Known and Unknown (6 page)

I could provide Gemayel with no reassurance. I knew the decision would not be reconsidered. The United States had been one of Lebanon's close allies. As I left him to his fate, I felt what he felt: America had not lived up to its promises.

To my surprise, the statement from the White House announcing the American withdrawal was couched in buoyant optimism. “[A]fter consultation with our MNF [multinational force] partners and President Gemayel, and at his request, we are prepared to do the following,” the statement began. It outlined a series of steps the administration was taking to further help the Lebanese. “We will stand firm to deter those who seek to influence Lebanon's future by intimidation,” the statement added, pledging support for the Gemayel government. The steps, the statement said, “will strengthen our ability to do the job we set out to do and to sustain our efforts over the long term.”
²⁰
From the language, one could have been forgiven for thinking the new decision being announced was a victory for the Lebanese government. The reality was Gemayel would now be alone facing Syria and the centrifugal forces pulling apart his country.

The day after the White House statement, the Syrians and their allies stepped up their artillery and rocket attacks against the presidential palace, the American ambassador's residence, and other targets in the hills overlooking Beirut. On February 8, more rounds of artillery landed near the ambassador's residence. The United States did not mount any military response to these attempts to kill or injure our ambassador and his staff. I asked Washington about the new and tougher rules of engagement that had been approved by the President in the event American personnel continued to come under attack in Lebanon. I argued for a military response of some kind. The battleship USS
New Jersey
eventually began a shore bombardment using its sixteen-inch guns. But the retaliatory strike came late and was well off target. The shelling's only effect was to signal American ineffectiveness, quite the opposite of what the President intended.
^*

At the end of March 1984, I stopped in Beirut for a final meeting in Lebanon with President Gemayel. Our encounter took place at midnight and lasted an hour and a half. Knowing now that the administration would not reconsider its decision to withdraw, Gemayel felt defeated. There was an air of despondency in his voice, followed by moments of resignation. After the dozens of hours we had spent together in the heat of battle, when our hopes had been higher, it was a sad parting. With the Syrians gaining an upper hand in his country, I thought it might be the last time I would see the courageous but disheartened Lebanese President.
^†

Despite Shultz's and my hopes for an orderly evacuation, the departure of American forces from Lebanon ended up appearing frantic. Our withdrawal was met with despair by the Lebanese people and with ridicule from the French.
²¹
The Italians left as soon as we did, and even the French, despite their disparagement of the American pullout, followed shortly thereafter. Lebanon and Israel never forged a satisfactory arrangement. Syria would remain in Lebanon for the next two decades, just as Hafez al-Assad had intended.

I returned to Washington on March 29, 1984, having worked hard on the complex and intractable issues in the region but disappointed in the outcome. While some would point a finger at Lebanon's failings, it is also true that the withdrawal of American troops, our inability to match actions with our public statements and our hopes, and a lack of firmness by the administration in the face of congressional pressure had contributed to the outcome.

There were many decisions and judgments that had led our country to this point. For one, the administration may not have fully appreciated the staying power and determination of a regime like Syria's. We approached a dictatorial regime from a position of weakness. Ruthless actors do not follow our modes of behavior. For example, one assumption in our negotiations with Syria was that their forces would withdraw from Lebanon if America could get Israeli forces to do so. That proved to be incorrect.

We experienced the risks of allowing our friends to become dependent on the United States. The Lebanese military could not fill the vacuum after America withdrew, at least in part because they had not been trained for the type of fighting they'd face. The other problem was the difficulty of having a national military force in a country with strong ethnic divisions. The government of Lebanon wasn't able to achieve the cohesion necessary to provide effective leadership and, as it turned out, rested too much of its hopes on a continued American presence.

The experience with Lebanon confirmed my impressions of the Middle East as a tangle of hidden agendas, longstanding animosities, and differing perceptions operating above and beneath the surface. The hope that moderate Arab states, such as Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, and others, might play a constructive role in the crisis also proved to be misplaced.

I was troubled by the unrealistic expectations some in the region had of the United States, of the ways and how rapidly we could assist them if their neighbors took aggressive actions. In my travels, I was often warned by Gulf leaders about the looming dangers posed by Iran and Syria, and, potentially, by Iraq. I explained the need for our friends to undertake planning to deter aggression. I urged them to be prepared beforehand—and not found wanting after a new crisis arose. While I found the Saudis and Bahrainis somewhat receptive, the Kuwaitis, for one, were less so. Many leaders seemed to believe that American forces would be able to appear magically from over the horizon and deliver them from Iran's or Iraq's clutches; these beliefs encouraged them to do relatively little about their own defenses.

