In this chapter, we will look at the US intervention in Lebanon between 1982 and 1984. What we will see from this case study is that, in both Vietnam and Lebanon, the US Military and Colin Powell were extremely critical of the lack of a clear, militarily achievable objective being set for intervention and insisted that in the future the US policymakers must set clear and unambiguous objectives for any intervention. And how what happened in Lebanon served as further reinforcement to the lessons that those who created the intellectual climate behind the Powell Doctrine took from Vietnam.
In this chapter, we will again be dealing with the intellectual climate that led to the Powell Doctrine because the events of this chapter take place before either the publication of Powell’s 1992 Foreign Affairs article or Powell’s term as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. However, in this chapter, it is appropriate to refer to Powell’s personal opinions on the decision to intervene in Lebanon, and subsequent decisions as to how that intervention was carried out, as Powell was in a position to closely observe these events as a Military Assistant to the Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger. What we will see is that, in terms of developing the intellectual climate that led to the creation of the Powell Doctrine, the experience of the US Marines in Lebanon tended to act as a reminder of lessons that first emerged out of the US experience of the Vietnam War.
When looking at US interventions in Lebanon it is important to understand that there were actually two separate US military missions to Lebanon: the first took place in August 1982, and its purpose was to provide security for the safe evacuation of the Palestinian Liberation Organization’s (PLO) fighters and leadership from Beirut. I will argue that this mission was largely undertaken for reasons of prestige and so that the US could restore its position as a credible mediator in the Israeli-Arab conflict, which had been damaged by Israel’s decision to invade Lebanon. I will also argue that, whilst this first intervention can superficially be seen as a success, however because of poor co-ordination between the US military and diplomatic strategies, this first intervention did not achieve the objectives which US negotiators had hoped for. The caution of US commanders on the ground, coupled with the Secretary of Defense’s disinclination to be involved in Lebanon caused the US to fold the first international force in Lebanon prematurely. The second intervention was undertaken from September 1982 to February 1984. This second intervention had no clear objective either militarily or politically and was largely undertaken because of President Reagan’s revulsion at the suffering of Beirut’s civilian population, and because of these failings, both missions constituted a serious disagreement with the climate that led to the Powell Doctrine’s insistence on the need for clear and achievable objectives.
The discussion of the relationships between the various elements of the Powell Doctrine in this chapter will focus on how the intellectual climate that led to the Powell Doctrine’s call for clear objectives relates to the need for a clear “exit strategy” and the need for public support.
In order to understand the Reagan Administration’s decision to intervene in the Lebanese conflict, we need to understand the context in which this decision was made.
Lebanon has, since its creation in 1919, been an unstable mix of various confessional and ethnic groups. Lebanon was established as a majority Christian state, but, by the time of the Israeli invasion, this was no longer the case. This change in the balance of the population had led to a vicious civil war breaking out in 1975. Complicating the balance of forces in this civil war was the fact that Syria has never recognized Lebanon’s right to exist. Syria regarded Lebanon as part of its own national territory which had been stolen by the French at the end of the First World War. Syria used the Lebanese civil war as a pretext to station a large military force in Lebanon, ostensibly to keep the peace but, in reality, this force served to bring Lebanon under much greater Syrian control and helped guard against an Israeli strike at Syria through Lebanon. Since the mid-1970s, the South of Lebanon had become a focal point for Palestinian terrorism, directed against Israel. Lebanon represented the last safe haven for the PLO which bordered Israel. For this reason, tension between Israel, Lebanon, and the Palestinians had been growing and the south of Lebanon had become the scene of many small scale clashes between Israel and the PLO.1
By the summer of 1982, the situation facing Israel had become increasingly complex. The Syrian presence in Lebanon had been maintained and strengthened, despite the fact that the Civil War had settled into an uneasy truce, a UN force (United Nations Force In Lebanon—UNFIL) had been deployed in Southern Lebanon, with the aim of separating the PLO and Israel. However, the PLO regularly infiltrated into UNFIL’s area of operations but the presence of UN troops made it politically sensitive for the Israelis to strike back at the PLO.
The nature of the Israeli government also had a major impact on how the events of 1982 would unfold. The Likud Party had first come to power in the 1977 elections; this first Likud Government contained a number of more moderate members who had switched parties from the dominant Israeli Labor Party. Also, the coalition that Likud headed depended for its survival on the support of small centrist Parties. This first government contained many members whose first career had been in the military, in particular Foreign Minister Moshe Dayan and Defense Minister Ezer Weizman. This government had concluded the first ever peace treaty between Israel and one of its Arab neighbors by signing the Israeli-Egyptian Peace Treaty in 1979. Likud returned to power in 1980, but the make-up of the second government was very different. Although still led by Prime Minister Menachem Begin, and although this government was a coalition, because of the death of Dayan and Weizman’s retirement, this government had far fewer members with direct military experience and Begin had been forced by political circumstance to give the post of Minister of Defense to Ariel Sharon. Sharon was a man who raised very strong feelings among those who knew him:
Many Israelis viewed him as in one writer’s words, an “ultra-hawk with tendencies towards extreme action” In time he would make a powerful—and overwhelmingly negative—impression on American Diplomats. Under Secretary Lawrence Eagleburger was among the more restrained in describing Sharon as a “bull in the china shop” and a “rogue elephant” who “would hear what he wanted to hear.”2
Sharon had additional clout in that the Israeli elections had left the Likud party with a plurality of only one seat and Sharon controlled three votes. In fact, there is evidence to suggest that Begin’s decision to appoint Sharon had been the result of political blackmail. According to US Ambassador Samuel Lewis: “Arik [Sharon’s nickname] controlled three Likud votes—his own and two others. He threatened Begin that if he’d not become defense minister, he and his two friends would ‘take a walk’ and make the Likud a minority party.”3
Sharon believed that it had been a grave mistake for Israel to have allowed the Syrians to intervene in Lebanon in the first place.
