend in Beirut was the first foreigner to die when Lebanon's civil war broke out in earnest in 1975. When he and a Canadian school teacher foolishly tried to cross at night from "leftist" into "rightist" territory, he was stabbed to death and his companion gang-raped and then released to tell the tale. Clearly those who perpetrated this atrocity, and dozens like it, committed against both Lebanese and Palestinians, wanted to heat up the spiral of horrors.

They mounted rapidly. Every morning there were new bodies, victims of the Maronites, under bridges in their parts of town. At the same time, ambulances were picking up bodies dropped by Muslim and Palestinian militiamen over a cliff overlooking the sea in West Beirut.

Perhaps 60,000 people were killed in the first year and a half of fighting the vast majority in one city, Beirut. The massacre by Maronites of Palestinians at the Tel Zaatar camp in East Beirut seemed just a footnote at the time. As the last Palestinian fighters surrendered, the Maronite militiamen attached ropesto them and then dragged them, alive at first, behind their cars until they reached the bridge over the Dog river where the bodies were dumped.

The saga of Tel Zaatar's doomed defenders became a rallying point for Palestinians, strengthening their resolve to brave any odds until they haw a homeland of their own. These were the role models for today's "children of the stones."

Our embassy was literally in the Muslim front lines, I still didn't stand in front of my office windows, though they were armored with mylar which could at least deflect a bullet. And, on one occasion when I was in a car that took a wrong turn into a roadblock, the vehicle was so heavily armored that the bullets literally just glanced off the inch-thick glass windshield.

After visits to East Beirut, newsmen frequently asked where the Maronites were getting their "brand new" American weapons.

"We don't know anything about it," I would insist, truthfully.

Then our ambassador, G. McMurtrie (Mac) Godley, whose physical courage was matched only by his rock-ribbed integrity, returned from a meeting called by Henry Kissinger in Amman with chiefs of US missions in the Middle East. The US government, Godley said ruefully, did seem to know a good deal more about the weapons being used by the Maronites than anyone had told us in Beirut. It was, unfortunately, not United States dosed its eyes to transfers of American arms by Israel to countries or clients whose aims are not in harmony with ours.

Uniquely, in Lebanon's civil war the telephone lines between the two sides remained intact, and US officials used them, and hazardous visits across the lines, to warn Maronite leaders, repeatedly, that no matter what trouble they got into, the US would not bail them out. The Christian leaders thought otherwise. They escalated, and so, probably, did unseen hands in the Muslim camp.

One day, at a meeting of the now tiny embassy staff, a shell struck so close that everyone leaped out of his seat. As we settled down again, Bob Waring, the economic counselor, remarked that this was the strangest assignment he had ever had. "Every morning you think, 'Shall I go to work and perhaps be killed or call in sick and live?... Bob, who never called in sick andhad already voluntarily extended his tour of duty by a fourth year, was kidnapped and killed two months later in West Beirut, along with Ambassador Francis Meloy, whohad been in the country only six weeks, and their Lebanese driver.

My family's tour in Beirut had ended in October 1975 when dependents and much of the embassy staff were evacuated. By the time my own tour of duty ended in May, 1976, a new scenario had developed. Whereas most of the combat had been a matter of pouring artillery, mortar, and small arms fire into neighborhoods "across the line," now Christian towns and villages in the mountains were actually failing into Druze or Palestinian hands.

The Arab League gave the Syrians a mandate to go in and restore order as the vanguard of an Arab League force, and the US promised to secure guarantees from Israel that it would not attack the Syrians. The Israelis were reluctant to agree. I suppose they finally gave in because they realized the Maronites, whom they had encouraged and armed throughout the fighting, were actually on the verge of losing the war. Clearly Israel wanted a stalemate and partition to keep Christian Lebanon as a tiny non-Islamic confessional state in the Middle East—like Israel.

The rest is history. Over 14 years the Syrians have fought both for and against virtually every militia on both sides, except the several they have controlled or created themselves. The Israelis made their own terrifying move against the Palestinians in 1982. They turned Beirut into an even greater hell than the one I remembered, and 20,000 Lebanese and Palestinians died. The Sabra Shatila massacre of Palestinians by Israeli-armed and supported Maronite militias succeeded Tel Zaatar in Middle Eastern history books. US Marine actions in Beirut in 1982 and 1983, in which some 260 Americans died, succeeded 1958 in US military annals.

Both before and after I retired from the foreign service I was able to visit Beirut occasionally between rounds of fighting. During a brief visit my wife and I made to the embassy on an AID-funded project in 1983, I saw many of my former Lebanese and Palestinian colleagues. By chance, our friend Malcolm Kerr was being sworn in as president of the American University of Beirut and we attended the ceremony on an AUB campus that looked almost unscathed from the years of warfare.

Two months later, many of the colleagues I had just seen were among the 63 killed when the embassy was blown up as they were having lunch. So was the American AID officer with whom I'd dealt. So, eventually, was Malcolm Kerr, one of America's most prominent Arabists, who had spent his life explaining the Middle East to his countrymen.

This deliberate assassination of a particularly sympathetic American sent a message, probably from Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini, to Americans: Stop just expressing pious hopes that in the future US relations with Muslims and Arabs will again match the glory days of the past. You are no longer welcome here until your policies match your words.

It's a warning we must heed. So long as, for domestic political reasons, we arm and encourage Israel in its unwillingness to accept the two-state, land-for-peace solution now being offered by Yasser Arafat and virtually the entire Arab world, we will be perceived as Israel's mentor by Israel's victims.

We should back international, not unilateral, action in Lebanon, but can no longer really be part of it. The Lebanese need political reform so that they, like Americans, all have equal rights. One person, one vote. Lebanon needs a constitution that will safeguard its unique pluralism. Lebanese Christians should not have to worry that they will ever be subject to Islamic law. Lebanese Muslims should not have to worry that their country will ever turn its back on its Arab and Islamic heritage. A democratic, secular, neutral Lebanon with full and equal protection for all of its minorities is not too much to ask.

Perhaps peace will be obtained through a package deal providing for internationally supervised elections, a new constitution, and withdrawal of all foreign forces, all in a pre-agreed order.

The most constructive contribution the US can make to Lebanon is to get on with a Palestinian-Israeli peace. All Lebanese believe that Iranian, Israeli, Iraqi, Syrian, Libyan, and other foreign hands are fighting their battles by proxy through Lebanese militias on Lebanese soil. It is time to end those battles most of which stem from the Palestinian-Israeli dispute. That dispute will end only when the US brings its Israeli client to heel, and it is there that the US should concentrate its efforts. Until it does, there will be no peace in Israel, no peace in Palestine, and—almost certainly—no peace in Lebanon.