Escalation in Lebanon

Increasingly, President Reagan is preoccupied with Lebanon—the presence of 1,200 Marines there, and the escalating U.S./Syrian confrontation, made the more serious and refractory of late by the U.S. naval bombardment of Syrian artillery positions. Besides the obvious question of whether Mr. Reagan can persuade the American people that our national security justifies the growing costs of our Marines in Lebanon, there is the matter of where this military intensification is leading the President geo-strategically and politically.

What are our options in Lebanon? First, cut and run. The White House has rejected this because we are committed to the Multinational Peacekeeping Force along with our allies, the British, the Italians, and the French. The British and the Italians, says U.S. negotiator Morris Draper, are eager to do anything that America asks; France, on the other hand, is a kind of odd card in the mix. This stems largely from her support of Iraq (see also “Abroad,” p. 1285) and convoluted ethnic reasons deriving therefrom. So she takes a dim view of the U.S. shelling of the Syrians. Were the United States to bug out, not only would our superpower prestige be turned on its head, but the constitutionally established government of Amin Gemayel would collapse, anarchy prevail, and Syria very probably dictate the terms of “peace.”

JM

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John McLaughlin

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Increasingly, President Reagan is preoccupied with Lebanon—the presence of 1,200 Marines there, and the escalating U.S./Syrian confrontation, made the more serious and refractory of late by the U.S. naval bombardment of Syrian artillery positions. Besides the obvious question of whether Mr. Reagan can persuade the American people that our national security justifies the growing costs of our Marines in Lebanon, there is the matter of where this military intensification is leading the President geo-strategically and politically.

What are our options in Lebanon? First, cut and run. The White House has rejected this because we are committed to the Multinational Peacekeeping Force along with our allies, the British, the Italians, and the French. The British and the Italians, says U.S. negotiator Morris Draper, are eager to do anything that America asks; France, on the other hand, is a kind of odd card in the mix. This stems largely from her support of Iraq (see also “Abroad,” p. 1285) and convoluted ethnic reasons deriving therefrom. So she takes a dim view of the U.S. shelling of the Syrians. Were the United States to bug out, not only would our superpower prestige be turned on its head, but the constitutionally established government of Amin Gemayel would collapse, anarchy prevail, and Syria very probably dictate the terms of “peace.”