Known and Unknown - Donald Rumsfeld [10]
Unfortunately, the administration’s strategy faced another major impediment, namely the United States Congress. During the late phase of the Vietnam War, Congress had passed the War Powers Resolution, which required a withdrawal of American military forces deployed to another country within sixty to ninety days absent the explicit authorization of Congress.* The resolution, despite its questionable and still untested constitutionality, undercut the President’s ability to convince troublemakers of America’s staying power. It was clear to anyone with a newspaper that Congress wanted out.
So with the Reagan administration internally split over the policy, with Syria poised to exploit Lebanon’s chaos, with American deaths from the attack on the Marine barracks still being mourned, and with a ticking clock in the form of Congress ever present in our minds, I was sent to Lebanon to try to work out the problem. It brought to mind an observation former Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres once made to me: “If a problem has no solution, it is not a problem to be solved but a fact to be coped with over time.”
CHAPTER 2
Into the Swamp
For years, Beirut had been known as the “Paris of the Middle East”—a favored destination of Western and Arab tourists. Its high-rise hotels along the Corniche and its magnificent port made it a symbol of a modern Middle East. That, of course, was before their civil war began in 1975. I thought I had been prepared for what I would see on my arrival in Beirut eight years later, but the physical devastation was much worse than I had expected. By the time of my visit in late 1983, large sections of downtown and portions of the port had been reduced to rubble. Once elegant hotels were pockmarked from rockets and bullets. Even the presidential palace was scarred by rocket attacks. That was where I first met Lebanon’s beleaguered leader, who was struggling to hold his shattered country together.
I traveled throughout the region five times during my brief tenure as President Reagan’s Middle East envoy.
Amine Gemayel was not supposed to have been president but assumed the position upon the death of his brother, Bashir. Bashir Gemayel had been a radical politician for the Middle East: a young dynamic leader who vowed to reform the Lebanese political system and even broached the prospect of peace with israel. That was the sort of thinking that didn’t win friends among the potentates of the Arab League. Bashir’s assassination—linked to a Syrian terror group—resulted in his reserved, serious-minded brother taking charge of the shaken nation.
President Gemayel had been in office for a little over a year when I first met him. He was impeccably dressed—a reminder that had he wished to, he and his family had the resources to join other wealthy émigrés on the French Riviera.
Gemayel spoke for long periods at a time. He knew his country’s prospects, as well as his own, were precarious. Everywhere he turned he was faced by adversaries and rivals, both within and outside his own government. I was struck by his raw emotion. Gemayel had come to believe that the only hope for his government’s survival, and for his country, lay with the United States. As long as American and other multinational forces were in Lebanon to hold Syria at bay, Gemayel felt he might have the breathing room needed to fashion a coalition government and expand the government’s authority outside of Beirut.
I believed that as well, at least initially. But I also sensed that as the security situation in Lebanon deteriorated, the Lebanese had become increasingly dependent