Linked to this, Sharon had also been a long term advocate of what Israelis called “The Peripheral Strategy”:
The fact was that every Israeli government has wrestled with the profound difficulties of existing in isolation amid a sea of enemies. For Begin’s predecessors as Prime Minister, and mine as defense minister, one answer has always been to look for allies among the peripheral nations.*4
This was the idea that Israel should support other non-Muslim minorities within the greater Middle East. As part of this strategy, Sharon stepped up Israeli contact with the Christian forces inside Lebanon. Such contact had been going on since 1976 and Christian forces had received Israeli supplies of light arms and a form of military liaison had been maintained. Sharon added a significant amount of fuel to this fire; he personally travelled to Lebanon to meet with the Christian leadership, particularly with Bashir Gemayel, leader of the largest Christian faction. These discussions centered on the role that Lebanese Christian forces would play in the event that Israel launched a large scale invasion of Lebanon:
Escorting him throughout his tour was Bashir Gemayel, who showered his distinguished guests with every type of respect … Sharon lectured that there was no point in an action in Lebanon unless it was a thorough one, and no action against the PLO would be thorough unless it drove the terrorists out of Beirut.5
It is also clear from the account of this visit who Sharon expected to take care of matters in Beirut: “We should let the Phalange [Gemayel’s Christian militia group] take Beirut. We won’t have to enter the city at all; they’ll capture it instead.”6
Throughout 1981 and the first six months of 1982, tension between Israel, Lebanon and Syria steadily mounted. So much so that President Reagan appointed Special Envoy Philip Habib to negotiate a ceasefire and prevent a much larger confrontation. What Habib managed to negotiate was a simple ceasefire in place. From Sharon’s point of view, this ceasefire was fatally flawed. He pointed out that it did nothing to address the problem of PLO terrorist activity outside of Lebanon, but it tied Israel’s hands in terms of responding to it because the PLO’s headquarters and leadership were in Lebanon.
Even 30 years after the event, it is still extremely difficult to ascertain precisely what happened next. What we know for certain is this—In May 1982 Sharon visited Washington and had a series of meetings with US Secretary of State Alexander Haig. We know that in these meetings Sharon outlined the problems he saw with the ceasefire that Habib had negotiated, and he laid out how Israel intended to respond to any further PLO terrorist action. Recollections of exactly what Sharon told Haig vary according to the participant. However, what all the participants are in agreement with is that Haig said that the US would only support Israeli action if there was an “internationally recognized” violation of the ceasefire:
Late in May, while on an official visit to Washington, General Sharon shocked a room full of State Department bureaucrats by sketching out two possible military campaigns: one that would pacify Southern Lebanon and a second that would rewrite the political map of Beirut in favor of the phalange. It was clear that Sharon was putting the United States on notice; one more provocation by the Palestinians and Israel would deliver a knockout blow to the PLO.7
Haig’s reaction to this surprising news was a mixture of shock and anger:
In a strenuous argument with Sharon, in the presence of my staff, I challenged these plans, after the meeting, so that there could be no question that I was playing to an audience, I invited Sharon into my office and told him privately, in the plainest possible language, what I had repeated to him and Begin and their colleagues many times before; unless there was an internationally recognized provocation and unless Israeli retaliation was proportionate to any such provocation, an attack by Israel into Lebanon would have a devastating effect in the United States.8
Interestingly in light of all the subsequent claims of misunderstanding, Sharon’s account of the meeting is not dissimilar to Haig’s:
Both Habib and Haig stressed that there would have to be an “internationally recognized provocation” and that if Israel took any kind of ‘disproportionate action’ it would create the most severe consequences within the United States.9
Sharon does not seem to have been intimidated by Haig’s dire threats. “I had not come to Washington to get American approval for whatever we decided to do, but to let them know, as friends and allies, exactly where we stood.”10
In early June the Israeli ambassador in London was assassinated by Palestinian terrorists. Although the evidence seems to suggest that the PLO was not involved in the assassination, at the time there was at least enough doubt about who was responsible to make the Israeli Cabinet consider retribution against the PLO: “Scotland Yard had yet to issue a formal statement on the episode, but the attack was most probably the work of the terrorist group headed by Abu Nidal”11: the Israeli Cabinet was not in the mood for convoluted explanations about the differences between various Palestinian groups. What they knew for certain was that an ambassador had been assassinated and that this constituted an attack on the state of Israel. Before Israeli officials could begin to explain the evidence, Prime Minister Begin pronounced “they’re all PLO.”12 Chief of Defense Staff Raphael Eitan was even less interested in nuance. “Before entering the cabinet room, he had been informed by one of his intelligence men that Abu Nidal’s men were evidently responsible for the assault. ‘Abu Nidal, Abu Shmidal, we have to strike at the PLO!’”13
The Israeli Cabinet decided to approve air strikes on PLO targets in Beirut, something it had only ever approved once before. These air strikes provoked the inevitable Palestinian response and towns and settlements all across northern Israel sustained prolonged artillery bombardment. Shortly thereafter Israeli troops crossed the Lebanese border in three main thrusts; one column headed up the coast towards Beirut, the other two columns moved to cut the main highway between Beirut and Damascus. This inevitably led to confrontation with the Syrian forces stationed in Lebanon, who were in imminent danger of being cut off.
