Known and Unknown_ A Memoir - Donald Rumsfeld [13]
Republican Senator Barry Goldwater was never one who had to be coaxed to offer his opinion. “We’re not helping one bit,” he said bluntly, “risking the lives of American Marines serving over there, trying to keep peace, when they’ve got a bunch of jackasses who want to kill each other. I’d get out of there and let them shoot.”9
Also troubling was the position of Illinois Senator Charles Percy, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. He was from the opposite end of the Republican spectrum from Goldwater and had previously been inclined to stick it out in Lebanon. But Percy was now saying withdrawal from Lebanon should take place “as soon as possible.”10 Indeed, there was a growing impression that a withdrawal might be ordered at any moment.
The way Syria operated during the Lebanon crisis provided an interesting insight into how smaller nations can manipulate a superpower. It also was a cautionary lesson for me in the future about how to deal with totalitarian regimes opposed to America’s national security interests.
The Syrian dictatorship possessed in the extreme two qualities particularly dangerous in a military adversary—ruthlessness and patience. Like all dictatorships, the regime had the advantage of not needing to cater to its domestic opinion. It could do whatever it deemed expedient to achieve its goals. The Syrians had been playing a diplomatic game with us for decades: doing just enough to look accommodating or coming up just shy of being too provocative. They played the international media like skilled poker players—offering public words of support for peace efforts so as to be seen as not unreasonable. The Syrians would float friendly diplomatic overtures to give the regime deniability when negotiations went off-track, as they had intended all along. This left them free to pursue their hostile interests behind the scenes: destabilizing the Lebanese government and supporting armed militias and terrorist groups. At other points, the Syrians dropped any pretense of cooperation and became immovable. Even during negotiations, Syrians and their then allies, the Druze, directed relentless artillery and rocket fire on the civilian population of Beirut.
The Syrians were savvy about the U.S. government. A Jordanian official told me the Syrians had analyzed America’s War Powers Resolution carefully. They knew that congressional support for our involvement in Beirut was fragile and vulnerable to the slightest shift of activity in the region.11 The Syrians believed correctly that they had the ability to force such a shift at their pleasure.
The obvious mixed signals the Syrians were receiving from Washington undoubtedly heightened that belief. Secretary Shultz and I observed that the Syrians were the most reasonable whenever the United States flew reconnaissance missions over their territories. They seemed sensitive to the proximity of American military power. When our flights were suspended, the Syrians became more intransigent. In mid-December 1983, the Department of Defense halted the reconnaissance flights without informing the State Department or our mission. It was done just at the moment we were trying to achieve concessions from the Syrian government. Even worse for American credibility, after assuring President Gemayel that the United States was going to continue to exert pressure on the Syrians, we heard through the grapevine that someone in the Department of State had tried to set up a separate, secret channel to make conciliatory overtures toward the Syrians. Here I was telling the Syrians there could be consequences for their actions while someone back in Washington was telling them just the opposite. Our delegation was blindsided.
None of these activities put