Who's On First?

At a press conference on August 14, President Reagan, while acknowledging the disproportionality of many Israeli responses to PLO violations of the cease-fire in Lebanon, added: "but we can't deny that the Israelis have been taking casualties from those cease-fire violations themselves. I think the figure now is 326 dead of their own military from being attacked in the breaking of the cease-fire."

The amount of confusion embodied in this statement makes the mind reel.

The main thing is that its not easy to figure out just which cease-fire violations the President was referring to, if he meant those which took place during the siege of Beirut—which it seems clear was what the questioner had in mind—the figure of 326 is, of course, quite wrong. That number represented the total of all Israeli soldiers killed, as of that date, since the invasion of Lebanon on June 6.

Since he couldn't have been talking about the siege of Beirut, there are a couple of ways of interpreting what the President might have meant:

Did he mean that all of the 326 soldiers were killed while responding to cease-fire violations within Lebanon, not just in Beirut? If so, that would seem a strange way to categorize the casualties resulting from a massive invasion whose goals, according to the Israelis themselves, were to create a buffer zone, get rid of all foreign troops in Lebanon, and help restore a viable Lebanese government. Surely not all the fighting within Lebanon was caused by violations of cease-fires?

Or did the President mean that 326 Israeli lives were lost during the PLO's cease-fire violation of last June—the rocketing over the border which the Israelis used as their pretext to invade? Presumably not, since the total of Israeli casualties from that violation was one killed and three wounded. It had been the first such PLO violation for nine months, and was a response to two days of unprovoked bombing by Israeli jets after the attempted assassination of Israel's ambassador in London.

One thing we're sure of is that he did not really mean it when he implicitly equated military with civilian casualties. The death of any human being in war is unspeakably tragic and wasteful. But the soldier is in a war doing a job that involves killing others—and understands that in the process he risks being killed himself. This cannot be said for the helpless civilians, including children, who are just trying to stay out of the way. There are, undoubtedly, varying shades of tragedy—but statistics tend to paint them all in one color.

We think, therefore, that we know what the President did not mean. That leaves us with just one question:

Mr. President, what did you mean?