By early August the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) had reached the outskirts of Beirut. They had linked up with Christian forces and were now faced with the problem of how to remove several thousand PLO fighters from a city with a population of over half a million.
US diplomacy in the run up to the Lebanon war had been characterized by a deteriorating relationship with Israel that was punctuated by the Israelis repeatedly ignoring their closest ally and now they were poised on the brink of attacking an Arab capital for the first time in full view of the world’s media.
It is safe to assume that part of the motivation for the US’s subsequent military involvement in Lebanon was due to a desire to show on the one hand that the Israelis were making a sizable mistake by ignoring the US and to demonstrate to the rest of the Middle East that the US was not complicit with the Israelis. On top of this was the realization that Israel was engaged in a brutal siege using mostly American manufactured weapons. The consequences for the US’s diplomatic position in the Middle East, should this situation be allowed to stand, could have been potentially catastrophic. As well as this stark geopolitical reality was the fact that the siege of Beirut was broadcast live around the world and senior American policy makers, particularly President Reagan, felt a sense of outrage at what Israel was doing. The following is an extract from President Reagan’s diary: “I told Begin it had to stop or our entire future relationship was endangered. I used the word ‘Holocaust’ deliberately. ‘Menachem, this is a Holocaust.’”14 These factors taken together serve to explain why the Reagan Administration undertook its first military intervention in Lebanon.
The idea of deploying some kind of international force to Beirut had obvious appeal to anyone trying to negotiate a peaceful resolution to the siege. The Israelis would not end the siege until the PLO had been evicted from Beirut and preferably the whole of Lebanon, and the PLO was not going to leave Beirut unless it had some guarantee of safe passage for its fighters and some assurance that the civilian Palestinian population would be safe after they had left.
An international force could provide the means by which the PLO could safely leave by placing itself between them and the Israelis. President Reagan had, from an early point, been willing to consider the commitment of US troops in order to police a settlement. When Ambassador Habib began to float the notion of an international force, he asked both the Joint Chiefs of Staff in Washington and the Lebanese Government to estimate the size of the force that would be needed to permit the safe evacuation of PLO fighters and to provide temporary security to the civilian population of Beirut. The Lebanese Government came back with a figure of 250,00015. Habib dismissed this as ridiculously over the top and completely impractical. Instead, he settled on a force of 800 Americans, 800 French and 600 Italian soldiers.
Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger was deeply skeptical about the idea of putting US troops in Lebanon. First, because he believed that the US interest in the outcome of the Lebanese crisis was not strong enough to merit the risk to US personnel; second, because he believed that the US might find itself in a situation where it was engaged in hostilities against an Arab enemy, as this would serve to undermine the US’ position in the Middle East. Finally, because Weinberger feared that the deployment of small numbers of US troops to such a volatile part of the world carried with it the risk that the US would get sucked into deeper and deeper commitment, and that this would distract funding and political attention away from the enormous defense build-up that the Reagan Administration was undertaking. Weinberger himself is tight lipped about the reasons for his opposition to American participation in the Multinational Force, limiting himself to saying that: “General Vessey [General John Vessey, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff] and I argued that we should not be one of the participants; but this argument we lost.”16
At this point, we will look at how the first US mission in Lebanon was seen as lacking clear, well-defined, militarily achievable objectives, and how this criticism leveled at the US mission in Lebanon tended to reinforce lessons already learned by those who would contribute to the intellectual climate that produced the Powell Doctrine, and how the perceived mistakes made in Lebanon was seen as confirmation of the validity of those lessons, and how and why, despite misgivings from the Military because of the lessons of Vietnam, the US intervention in Lebanon was still undertaken.
In analysing the Marines’ mission in Beirut in retrospect, certain members of the US Military have been scathing in their criticism of what they see as a poorly defined, open-ended mission:
The introduction of US forces into Lebanon without a thoughtful risk assessment by senior leaders and in the absence of a realistic and unified strategic concept of how they should be employed was a miscalculation of considerable proportion. When coupled with an inability to simultaneously and effectively use the other elements of power in connection with the military application, it was clearly a recipe for disaster.17
Commander Steven K. Westra, writing in the US military journal Small Wars, goes even further in criticizing what he sees as the simultaneously grandiose but uncoordinated strategy of the Reagan Administration:
These goals, by any standards of foreign policy, were highly aggressive and extremely difficult to achieve. There existed no coordinated plan on how to resolve the complex religious and political antecedents of the civil war itself. American policy pursued the withdrawal of Israeli and Syrian forces from Lebanon.18
Just how ill-defined and sweeping US goals in Lebanon were can be seen by the National Security Decision Directives (NSDD) issued by Reagan.