The difficulty in coordinating the military and political elements of the U.S. government and the Congress also became apparent during the Lebanon crisis. It pointed out just how important it is for there to be a tight linkage between our country's diplomatic and military capabilities if America is to successfully meet its national security objectives.

While some believed that a decade after Vietnam, America had finally shed the baggage of our involvement in Southeast Asia, it seemed the American body politic was still a prisoner of the Vietnam experience. The country was able to deal with short operations such as the evacuation of American citizens from Grenada, which had occurred almost simultaneously with the Marine barracks bombing. But it was not well prepared to address the more complex challenge we faced in Lebanon. Our government—the Department of Defense as well as the Congress—and the media were still focused on yesterday's war, reacting to the Vietnam experience but not confronting the growing problem of international terrorism.

Perhaps the most important lesson was that our government had not yet developed a full appreciation of the devastating effectiveness of terrorism as an instrument of policy against us and, indeed, against any free nation. We were on defense when we needed to be on offense. After the Marine barracks truck bombing, the immediate reaction was to do everything possible to defend against a similar attack. Cement barriers were put on the grounds around buildings, so that trucks with explosives couldn't easily run into our buildings as they had before. The terrorists started using rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs), lobbing them over the cement barricades. So to defend against RPG attacks, embassy buildings along the Corniche in Beirut were next draped with a metal mesh to keep them from hitting the building. Because the mesh worked reasonably well, it wasn't long before terrorists began hitting the soft targets, namely Americans and other Westerners going to and from their work.

It should have been clear: The way to successfully deal with terrorists is not only to try to defend against them, but also to take the battle to them; to go after them where they live, where they plan, where they hide; to go after their finances and their networks; and even to go after nations that harbor and assist them. The best defense would be a good offense.

Beirut demonstrated to me the profound truth that weakness is provocative. Our withdrawal from Lebanon contributed again to an impression among our friends and enemies of a vulnerable and irresolute America. This, of course, was President Reagan's concern all along.

One observer of our pullout from Lebanon was a young Saudi. The American response to the Beirut terrorist attack, Osama bin Laden observed, demonstrated “the decline of American power and the weakness of the American soldier, who is ready to wage cold wars but unprepared to fight long wars. This was proven in Beirut in 1983, when the Marines fled.”
²²
Osama bin Laden said he first conceived his attack on the World Trade Center during that period.

Referring to the destruction of the Marine barracks and the bombing of the U.S. embassy in Beirut, bin Laden later noted, “When I saw those destroyed towers in Lebanon, it sparked in my mind that the oppressors should be punished in the same way and that we should destroy towers in America—so they can taste what we tasted and so they stop killing our women and children.”
²³

We were already entering a new age of terrorism, although many didn't fully appreciate it. In September 1984, after U.S. forces had withdrawn from Lebanon, the U.S. embassy annex was nearly destroyed by a bomb, the third major attack on Americans in Lebanon in three years.

A month later, Prime Minister Thatcher barely escaped assassination by the Irish Republican Army. She was in her hotel room when a bomb exploded, destroying the bathroom she had been in only moments earlier. Her would-be assassins left Mrs. Thatcher a chilling note that I've reflected on many times since. “We have only to be lucky once,” they wrote to her. “You will have to be lucky always.”

Within weeks of Thatcher's hairbreadth escape, George Shultz and I each delivered speeches on our recent experiences in the Middle East and the rising danger posed by terrorists. On October 17, 1984, I was awarded the George Catlett Marshall Medal presented by the Association of the U.S. Army. In my acceptance remarks, I summarized my conviction that the United States and free people everywhere needed to come to grips with terrorism as a preeminent threat of the future:

Just a week after I gave my speech, George Shultz sounded a similar note of caution. He warned against America acting as a global Hamlet while terrorism was on the rise. “The magnitude of the threat posed by terrorism is so great that we cannot afford to confront it with halfhearted and poorly organized measures,” Shultz warned.
²⁵

In a preview of what President George W. Bush would call for less than two decades later, Shultz urged that America pursue a policy goal of preempting terrorist atrocities. He recommended strengthening U.S. intelligence capabilities, demonstrating a willingness to use force when and where needed to confront terrorism, and deploying the full range of measures available to our country.

