Arriving aboard the night ferry from Cyprus, it seemed a fireworks display was under way over Lebanon’s capital, Beirut. Getting closer to Beirut harbor, however, the ferry was more a combat landing ship heading for Omaha Beach. White phosphorous warheads exploded with a halo of white stars over West Beirut. One of these white flecks of what the military called Willie Pete would burn flesh to the bone. Fiery aerial bombs destroyed whole apartment buildings. Naval guns offshore kept up a constant barrage that rattled the deck of the arriving Cyprus ferry. Near the Corniche of West Beirut, home to the US embassy, artillery and tanks pounded with a roar that shook the Muslim sector. It was once the seaside promenade for Beirut lovers and families. Once the Paris of the Mideast, Beirut was now shell-shocked. The 56-day Israeli siege of West Beirut was at its thundering peak that August night. Ariel Sharon, minister of defense of the Jerusalem government, was in battle dress in East Beirut and directing the bombardment. The man Prime Minister Menachem Begin called mon general had become unhinged. Begin and the Israeli cabinet could no longer control—if they ever did—the rotund Sharon. His elaborate ambition to conquer Lebanon had degenerated into a single-minded and merciless pounding of Muslim Beirut. As his frustrations mounted, his appetite added more to his 300-pound body. “He cleaned out everything in the kitchen,” said one East Beirut restaurateur. A month earlier, the white-haired Sharon had cut off electricity and water in West Beirut and scoured the streets for PLO leader Yasser Arafat. Israeli agents—mainly Christian soldiers from Bashir Gemayel’s Phalange militia—staged terrorist attacks. Car bombs were installed and detonated throughout West Beirut streets. Transponders that could send signals to Israeli receivers were planted in buildings suspected to house Arafat and other PLO leaders. Loitering Israeli warplanes would then attack these electronically pinpointed targets. Arafat always managed to escape. In one case, on August 6, rumors quickly spread that he had left only minutes before an American-made laser-guided bomb destroyed two eight-floor apartment buildings and the more than 200 people in it. One of the buildings had once housed the PLO’s security headquarters. Only a week after the June 6 invasion, it seemed the PLO was finished. The PLO strongholds and refugee camps near Tyre, Sidon, and other southern Lebanon towns were surrounded and bombarded. The PLO strongpoint in Beaufort Castle, the twelfth-century Crusader castle that overlooked all southern Lebanon, was overrun. A surrounded Arafat, refused military aid by both Syria and Moscow, hinted he might accept exile from Lebanon. All that changed. Many senior PLO commanders deserted fighters in southern Lebanon to hide in West Beirut. Soon, PLO fighters shed uniforms and melted into the population of West Beirut. As the siege grew in intensity, Arafat became more defiant of demands made by Sharon and US diplomats. Arafat and his soldiers went underground in West Beirut, where bunkers could withstand aerial bombardment. Two American reporters scrambling for safety in one bombardment jumped into an unlit underground bunker. They were welcomed by the sound of bullets being racked into dozens of Kalashnikov rifles. They were spared after shouting, “Sahafi! Sahafi!”—the Arab word for “press.” During the day, West Beirut was drowned by the sounds of electric generators wired to every storefront. While I was away, a wayward howitzer damaged my regular room at the Commodore Hotel in West Beirut. Still, after arriving on the Cyprus ferry, I spent the night in the room. After all, what were the chances of another direct hit? I awoke the next morning to repairmen on ladders patching the 105 mm hole. Reporters from the entire world were hunkered down at the Commodore. Coco, the hotel’s poolside parrot, added a new sound to its vocabulary of curses. It was a high-to-low whistle that perfectly mimicked an incoming warhead.
