Israel and the Marines

On the day after the massacre of the marines, President Reagan was asked by a journalist to comment on the U.S. military role in Lebanon. He was, of course, ready to oblige (see following story), but decided to offer a little historical background first—"going back a little bit in memory," he called it. Among his recollections, it appears, was that in June, 1982, prior to the arrival of the marines, Israel "had been forced to cross its own border" into Lebanon—i.e., invade it.

We think this is a strange lapse of memory about a cataclysmic event that took place only 17 months ago—particularly since the U.S. was so closely in touch with the problems which preceded it. At the time of the invasion Mr. Reagan's officials had been congratulating themselves over the success, up to then, of a PLO-Israel ceasefire which had been mediated by the Administration's own envoy Philip Habib. The border area had been very quiet for eleven months, and there was certainly nothing happening there that should have "forced" Israel to launch an attack.

But what makes Mr. Reagan's memory lapse stranger is that even in Israel it is now widely acknowledged that Israel did not have to go to war in June, 1982. Israelis refer to the Lebanon war (however inaccurately) as Israel's "first war of choice"—that is, the first war Israel has fought that was not a necessary response to Arab actions. Few if any Israelis believe that the ostensible reason given for the invasion at the time—the attempted assassination in London of Israel's ambassador there—was valid, and the victim himself announced later that he thought the war had been totally unnecessary. In any case, it turned out afterwards that the assassination attempt had been carried out by individuals who were anti-PLO.

Another thing that bothers us a great deal about Mr. Reagan's faulty recollection is that it appears to absolve Israel, as far as the President is concerned, from any responsibility for the later involvement in Lebanon of U.S. marines. Yet, it was Israel's attempt to create a "new order" in Lebanon by invading that unhappy country which was the catalyst for all the U.S. involvement that followed. If there had been no invasion, the first, short mission of the marines to Beirut, to help evacuate PLO guerrillas, would not have taken place. If Israel had not later moved into West Beirut—in violation of commitments to the U.S.—and then allowed the Shatila massacre to happen, the marines would not have come in for the second time. Furthermore, if Israel had not provocatively brought Christian Phalangist militiamen into the Shuf mountains, which had been spared from being a battlefield through the seven years of civil war which preceded the Israeli invasion, there would have been no war there. When the war came—the first between Christians and Druze in that region for more than 120 years—U.S. marines at the airport below became victims of random shells from Druze artillerymen who were aiming at nearby Lebanese army troops.

It's conceivable that Mr. Reagan might have been reluctant, for political reasons, not to bring up these points even if he had not forgotten the actual circumstances of Israel's entry into Lebanon. But we have not forgotten, and we are not running for office, so we'll come right out and say it:

If Israel had not launched its unjustified attack on Lebanon in June, 1982, there would almost surely be no marines in Lebanon today—and there would, as a consequence, have been no marine casualties.