“We will need the flexibility to respond to terrorist attacks in a variety of ways,” Shultz advised, using words that mirrored ones a future president would use, “at times and places of our own choosing.”

The Beirut bombing and its aftermath remain seared in my mind as the beginning of the modern war waged by Islamist radicals against the United States of America. It was one of those rare moments when our country was awakened, however briefly, to the dangers foreign elements could pose to our interests. Another of those moments would occur on a bright September morning in 2001. But the first, for me, took place much earlier—on a December afternoon when I was just a boy.

DECEMBER 7, 1941

I
n the carefree days of the early 1940s, when I was not yet ten years old, my life centered on school, chores, and, for entertainment, the family radio. Sometimes I'd tune in to
Captain Midnight,
which was about a U.S. Army pilot and his dangerous adventures. But it was another program that fully captured my imagination. Countless times I hurried into the living room so I wouldn't miss its famous opening to the sounds of the “William Tell Overture”:

For many young boys in the quiet villages on the outskirts of Chicago, where the biggest neighborhood news usually was the search for a missing dog, the American West offered mystery and excitement. My friends and I sent in for the Lone Ranger's six-shooter ring and deputy badge. And we learned the Lone Ranger credo: “I believe that to have a friend, a man must be one. That all men are created equal and that everyone has within himself the power to make this a better world. That God put the firewood there, but that every man must gather and light it himself.” Seven decades later, it is still not a bad philosophy.

The radio also was our portal into the world of professional sports. In the fall, that meant football. My father and I cheered on our favorite team, the Chicago Bears. The Bears were fighting it out one Sunday at Comiskey Park when the announcer on Chicago's WENR radio station interrupted the action with a bulletin. “Flash: Airplanes from the empire of Japan have launched a surprise attack on the territories of Hawaii.” A U.S. military base called Pearl Harbor was in flames.

NBC Radio broke from its regular programming to air a live report from Honolulu: “We have witnessed this morning…the severe bombing of Pearl Harbor by enemy planes, undoubtedly Japanese. The city of Honolulu has also been attacked and considerable damage done. This battle has been going on for nearly three hours…. It is no joke. It is a real war.”
²
Hawaii was not yet an American state, but I had a vague idea of where it was. I didn't know anything about Pearl Harbor or what it meant to the United States Navy. But I could feel that something terrible had happened. I saw it in my parents' faces and heard it in the tense voices reporting the news of the attack. From that moment on, much of what was on the radio, in the newspapers, in talk on the streets, and in school centered on the attack.

For two years, Americans had followed the conflicts raging in Europe and Asia, but from the comfortable distance provided by two vast oceans. Many remembered the heavy American losses in World War I a little more than two decades earlier and wanted no part in another territorial dispute far away. That sentiment was especially strong in Chicago. The city was the national headquarters of the antiwar America First Committee. With more than eight hundred thousand members, it was one of the largest antiwar organizations in American history. The America Firsters appealed to many young Americans, including some whose paths I would cross in later life—a student at Yale Law School named Gerald Ford as well as a young John F. Kennedy, who sent the committee a check.
^*
The America First Committee was one of the early casualties of the Pearl Harbor attack. Its membership dwindled almost overnight. And many of its supporters—Ford and Kennedy among them—soon went off to war.

Throughout the rest of that Sunday, our family huddled around the radio, listening to the latest news. New reports were coming in every hour:

The next day, the American people heard from the President. Having first been elected four months after I was born, Franklin Delano Roosevelt was the only president I had known. There was something about Roosevelt's voice that added to his authority. He had a formal, almost aristocratic tone. He certainly did not sound like any of our friends in the Midwest. Throughout the Great Depression, he had been a voice of reassurance, including to my parents. Outlining the indictment against the Japanese empire, he spoke slowly and deliberately. Every syllable was carefully enunciated, as if the words themselves were missiles of outrage and anger. That gave him a singular quality as America heard for the first time the words that have now become so familiar to history: “Yesterday, December 7, 1941—a date which will live in infamy…”
⁵

The President asked Congress for a declaration of war. The fate of democracy now hung on America's success. A war that millions at home had wanted to avoid was going to be fought, and many Americans would die in the cause. The conflict would change the lives of Americans across the country, including a boy in Illinois who wondered if we'd be able to return to the carefree world of The
Lone Ranger
again.