Our strategy for this next phase in the restoration of Lebanon has two principal objectives. First, we seek, and we will facilitate, the prompt disengagement and quickest orderly withdrawal of Israeli, Syrian and Palestinian armed forces from Lebanon. Second, we must strengthen the ability of the Government of Lebanon to control, administer, and defend its sovereign territory.19
Here we can see a clear parallel between Lebanon and Vietnam. National Security Action Memorandum 288 (NASM),20 issued by Lyndon Johnson in 1964, gave similarly sweeping objectives for US forces to achieve in Vietnam:
We seek an independent non-Communist South Vietnam. We do not require that it serve as a Western base or as a member of a Western alliance. South Vietnam must be free, however, to accept outside assistance as required to maintain its security. This assistance should be able to take the form not only of economic and social measures but also police and military help to root out and control insurgent elements.21
Neither the NSDD nor the NSAM spelled out in any detail how the deployment of US troops was related to the broader objectives set for the United States.
Kasperski and Crockett clearly see the major political implications behind the rather bland and bureaucratic language used in Reagan’s Directive.
American policy sought to end the civil war, secure the withdrawal of Israeli and Syrian forces, prop-up the minority Maronite Christian government, secure a homeland for the Palestinians, and win a de-facto victory over the Soviet Union by evicting the Syrians from Lebanon.22
The notion that objectives for US military intervention ought to be maintained within the realm of what it is possible for military force to achieve on its own goes back to the attempt by the US Army to try and understand the lessons of Vietnam, and was an important component in creating the intellectual climate that created the Powell Doctrine. Summers notes that, when it came to trying to define US goals in Vietnam, the guidance the Johnson Administration gave to its commanders was at the very least divergent:
Even a cursory mission analysis reveals two divergent specified tasks. The first specified task—“To assist the Government of Vietnam and its armed forces to defeat externally directed and supported communist subversion and aggression”—is clearly a legitimate military objective, albeit one difficult to accomplish. The second specified task—to “attain an independent South Vietnam functioning in a secure environment”—is more a political than a military objective. The confusion over objectives inherent in the MACV mission statement was to plague our conduct of the war.23
In a series of interviews conducted with officers holding the rank of Major General or above during the Vietnam conflict, Colonel Douglas Kinnard, in his attempt to evaluate the lessons that the Senior Officer Corps in Vietnam drew from its experiences, found that US objectives in Vietnam were vague to the point that 68 percent of the most senior officers managing the war either did not understand or only partially understood what US objectives were. Two of the most striking comments recorded by Kinnard on an anonymous basis conveyed just how little understood US objectives were: “The national objective in Vietnam was never clear to anyone” and “Objectives lost meaning and were modified to justify events.”24 Given these lessons taken from Vietnam, it is easy to see why the likes of Westra, Kasparski, and Crockett, plus Caspar Weinberger and Colin Powell, as we shall see later, were extremely reluctant to commit US troops to Lebanon and absolutely determined that, if the US Military was forced to enter Lebanon, it would be there for the shortest amount of time possible.
Secretary of State George Schultz’s department had a different view of the Marines’ utility in Lebanon. The new Secretary of State supported the idea of US troops being sent to Lebanon because he agreed with Habib that US participation was the only way that the international force would be credible to all sides of the conflict. On a more general philosophical level, Schultz was a firm believer in the idea that, in order to be successful, diplomacy in the final analysis had to be backed up by military force and that this held true not just in the context of a major crisis with the Soviet Union but for US diplomacy in regional conflicts around the world:
A stable Lebanon could be a bridge country in the middle-east; a Lebanon dominated by Syria and the Soviet Union would contribute to tension and constitute a site for threats against Israel. Lebanon had taken the brunt of turmoil from Middle East problems. Peace in Lebanon could contribute to peace elsewhere.25
Ultimately what guaranteed that the US would participate were not the diplomatic or military arguments between Shultz and Weinberger; rather, it was President Reagan’s dismay at the brutality of the siege of Beirut and revulsion at the prospect at what might happen if the siege was not brought to a peaceful end:
During that period the President was increasingly worried and unhappy about the fate of the people living in Beirut, including many American citizens. He was very critical of the Israelis’ use of force and particularly their use of the CBU or “cluster” bomb units, which had been given to Israel to use in their own defense; they had used them in urban areas, inflicting heavy casualties on civilians. As a result the President was a strong supporter of the plan to send in the first MNF.26
The two most important conditions attached to US participation were that, the French contingent would arrive and deploy a week ahead of the Americans in order that US troops could deploy in an environment that was relatively secure. This had a number of implications for the evacuation. The Israelis did not trust the French, seeing them as pro-PLO and unlikely to be strict about disarming Palestinian forces before they were evacuated. This meant that the Israelis refused to allow the evacuation to commence before the American contingent arrived, which in turn meant that the relationship between the MNF and the IDF got off to an acrimonious start. The second major caveat that the Pentagon placed upon US involvement was the agreement of all parties that the MNF would not remain in Lebanon after the removal of all PLO fighters from Beirut. This arrangement meant that at the end of the evacuation there would be nobody, apart from the enfeebled Lebanese Government, to provide security to the civilian Palestinian population.