Coverage of the bombardment in the print media and on television led to relentless condemnation of Israel from all corners of the world. Holocaust survivors in Germany pleaded with Israel to halt the inhumanity. NBC News anchor John Chancellor likened the siege to the Fascist bombing of Madrid during the Spanish Civil War. Instead of America’s vital ally in the Mideast, Chancellor saw a regional aggressor armed by the United States. “We are now dealing with an imperial Israel,” he said. “Israel can’t go on much longer horrifying the world.” Israeli spokesmen argued that the press was distorting the siege. Television showed some of the thousands killed and injured, including a baby at a Beirut hospital with its arms blown off. Sharon’s siege destroyed support for the antiterrorist drive called Operation Peace for Galilee. Instead of reinforcing Israel’s portrayal of the Palestine Liberation Organization as ruthless terrorists, the siege revived sympathy for Palestinians. Arafat and others were driven from their Palestine homeland with the creation of Israel in 1948. After the 1967 war, Israel seized the West Bank of the Jordan and chased the PLO to the East Bank, where they attempted to overthrow the Jordanian government. Once more, Arafat and the PLO were defeated and expelled from Jordan with their families. More than 200,000 Palestinians traveled through Syria to southern Lebanon. At every stage of the diaspora, Arafat staged attacks on Israel. And Israel always struck back.
Operation Big Pines, Sharon’s 1982 plan to expel Syria from Lebanon and destroy the Palestine Liberation Organization once and for all, had collapsed on three fronts. A determined Assad and the narrow dirt roads of Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley blocked Sharon’s plan to sever the main highway between Beirut and Damascus midway between the two capitals. That would outflank 35,000 Syrian troops who had occupied Lebanon since 1976. Instead, narrow mountain roads hamstrung the main battle tank columns of the Israel Defense Forces. Refueling trucks couldn’t get through. Some armor units ran out of gasoline. Scores of IDF tanks sent to attack Assad’s army were unable to maneuver on the narrow roads and never fired their guns. IDF units hemmed in on narrow valley roads came under Syrian fire above them on ridgelines. Abandoned villages came alive with Syrian troops when Israeli tanks came within range. Soviet-made Sagger handheld rockets picked off IDF tanks in one valley clash. For the first time, IDF armor came under fire from French-made helicopters with Syrian pilots firing laser-guided antitank rockets from four miles away—well beyond IDF antiaircraft defenses.
Syria’s counterattack forced Sharon to forsake the Bekaa Valley and shift strategy to surrounding Beirut and trapping the PLO leadership and Syrian occupying troops. The June 14 maneuver was never approved, before or after, by the Israeli cabinet. Also balking were some Israeli commanders in the IDF citizen army. Sharon’s order was defied by Colonel Eli Geva, a tank brigade commander, one of the best and brightest of the IDF’s younger officers. He refused an order from the chief of staff to take his tanks into West Beirut and resigned from the army. He said entry would bog the tanks down in urban warfare and endanger civilians.
Israeli soldiers, like the world, were told the invasion would halt 40 kilometers into southern Lebanon and focus attack on PLO sites along the west coast. Now Sharon was violating a tenet of Israeli foreign policy: Never occupy an Arab capital. Sharon’s base of operation was in East Beirut, where the IDF linked with the Phalange, the Christian militia under the command of Bashir Gemayel. The ruthless young warlord was crucial to Sharon’s endgame: In the coming fall election, Israel would back Gemayel as the next president of Lebanon in the face of little opposition. In turn, Gemayel would sign a peace treaty with Israel, giving the Jerusalem government a dominating role in Lebanese affairs. The possible redrawing of the map of Lebanon was secretly supported by Secretary of State Alexander Haig, who had enlisted President Reagan in financing the Phalange with $10 million. Sharon called on Gemayel in East Beirut to collect on the warlord’s promise: Once Beirut was surrounded, Gemayel said, his militia would wade into West Beirut and slaughter the PLO in house-to-house fighting. Begin had promised Israeli military support for the bloodletting but insisted the Phalange lead the way. “Let me take care of West Beirut” was Gemayel’s assurance during the planning stage. Now Gemayel refused. If—as planned—he was elected president of a Muslim-majority country, Gemayel said, he would be unable to govern with West Beirut’s blood on his hands. Without the Phalange, Sharon had only the siege. While the Israeli generals had drawn up a plan for the bloody invasion of West Beirut, Begin would have no part of it. The prime minister genuinely grieved for every Israeli killed on the battlefield.
