Known and Unknown - Donald Rumsfeld [12]
I normally would have worked from the U.S. embassy in Beirut. But it had been closed after a bombing several months earlier that had killed sixty-three people. So instead my staff and I worked out of the American ambassador’s residence some distance from the capital. Unfortunately, the ambassador’s residence was hardly more secure than the embassy had been. It was shelled periodically, but there was no basement or shelter. As a result, during some of the attacks we spent time working under a staircase, which provided the best available cover.
One evening I left the ambassador’s residence to go to a small shack in the complex that contained the communications equipment needed to contact Washington, D.C. Our mission’s indispensable chief of staff, Tom Miller, and Ambassador Reg Bartholomew were with me. The shack contained two small rooms, a phone, and several radios. There was a small window with an air-conditioning unit in it. Just outside the shack, a SUV was parked near a tree.
When I made contact with the Secretary of State, he told me that he just had spoken with my wife, Joyce, who had been seeing reports on Chicago television and in the newspapers about the bombing and rocket attacks in Beirut, some of them in the areas where I was located.
“I talked with Joyce and reassured her,” Shultz said confidently. “I told her you had the best security possible and you were safe.”
At almost that exact moment, there was a loud explosion. A 122 millimeter Soviet-made Grad rocket hit the car just outside the shack. The impact of the explosion blew the air conditioner out of the window and across Tom Miller’s shoulder. A typewriter flew between Bartholomew’s and my heads, and I was thrown to the floor. As I scrambled back to continue the call with Shultz, I realized the phone line was dead. We, fortunately, were not.
In late December 1983, Secretary of Defense Weinberger received crucial support for a prompt and complete withdrawal of U.S. forces from Lebanon in a study commissioned by the Pentagon. It placed responsibility on the military commanders on the ground for failing to have adequate security safeguards and noted that the Marine force “was not trained, organized, staffed, or supported to deal effectively with the terrorist threat in Lebanon.”6 The report recommended that the Marines in Lebanon be withdrawn.
After the report was published, President Reagan acknowledged that the Marines’ mission in Lebanon was difficult. “We recognized the fact at the beginning,” Reagan said, “and we’re painfully mindful of it today. But the point is that our forces have already contributed to achievements that lay the foundation for a future peace, the restoration of a central government, and the establishment of an effective national Lebanese Army.”7 Asked if the United States planned to stay in Lebanon to see this work through, the President responded, “[W]hile there’s hope for peace we have to remain.”8
My own doubts about our ability to remain were growing. As I often do when dealing with a seemingly intractable problem, I developed an options paper. In the case of Lebanon, the exercise helped me think through whether we should persevere or, conversely, recognize that the potential for a positive outcome was limited and look for the best way to reduce American forces with as little damage to Lebanon and to our friends in the region as possible. In tough national security decisions, I’ve often found that there are seldom good options—only the least bad. This was the case in Lebanon. I estimated that we had a roughly 60 percent chance of accomplishing our goals in some form. These were not great odds, but I felt they were better than the alternative of a hasty withdrawal that would leave Lebanon to the control of the Syrians and further damage the reputation of our country. This was, after all, not quite a decade after our hasty withdrawal from Saigon at the end of the Vietnam War.
At the same time, a vigorous public debate