Known and Unknown_ A Memoir - Donald Rumsfeld [8]
“My idea of American policy…is simple,” he told aides when asked his view on the Soviet Union. “We win and they lose.” Critics scoffed at that statement as simplistic bravado, but in truth it was a big idea, bold and transformative. For a number of years before Reagan took office, the architecture of the federal government and the foreign policy establishment had been built around the notion of peaceful coexistence, or “détente,” as it was called, with the Soviets. It was not fashionable to look at the Cold War as a win-lose proposition. The Soviet Union was considered more an unfortunate fact of life. But Reagan knew that major strategic changes in U.S. policy could be made by a president who had thought the subject through, was determined to redirect policy, and had an effective team of senior officials ready to implement his vision. The ultimate confirmation of his wisdom toward the Soviets, of course, is that President Reagan accomplished what he set out to do.
With regard to the crisis in Lebanon, Reagan’s words were similarly straightforward, even if things ended up turning out quite different than he’d initially hoped. On the Middle East, Reagan’s instincts were consistent with his policy against the Soviets: to use American strength to protect and encourage the aspirations of free people and to deter those who would break the peace. The President said we could not allow terrorists to drive us from Lebanon. At the same time, he was aware that when it came to the maneuverings of the Middle East, the United States was holding a difficult hand that would require substantial time and patience to play successfully. Those two commodities were in short supply. Reagan’s major national security focus was the Soviet Union, as it should have been at the height of the Cold War. For the time being at least, his goal in the Middle East was to try to bring about some modest degree of stability.
I told Reagan I would do my best to represent our country’s interests in the region. He thanked me for agreeing to come onboard at a difficult time for the country and pledged his support for the mission. Yet it was apparent that the “mission” wasn’t all that clear.
Throughout the Lebanon crisis, Reagan got the rhetoric right—he declared that America would not cower in the face of terror or abandon our friends in the region—but I could tell from our first meeting that formulating a consistent policy was going to be more difficult. It was hard to plant a standard toward a goal when there was little or no solid ground in which to set it.
After our discussion in the Oval Office, President Reagan and I walked to the White House press briefing room, where he introduced me as his special envoy to the Middle East.6 The press began with typical Washington-style queries. They noted that I was Reagan’s third Middle East envoy in three years, the latest diplomat being sent out to undertake the Sisyphean task of rolling a boulder up a never-ending hill. Why, some wondered, would I take such a “no-win job”? I responded that I simply wanted to be helpful, despite the difficulty of the challenge. But what I didn’t say was that I also had to try to manage expectations. As I told George Shultz, “I promise you will never hear out of my mouth the phrase ‘The U.S. seeks a just and lasting peace in the Middle East.’ There is little that is just, and the only things I’ve seen that are lasting are conflict, blackmail and killing—not peace.”7 I thought the best I could hope for was to make some modest progress. Under the circumstances I knew that even keeping things from getting worse in the Middle East could be valuable.8
Because I wasn’t on the federal payroll, I had hoped that would free me from some of the burdens of the federal bureaucracy. That was wishful thinking. A Department of State functionary decided I had to be classified technically as an “unpaid government employee.” As such, a legal title was needed for me so that they could determine which classification applied. Was I a State Department expert