In addition to Syria’s counterattack and Bashir Gemayel’s refusal to invade West Beirut, Sharon found that the televised siege was eroding crucial support of some in Washington. There was no wavering by Alexander Haig. The secretary of state had remained staunch. Haig even read to Washington newsmen Israeli government statements minimizing death and destruction in West Beirut. Robert Dillon, the American ambassador to Lebanon, witnessed daily destruction from his hillside residence in East Beirut. Dillon called the State Department to denounce the ferocity of Israel’s jets and artillery in an area full of innocent civilians. Haig, an Army veteran of the US air war in Vietnam, dismissed Dillon’s alarms. “Bullshit,” Haig said. “There wasn’t any heavy Israeli bombing. It was fringe bombing. In the siege of Beirut, there was not a massive bombing at all.” Compared to America’s bombing of Hanoi in 1972, Sharon’s bombardments were “more token than real.”
Sharon and Haig found themselves increasingly outflanked by Philip Habib, President Reagan’s personal Mideast representative. New to the Mideast, the career diplomat found himself manipulated by Prime Minister Begin and bullied by Sharon. “Sharon is a brawny man who uses his bulk, his extremely loud voice and a flagrantly aggressive manner which I suspect he has cultivated for effect to overwhelm opposition,” Haig recalled. Sharon would actually bump into a person in his face-to-face confrontations. In conversation, Sharon called Habib naïve and America weak. Habib thought Sharon a bully and a liar. An undiplomatic loathing for Sharon arose in Habib. “Philip hated Arik Sharon with a deep, dark passion,” said Marjorie, Habib’s wife (Arik was a nickname for Sharon’s first name, Ariel).
Although he was the new boy on the block in the Mideast, the 62-year-old diplomat was a wily veteran of Washington politics. Reagan had endorsed Habib’s central focus of nailing down a cease-fire to halt Israel’s attacks. His initiatives were blocked by Haig. Samuel Lewis, US ambassador to Israel at the time, watched the increasingly hostile relationship between Habib and his boss at the State Department. “Habib didn’t like Haig very much. Didn’t respect him. Why? Disagreed with him. Thought he was a kind of megalomaniac and very pro-Israeli and not a very good diplomat.” To get around Haig, the president’s special representative to the Mideast appealed to his second boss, President Reagan, or, more specifically, Reagan’s daily advisers—Edwin Meese, William Clark, James Baker, and Mike Deaver. Habib’s briefings for them were detailed and weekly. Their dislike of Haig began on the day of Reagan’s inauguration. Haig showed up with a letter to be signed by the president. It restricted all foreign policy decisions to Haig, cutting out the White House National Security Council. It was the same sort of power Henry Kissinger possessed while secretary of state and adviser on national security affairs to President Nixon. While he learned much as Kissinger’s deputy, Haig never gained the same stature with Reagan. The letter went unsigned. Haig proclaimed himself as Reagan’s foreign policy “vicar.” As a fervent Catholic, he was likening his role to the pope of Rome, who represents God on earth. From then on, every State Department reporter referred to Haig as “The Vicar.” With every real or imagined infringement on his turf by the White House, Haig would complain bitterly to Reagan, often with the added threat of resignation. The president, who loathed infighting among his staff, always placated Haig.
