Known and Unknown_ A Memoir - Donald Rumsfeld [9]
I did know Lebanon’s plight was agonizing, and that it had worsened since civil war broke out there in 1975. I had been serving as secretary of defense in the Ford administration when the Department of Defense (DoD) assisted in the evacuation of American citizens from the country. The Lebanese civil war ultimately claimed 150,000 lives, and by 1983, the loss of life was already monumental—“comparable to the United States losing ten million of its citizens,” Reagan declared that December.9 Hundreds of thousands of the most successful and educated Lebanese fled the country. The countryside outside Beirut came under the control of Lebanese militias that had little or no allegiance to the central government.
Complicating matters further, by the time of the 1983 Beirut bombing a large fraction of the country was occupied by Lebanon’s neighboring and rival foreign powers, Syria and Israel. The Syrians had a proprietary attitude toward Lebanon, which they considered part of greater Syria. Israel had invaded in June 1982 to protect its territory from the Palestinian terrorist camps that were operating inside Lebanon. The Syrians resented the Israeli occupation, the Israelis resented the Syrian occupation, and the Lebanese resented being occupied by anyone. In the middle of all this hostility was a small contingent of American military personnel as part of a multinational peacekeeping force.
From a safe distance in Washington, it was easy for American leaders to say that we’d never let terrorists defeat us in Lebanon or push us to withdraw. But it became apparent that fulfilling that pledge would have required far more than Americans were prepared to muster. There was little appetite anywhere—in the administration, in Congress, or among the American people—to increase our military commitment to Lebanon, especially after the outrage over the Beirut bombing dissipated.
Lebanon, I soon learned, was also the subject of intense debate even within the administration. Many in the Pentagon, including Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger, favored an early and complete withdrawal from the country. The American troops still on the ground were in largely indefensible positions and were being targeted by the Syrian-backed extremists. Because of the dangers they faced, the troops’ movements were severely restricted. They were using, as Weinberger later put it, “fruitless tactics in pursuit of unreachable goals.”* During his trip to Beirut after the bombings, even Vice President Bush, who publicly expressed support for our presence, privately characterized the pleas of Lebanon’s president for American support unpersuasive.11
On the other side of the issue was Secretary of State Shultz, who favored maintaining an American military presence to help stabilize the Lebanese government. The unpleasant alternative to that, Shultz pointed out, was to have the country become a client state of Syria or an ungoverned haven for terrorists and extremists. Shultz’s position was bolstered by a number of our strongest allies in the region. King Hussein of Jordan, for example, made it clear that if the United States were to leave Lebanon, we would essentially be out of the Middle East dynamic. Of greater concern, the King felt that without an American counterweight in Lebanon, Syria would likely turn its attention toward Jordan, and then to Saudi Arabia. Saddam Hussein told me during our meeting in Baghdad that he believed the United States had been indifferent to Syria’s initial invasion of Lebanon and had “let this group of lunatics bash each other.”12 It was an experience to be on the receiving end of a lecture from Saddam Hussein, especially when he might have been right.
I gravitated toward Shultz’s view. I believed that since we were there, we should keep some forces on the ground, and do so without