This in an atmosphere in which Lebanon’s other ethnic and religious groups, in particular the Christians, bore a deep resentment towards Palestinian refugees and wished, if possible, to remove all Palestinians from Lebanon. Ambassador Habib was acutely aware of the danger of a security vacuum developing in Beirut:
Intrinsic to his [Habib’s] plan all along had been the idea that the MNF would be on the ground for about 30 days. The presence for three weeks or so beyond the evacuation was to serve two purposes. To help smooth the transition from Anarchy to Lebanese rule, and to protect the remaining Palestinian civilians. Once the PLO fighters were gone, the families that they left behind would have no other protection from their enemies, the Israelis and the Phalange. The PLO fighters would not have left without Habib’s guarantee of the civilians’ safety.27
The Marine commander, Col. James Mead, was in no doubt about how strongly Habib felt on this issue:
Habib was absolutely furious when there was any discussion of not going the full 30 days. We told our chain of command “hey, we need to hang tough here for a little bit longer to get done what the ambassador wants done.” But no, boom, we got the order.28
Secretary of Defense Weinberger had a very different view of how complete the Marines’ mission in Beirut was. Weinberger was determined that the Marines should leave as soon as the evacuation of the PLO was complete:
I judged the MNF action to be a complete success because with virtually no losses, we had not only taken out the PLO army, one of the principal magnets for an Israeli house to house attack through Beirut, but we had removed a principal cause of instability in Lebanon itself. With this first MNF, we also had greatly eased conditions for all the people living in Beirut.29
Weinberger persuaded President Reagan to withdraw the Marine contingent from Beirut only seven days after their deployment.
This ignored both the text and the spirit of the agreement that Ambassador Habib had spent the better part of three months arranging, and which was a complex series of interlocking obligations and agreements between all parties to the conflict. Once the US had made the decision to withdraw, the French and Italian contingents had no choice but to follow suit. And 10 days after the end of the evacuation, the first multi-national force in Lebanon folded.
The MNF withdrawal left a complete security vacuum in west Beirut. This potentially dangerous situation exploded into violence with the assassination of President-elect Bashir Gemayel. Gemayel had been one of the key leaders of Lebanon’s Maronite Christian community. He was a charismatic, if somewhat bloodstained politician. His supporters believed that he would end the domination of the ageing political class that had governed Lebanon since its independence. They also believed that he would rid Lebanon of the Palestinian refugees they blamed for causing the civil war. Even his opponents believed that he was the best man to be President of Lebanon at the time because he was the only Christian politician with enough popularity to convince the Christians that they would be better off living in a united and pluralist Lebanon instead of a Christian Microstate. Exactly who was behind the assassination is a matter of controversy but what happened next is not.
The IDF occupied west Beirut in order to maintain order. However, the other powerful motivation for this occupation was Sharon’s conviction that the PLO had left behind a substantial number of fighters in the Palestinian refugee camps. The prospect of Israeli troops having to fight in the refugee camps was one of the key reasons why the Israelis were persuaded to accept the PLO’s evacuation. The Israeli plan now was to use their allies to fight for them. Predictably given the atmosphere, the operation to clear the Palestinian refugee camps turned into a slaughter.
The withdrawal of the multinational force was one of the major contributing factors to this massacre. Because of the withdrawal there was no neutral force capable of providing security in west Beirut. The multinational force, had it been on the ground, could easily have been redeployed to the refugee camps to ascertain what truth, if any, there was to Sharon’s suspicions. The PLO would have had no interest whatsoever in opening fire on Western troops and thus alienating American and European opinion at the very moment when it was at its weakest. The same logic holds equally true for Gemayel’s followers. They would have had no interest in antagonizing the US right at the moment that they were leaderless with no guarantee for the future of the Christian community in Lebanon. But the US military establishment’s fear of expanding a mission once its “objectives” had been achieved, proved stronger than its ability to see the need for a third party to provide minimal security during the transition between the PLO’s evacuation and the re-establishment of some kind of Lebanese government authority.
After the appalling loss of life in the camps, President Reagan authorized a second multi-national force to establish a “presence” in Beirut, and to help the Lebanese government regain control over its territory. I will now move on to look at how US participation in the second MNF unfolded, and how the US role in Lebanon came to a tragic end. The objective for US forces was, again, both vague and sweeping at the same time.