With news reporters and associates, Haig never hid his contempt for Reagan’s closest advisers or the president himself. He had constant criticism for Reagan’s national security adviser, William Clark. At every turn in his political career Reagan brought along Clark, a California rancher with a law degree. Clark was in fact the president’s best friend, free to wander into the Oval Office no matter the topic or already-present visitor. At one point Reagan made him a justice of the California Supreme Court. In Washington, Haig made Clark deputy secretary of state because of his connection with Reagan. When the national security post became open, Clark quickly returned to the White House. He designed the Mini-Memo. No matter the issue, it was reduced to a single page for Reagan’s desk. Reagan preferred the visual and loved film. The Pentagon film library was searched for training films suitable to educate the president about, say, the Soviet Union. Clark himself shared Reagan’s disinterest in world affairs. Clark “didn’t know his ass from third base,” Haig grumbled. “How could he? He never read a book on foreign policy in his life.” He saw Reagan in the same boat, at sea and unengaged with the facts of a serious problem. “He wasn’t a mean man. He was just stupid,” Clark quoted Haig saying of Reagan. Other senior officials held the same view, including William Casey, director of central intelligence. While Reagan was indeed smart enough to become president of the United States, he remained uninterested in foreign facts that Haig, Casey, and others considered vital. Reagan hated war and violence and urged Habib to do everything to bring peace to the Mideast.
Reagan’s attitude toward Israel’s invasion of Lebanon began to change after Vice President George H. W. Bush and Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger attended the June funeral of Saudi Arabia’s King Kalid in Riyadh. The Saudis were convinced the United States supported the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, the destruction of Syria’s air force, and, just then, the start of Sharon’s siege of West Beirut. The ruthless attack on the Muslim quarter had every Islamic center seething. The undertone of the Saudis’ objections hinted at another embargo of oil shipments to the United States. Bush and Weinberger brought word of the possible catastrophe back to the White House. Ten years earlier, the Saudis had destroyed the American economy with an oil embargo and runaway inflation. Suddenly, Saudi sensitivities were injected into deliberations about Lebanon. Saudi prince Bandar bin Sultan gained the ear of Clark, Reagan’s national security adviser, and began pushing the US cease-fire plan with Syrian president Assad. He became an important channel between the White House and the PLO’s Yasser Arafat. When Haig got wind of Clark possibly undercutting State Department control of policy toward Arafat, he took his outrage to the Oval Office. Reagan listened. “Utterly paranoid” was his later judgment.
After the first full week of Sharon’s siege, Begin showed up in the Oval Office on June 21. The day before, Begin sought a temporary halt in the bombing of West Beirut. On the phone, Sharon refused, invoking his blanket excuse for all his actions: I have to protect our men. Haig had prepared the prime minister for the meeting with the American president. “Hold out for what you want,” Haig advised Begin. Begin opened by spotlighting Israel’s destruction of the Syrian air force on June 9. “The combination of American planes and Israeli pilots is an excellent commercial symbol,” Begin said. It was an allusion to multimillion-dollar US sales of warplanes to other nations. Reagan jumped to the ravaging of West Beirut. The president acknowledged the seriousness of the attack on Israel’s ambassador to London. “I was pretty blunt,” Reagan wrote in his diary. He doubted the attack “warranted the retaliation which has taken so many lives in Lebanon.” He urged Begin to move forward on the diplomatic front. “What’s done is done,” Reagan said. Reagan wanted Israel to join Syria in withdrawing forces from Lebanon, but he did not insist. The president was still supporting Israel’s strategy of ousting Syria and installing Bashir Gemayel as president of Lebanon. Even his fiery representative in the Mideast, Habib, favored the Gemayel endgame.
“It’s a complex problem,” Reagan wrote. “While we think his action was overkill it still may turn out to be the best opportunity we’ve had to reconcile the warring factions in Lebanon.” The wishful thinking reflected what the US intelligence community saw as a profound ignorance of Lebanon in the highest circles of the Reagan administration. Begin had gotten what he wanted from Reagan. The siege of Beirut raged on for six more weeks.
