The Sideshow in Lebanon

THE SIDESHOW IN LEBANON Terence H. Wrong /\s recently as last spring the term "Lebanese crisis" again came into vogue in diplomatic circles after a five-year absence. However, after six years of bloody war, the Lebanese only dimly remember a time when survival was not a crisis. More than 100,000 Lebanese have died since 1975, but it is only when this 140-square-mile country becomes a chessboard for world politics that the international community and the foreign press speak of the "crisis in Lebanon." The latest application of the label was in April 1981 when Syrian "peacekeeping troops" of the Arab Deterrent Force brutally shelled East Beirut and Zahle, a city of 200,000 Lebanese Christians whom the Syrians intended to punish for cooperating with the right-wing Christian militia, the Phalangists (or "Kataeb," as they are known in Arabic). The Begin government, claiming that since 1976 Israel had a sworn allegiance to protect the Maronite Christian community in Lebanon, threatened to intercede and stop the Syrian's "genocidal" war. This inflammatory language caused great discomfort to the governments of the West, which once again recognized that, indeed, there was a "crisis in Lebanon." Besides the danger of a full-scale Arab-Israeli war, the thirty-year friendship treaty between Syria and the Soviet Union —specifying that Russia would come to Syria's aid in the event of war—raised the specter of a superpower confrontation. On April 29, the day after Israel had downed two Syrian helicopter gunships being used to attack hilltop Phalangist positions, Syria moved SAM 3 and SAM 6 missiles into Lebanon's Bekaa Valley for defensive purposes. Begin demanded that Syria remove the missiles, accusing President Hafez Assad of having violated the tacit "red line," or "status quo," agreement between Israel Terence H. Wrong has worked in Beirut for Newsweek, Commonweal, and other publications. He is currently a candidate for the master's degree in Middle East studies at SAIS. 73 74 SAIS REVIEW and Syria in Lebanon. In the grip of such high drama, the world press abandoned the stale refrain of "the Lebanese crisis," and opted for the more catchy phrase: "the Syrian missile crisis." Whatever happened to the "Syrian missile crisis" anyway? Nothing. The SAMs are still in the Bekaa, and Menachem Begin was reelected by a constituency readily seduced by his brand of militant diplomacy. Whatever happened to the "Lebanese crisis"? Unfortunately, it did not disappear when the world press switched labels. Throughout the summer and fall of 1981 the 30,000-man Syrian "peacekeeping force" intermittently shelled Ashrafiyeh in Christian East Beirut. The narrow European streets of this quarter are deserted, with 95 percent of the population having fled north to the Christian heartland in Junieh, where the Phalangist army (with a potential fighting force of 25,000 men) is headquartered . In predominantly Muslim West Beirut, the law of the gun prevails, with more than a dozen paramilitary parties (allies in the leftist National Movement) fighting for turf in an area smaller than Greenwich Village and espousing ideologies as incompatible as Islam and communism, to name the least eccentric ones. Equipped with missiles and even tanks, interparty bickering escalates quickly into miniwars. In the south, the PLO (itself an umbrella label for nearly a dozen factions, of which the largest is Yasser Arafat's Al Fatah) continues the Palestinian guerrilla war against Israel and, increasingly, each other. There is also the 2,000-man Christian militia headed by the renegade commander, Saad Haddad, who is backed by Israel and controls a nine-mile wide, eight-mile long buffer zone he calls "Free Lebanon." In addition, there are the 5,000 UNIFIL troops under the courageous command of General Callaghan, who spend a large part of their time trying not to get caught in the crossfire between Haddad's men and the PLO. If one includes the all but invisible, newly "rebuilt," 25,000-man Lebanese army, the 3,000-man gendarmerie, and the "Unit 16" police, there are roughly 150,000 fighting men in a country whose population is around 3.5 million.1 With 400,000 Palestinians living in Lebanon and the PLO headquartered in Beirut...