The following were the orders issued to the Marines outlining the nature and scope of their mission:
To establish an environment which will permit the Lebanese Armed Forces to carry out their responsibilities in the Beirut area. When directed, USCINCEUR [US Commander in Chief Europe] will introduce US forces as part of a multinational force presence in the Beirut area to occupy and secure positions along a designated section of the line from south of the Beirut International Airport to a position in the vicinity of the Presidential Palace; be prepared to protect US forces; and, on order, conduct retrograde [logistical] operations as required.30
The idea of a “presence” mission was an entirely new concept. The Marine commander on the ground Colonel James Mead appears to have been pretty much left to make up his own definition of his mission:
The imprecision of the “presence” phase in Col Jim Mead’s mission directive provided this able and ambitious officer with a crucial role in the command structure reaching down from the Oval Office. Indeed, Mead’s responsibility for conducting US foreign policy in Lebanon became, at the turn of a phrase, unique in modern American military and diplomatic annals.31
Despite the occasional verbal slip in press conferences by President Reagan, the mission of US forces in Lebanon was never one of peace keeping. There were far too few troops committed to the force to make that practical. The US contingent of the second MNF was deployed at Beirut International Airport, with a small force detailed to protect the US Embassy.
The deployment of the second MNF was in many ways everything the US Military had come to fear after the end of Vietnam. Civilian policy makers had no idea how to solve Lebanon’s considerable problems, they had no idea what they wanted from US involvement in Lebanon, but the images of suffering that came from Lebanon, and the possibilities that the Soviets might exploit this for their own ends, plus their own revulsion at what they were seeing, led them to the conclusion that the US had to do something and had to be seen doing something about the situation. Therefore, they would commit a small number of troops in order to demonstrate their commitment, and with the vague hope that somehow this deployment would act as a spur to diplomacy.
For the Marines on the ground, their nebulous mission was both frustrating and potentially dangerous. On the one hand, the fact that they were in Beirut at all, made them tempting targets for any Lebanese faction that wished to put pressure on the US. This was equally true of the Syrians who, since the Camp David agreement, had been trying to force the US to take it seriously as a regional power. The Syrians engaged in a complicated game with the US in Lebanon. They supported the various anti-American groups in Lebanon, just enough so that they would make the US presence difficult to maintain, but not enough to lead to a complete breakdown in their relationship with Washington. In addition to this already combustible mixture, the Iranian government, seeing an opportunity to hurt the US, who was at that time supporting their Iraqi enemies, began to spend substantial amounts of money and personnel to train various militant Shia groups. Colin Powell from his position as Weinberger’s military aide considered the Marines’ mission in Beirut moronic:
What I saw from my perch in the Pentagon was America sticking its hand into a thousand year old hornet’s nest with the expectation that our mere presence might pacify the hornets … lives must not be risked until we can face a parent or a spouse or a child with a clear answer to the question of why a member of that family had to die. To “provide a symbol” or “a presence” is not good enough.32
The US Marines in Beirut were operating according to peacetime rules governing the use of force and combat readiness because the Reagan Administration did not want to make it seem like US forces were actively involved in a civil war. This placed the Marines in an entirely reactive posture. They were only allowed to return fire at clearly identifiable targets, they were only permitted to return fire to the extent necessary to guarantee their own safety, and they were not allowed to initiate any kind of combat or action which might lead to combat. This set of restrictions totally seeded the initiative to whatever group wished to use Marine casualties to make a point. Yet at the same time, sooner or later, when the Marines did act to defend themselves, this would be taken by all parties to the conflict as a sign of American partiality.
The Americans also had their share of problems with the Israelis. Because the mission of the Marines was so ill defined and because the conditions under which they could employ force were so strict, the Americans often ended up acting as a buffer between the Israelis to the south of Beirut airport, and the Muslim militia to the north. This meant that the Israelis could not effectively return fire at enemy targets without running the risk of catching the MNF in a crossfire. There were also repeated incidents of Israeli tanks deliberately encroaching on the airport perimeter which led to increasingly bitter arguments, and, in at least one case, a stand-off involving loaded weapons.
With the deployment of the second MNF, Ambassador Habib began a second frantic round of shuttle diplomacy to try and secure the mutual withdrawal of Israeli and Syrian forces. The Israelis would not withdraw without a peace treaty with Lebanon and assurances that southern Lebanon would be demilitarized, and that the Syrians would leave. The Syrians would not withdraw unless the Israelis withdrew first. They would not accept a peace treaty between Lebanon and Israel and rejected any Israeli attempt to dominate southern Lebanon. By May 7, 1983, Habib had agreed a rough framework by which the Israelis would withdraw, but they would be allowed to continue to supply Christian forces in southern Lebanon, and an agreement on limited diplomatic recognition and the movement of goods. However, this agreement was subject to the Syrians agreeing to withdraw at the same time; this effectively gave Syria a veto which it promptly used. The failure of the May 7th agreement removed the last logical reason why the MNF should remain. There was now no prospect of foreign forces withdrawing from Lebanon, or of the Lebanese government re-establishing its authority. There would be no environment in which the MNF could provide any kind of meaningful assistance to the Lebanese government and there was no thought of making the MNF strong enough or giving it a mandate to forcibly remove the occupying armies.
Why then did it take until November 1983 for the second MNF to be withdrawn? Here again we see parallels to Vietnam and the reasons why the US remained committed in spite of the fact it had no clear or achievable objective.