Haig, the architect of American support for Begin and Sharon since 1981, was toppled by one final temper tantrum. Three days after the Begin meeting, Haig submitted to the president a list of wrongs against the secretary of state by the White House staff. Their meeting also included orders from Haig to Habib that had not been approved by Reagan. In confronting Haig, Reagan asked what General Haig would do if a lower commander ignored his orders. “I would fire him,” Haig replied. The next day in the Oval Office, Reagan handed him an unsealed envelope. Inside was an unsigned letter of resignation for Haig. Haig asked for time to write his own letter noting their disagreements over major foreign policy issues. Reagan simply announced Haig’s resignation at the afternoon press briefing. “Actually, the only disagreement was over whether I made policy or the Sec. of State did,” Reagan wrote later. Haig was not quite finished. While George Shultz was named to replace him, Reagan had asked Haig to stay on until Shultz was confirmed by the Senate. In a huff, Haig decamped with his family to the Greenbrier, a luxury hotel in the mountains of West Virginia. All the secretary’s business—including orders to Habib—was relayed by phone and telex from the hotel 240 miles from Washington. The Vicar was finally defrocked on July 9, when a phone call from Reagan interrupted Haig in the ornate Greenbrier dining room. The president agreed with Shultz that Haig should turn over authority to an acting secretary. “Very little more was said,” Haig recounted. “I went in and finished my dinner.”
In August, the siege worsened in West Beirut. The oil kingdom’s renewed influence came in a telephone call to the White House two days after Sharon became unglued and ordered a 24-hour saturation bombing. At least 300 were killed. On August 12, the newly elevated King Fahd called from Riyadh. Reagan recounted the call in his diary. Fahd “was begging me to do something,” Reagan wrote. “I told him I was calling P.M. Begin immediately. And I did—I was angry—I told him it had to stop or our entire future relationship was endangered. I used the word holocaust deliberately & said the symbol of the war was becoming a picture of a 7-month-old baby with its arms blown off.”
Begin was stung. He had lost family in the Nazi purge of Jews in Poland. “The president said, ‘It’s a holocaust,’” Begin said. “He hurt me very deeply.” Watching the telephone exchange in the prime minister’s office was John Kifner of The New York Times. The furious Begin yelled to an aide to get “the picture.” Begin showed the photo to Kifner. “That’s a holocaust,” Begin said. It showed a small boy in a newsboy hat with his hands up, walking under the guns of Polish and Nazi troops. Reagan’s phone call stung enough that Begin cracked down on Sharon. He called a meeting of the cabinet. They voted to strip Sharon of authority to order air, sea, or ground attacks on West Beirut—without specific approval of Begin and the cabinet. It was the first of several Israeli government censures.
The king of Saudi Arabia was not the only Arab enraged by the combination of Sharon’s ruthlessness and American weapons. Engineering classes were interrupted at the American University of Beirut for a 19-year-old Shiite Muslim. His name was Imad Mughniyeh, and the siege filled him with anger that would soon be translated into the destruction of the US embassy in Beirut and the bombing of a makeshift barracks where 241 Americans died. Watching the weeks of bombardment on television also fed the hatred of a wealthy Saudi, Osama bin Laden.
At the time, in 1982, bin Laden told the British journalist Robert Fiske in 2004, “After the situation became unbearable—and we witnessed the injustice and tyranny of the American-Israeli alliance against our people in Palestine and Lebanon—I thought about it. And the events that affected me directly were those of 1982 and the events that followed—when America allowed the Israelis to invade Lebanon, helped by the US Sixth Fleet. As I watched the destroyed towers in Lebanon, it occurred to me to punish the unjust the same way: to destroy towers in America so it could taste some of what we were tasting and to stop killing our children and women.”
With growing support from the White House, Habib stepped up demands from Israel for a cease-fire. Since the Fourth of July, Habib had been formulating plans to expel the Arafat and PLO fighters from Beirut. To prevent Sharon from attacking the departing PLO, Habib was proposing a multinational military force to act as both protectors and escorts. Habib balked at including American forces in such a peacekeeping force. He was challenged by his deputy, Morris Draper. American forces were a must, Draper insisted.
Habib agreed. He proposed US Marines for the duty. Reagan quickly granted his approval.