First, in both cases there was the hope that some new factor or diplomatic initiative would change the situation for the better and that the mere presence of US forces in whatever number or capacity would give Washington an important bargaining chip in some hypothetical negotiations. The problem with this line of argument is that no-one in the case of either Lebanon or Vietnam had the faintest clue where this new initiative would come from, or what it might look like. The reaction of high powered politicians in both cases was all too human. The belief that if they just hung on a little bit longer, some drastic new development would come and spare them from the painful admission that they had been wrong in the first place and that US casualties had been in vain:
What the president did not want to do, above all, was to pull out of Lebanon immediately, to be seen as running away as a result of the tragedy that had taken place. To the contrary, the barracks bombing seemed to strengthen his resolve to stay.33
These casualties themselves were an important factor in the stubborn refusal to withdraw. Once blood had been shed, both Presidents Johnson and Reagan were keen to show that they would not be intimidated by the death of US soldiers and that they personally were tough enough to accept losses and not be deflected from the “right” policy. These casualties also made it harder to withdraw because there is a sense in which politicians want to be able to give meaning to the sacrifices that they have asked for. Nobody wants to admit that they asked another man to die for an unclear and unachievable objective. The problem with both lines of logic is that one death does not justify more death, and that there is a difference between being intimidated and simply doing the right thing once the facts on the ground change.
Finally, there was a sense in both Lebanon and Vietnam that the world was watching and that other nations would judge their future actions by what they saw the US doing. The USA could not afford to be seen as weak; in Vietnam it needed to show that it was capable of standing up to Communist aggression, and in Lebanon it needed to show that it was not so traumatized by the experience of Vietnam that it could not resort to military measures when the situation required it. Additionally, in both cases, there was a sense in which the US was attempting to draw a line against a new type of threat. In the case of Vietnam this meant Communist revolutionary warfare, in the case of Lebanon it meant terrorism. The problem with this logic is that it assumes that vastly different regional and global problems are somehow related and that, because of this, the US has no freedom of action to respond to different situations in different ways, and second it assumes that the wider world only respects US strength and not US discretion. There is nothing wrong with great powers carefully choosing to intervene in those situations where their intervention can make a difference, and refusing to intervene in those situations where it can make no positive contribution.
We will now move on to look at how the insistence on clear objectives relates to the rest of the intellectual climate leading to the Powell Doctrine, in particular how it relates to Chapter 5, the need for an “exit strategy,” and Chapter 3, the need for public support.
The linkage between the need for clear objectives and the need to build public support should be clear enough. It is hard to build public support around ideas that you cannot succinctly and clearly define. The public are more likely to support action where the aims of the US are easily understood and Congress is more likely to vote to fund operations that they can see have some clear purpose. The drawback to this is that the need for clarity may tempt the President to paint the mission of US forces in overly stark terms in order to make it easy for the public to understand why US forces are involved in a particular situation. In other words, just because a President can put things across in simple and clear terms, it is not the same as them being simple and clear to the Military on the ground, and a search for clarity can easily turn into gross oversimplification of complex and evolving situations.
The need for public support and the need to state the mission to US forces clearly—both of these elements of the intellectual climate leading to the Powell Doctrine can be used to help define a third element: the idea that US military intervention should be in the national interest. If the national interest cannot be objectively defined, then perhaps the closest any Administration can come is to gain public support for an honest and clear plan of their intentions. The decision to send the Marines to Beirut clearly did not follow this logic. The Reagan Administration was never able to accurately and coherently explain what their purpose was. The reason it was never able to explain to the public the purpose of the Marines’ presence was that the Administration itself was divided on what that purpose was or should be.
The intellectual climate leading to the Powell Doctrine also calls for US forces not to be deployed overseas without a clear “exit strategy” being defined. The need for clear objectives can be seen as a prerequisite to this. If you do not know clearly what it is that you wish to achieve, how can you ever say that you have been successful or, indeed, how can you ever say you have failed. Thus policy makers have no point of reference to decide when it is time for American forces to leave. The second MNF is a classic example of this logic breaking down. Because the Reagan Administration did not really know what the Marines wanted to achieve in Beirut there was no way of putting any kind of time scale on their presence. There was not even a set of criteria under which the Marines could be said to have succeeded in their mission. Consequently, Marines occupied positions at Beirut airport, month after month, while Washington hoped that their presence would produce some kind of a result right up until the Marine Barracks were bombed, there were no plans to withdraw US troops. The fact of the matter is that US forces were forced out by the weight of domestic opinion demanding that they come home. Had the bombing not taken place, there is no telling how long the Reagan Administration would have maintained a US military presence in Lebanon or what it would have been able to achieve.
Of course the problem with having preconceived notions of what it is that you want to achieve is that they do not actually correspond to the situation on the ground. We can see this clearly in the first US mission to Lebanon in 1982. The Military has a preconceived notion that all it was in Lebanon to do was to guarantee the safe evacuation of the PLO from Beirut. However, as we have seen, this preconception completely ignored not only Lebanon’s complex political situation but both the text and spirit of agreements that the US had actually entered into. What this shows us is that, whilst it is important, the Military should only be used in situations where its use has some clear purpose. It must also be flexible enough to adapt to conditions on the ground.
What we have seen in this chapter is that the mistakes made in Vietnam and Lebanon over how the US defined the objectives of military intervention were very similar. What we have also seen is that the US commitment of Marines in Lebanon was undertaken without a thorough analysis and an agreed upon definition of what it was exactly that the United States was trying to achieve in Lebanon, and without sufficient thought being given to how a deployment of only 800 Marines could bring about what were very sweeping, very nebulous goals that the Reagan Administration set itself.
1 The following is just a sample of a wide body of literature dealing with Lebanese political history and culture: Dilip Hiro, Lebanon: Fire and Embers: A History of the Lebanese Civil War (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1993); Richard Augustus Norton, Amal and the Shi’a Struggle for the Soul of Lebanon (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1987); Richard Gabriel, Operation Peace for Galilee: The Israel-PLO War in Lebanon (New York: Hill and Wang, 1984); and Jonathan Randall, Going all the Way: Christian Warlords, Israeli Adventurers and American Bunglers (New York: Viking Press, 1983).
2 John Boykin, Cursed is the Peacemaker. The American Diplomat versus the Israeli General, Beirut 1982 (Belmont, CA: Applegate Press, 2002), p.48.
3 Boykin 2002, p. 49.
4 Ariel Sharon, Warrior: An Autobiography (London: Macdonald, 1989) p.422.
* Sharon is referring to non-Arab nations on the edge of the Greater Middle East—examples include Iran, Sudan, Chad, and, crucially, Lebanon. For a critical analysis of the evolution of Israeli security doctrine, see: Avi Shlaim, The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World (London: Penguin, 2001).
5 Z. Schiff and E. Ya’Ari, Edited and translated by Ina Friedman, Israel’s Lebanon War (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1984), p.49.
6 Schiff and Ya’Ari 1984, p.49.
7 Alexander Haig, Caveat: Realism, Reagan, and Foreign Policy (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1984), p.335.
8 Haig 1984, p.335.
9 Warrior, p.451.
10 Sharon 1989, p.451.
11 Israel’s Lebanon War, p.98.
12 Schiff and Ya’Ari 1984, p.98.
13 Schiff and Ya’Ari 1984, p.98.
14 Richard Reeves, President Reagan: The Triumph of Imagination (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2005), p.124.
15 This argument between Habib and the military rumbled on for some time before Habib just announced what the final figure would be in a plan he came up with entirely by himself. For a painstaking review of this argument see: John Boykin, Cursed is the Peacemaker: The American Diplomat versus the Israeli General, Beirut, 1982 (Belmont, CA: Applegate Press, 2002).
16 Caspar Weinberger, Fighting for Peace: Seven Critical Years in the Pentagon (New York: Warner Books, 1991), p.44.
17 Lieutenant Colonel John E. Kasperski USMC and Major Benjamin D. Crockett USA, 2004. The quote is taken from an unpublished manuscript of a study undertaken by, as part of a course at the Joint Forces Staff College: Joint and Combined War Fighting School in March 2004. Available at: http://www.jfsc.ndu.edu/current_students/documents_policies/documents/jca_cca_awsp/US_Involvemement_Lebanon_4–7-04.doc [Accessed October 18, 2007].
18 Lieutenant Commander Steven, K, Westra, USN. 1993. Beirut’s Lesson for Future Foreign Policy, Small Wars. [Online]. Available at: http://www.smallwarsjournal.com/documents/westra.htm [Accessed October 20, 2007].
19 NSDD was the designation used by the Reagan Administration for national security policy documents; other Administrations have used different acronyms. The Directives were issued in chronological order, rather than by subject area. Not all of Reagan’s Directives are publically available and some are only available in heavily edited form. The online source of all publically disclosed Directives is: http://www.fas.org/irp/offdocs/nsdd/index.html. The Reagan Presidential Library also holds paper copies of all NSDDs.
20 National Security Action Memoranda perform the same function as NSDDs performed in the Reagan Administration.
21 Douglas Kinnard, The War Managers: American Generals Reflect on Vietnam (New York: Da Capo Press, 1991), p.18.
22 Kasperski and Crockett.
23 Harry G. Summers, On Strategy: A Critical Analysis of the Vietnam War (New York: Dell Publishing, 1982), p.144.
24 The War Managers, p.25.
25 George P. Shultz, Turmoil and Triumph: My Years as Secretary of State, (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1993), p.232.
26 Fighting for Peace, p.144.
27 Cursed is the Peacemaker, p.266.
28 Boykin 2002, p.266.
29 Fighting for Peace, pp.144–5.
30 US Department of Defense, 1983. Report of the DOD Commission on Beirut International Airport Terrorist Act. [Online]. Available at: http://ftp.ibiblio.org/hyperwar/AMH/XX/MidEast/Lebanon-1982–1984/DOD-Report/Beirut-1.html [Accessed October 30, 2007].
31 Eric Hammel, The Root: The Marines in Beirut (San Diego: Pacifica Press 1985) p.38. Emphasis in original.
32 Colin Powell with Joseph E. Persico, My American Journey (New York: Ballantine Books, 1996), p.281.
33 Robert C. McFarlane with Zofia Smardz, Special Trust (New York: Cadell & Davies, 1994), p.268.