What Reagan’s foreign policy experience
can teach us about Syria.
They are Reagan’s Rules.
There are four of them, all concerning the use of
American military force.
Ronald Reagan had learned them the hard way, and he
wanted to make sure he communicated what he learned to his presidential
successors. So he wrote them out one-by-one in his memoir, An American Life.
What prompted them? What are Reagan’s Rules? And how
do they apply to the current situation in Syria?
We’ll begin with what happened, move on to the four
Reagan Rules and then apply them to Syria.
Reagan’s Disaster in Lebanon
October, 1983.
What began a year earlier as just one more chapter
in the seemingly eternal turmoil of the Middle East had, predictably,
mushroomed. In response to the attempted assassination of Israel’s British
Ambassador by the Abu Nidal faction of the Palestine Liberation Organization,
Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin had had enough. On June 6, 1982 Begin had
launched an Israeli invasion of Southern Lebanon. It was an invasion designed
to expel the PLO from Lebanon, strip Syria—then run by President Hafez al-Assad
(the father of today’s Bashar al-Assad) — of its Russian backed influence in
Lebanon. Then, once done, install a pro-Israeli government run by the Christian
Bashir Gemayel.
Suffice to say, all hell broke loose. Lebanon
quickly became a nest of vipers. There was the PLO, the non-PLO Palestinians,
the Right and the Left, the Christians, the Muslims, this and that paramilitary
group, the armed forces and the security forces. There were the occupying
Israelis and the conniving Syrians, the latter a client state of the Soviet
Union in the middle of the Cold War.
The international community, as the media loves to
call Everybody Else, was frantic. Lebanon went to the United Nations begging
for help — and got it. That help came in the form of what was called the
“Multinational Force in Lebanon,” MFN for short. President Reagan had warily
agreed to U.S. participation, and by October of 1983 the MFN “peacekeeping”
force included Americans (US Marines and Navy Seals), British and Italian
soldiers plus French paratroopers.
For a while, it seemed to be working. At least,
President Reagan thought so.
On the Friday of October 21, 1983, the Reagans flew
to Augusta, Georgia for a weekend of rest — which meant golf for the President.
He liked golf but didn’t play regularly and in fact it had been so long since
he had played that he expected his
performance to be miserable. As events turned out, his golf game was to be the
least of his worries.
At four in the morning, Saturday, Reagan was
awakened by his national security adviser, Bud McFarlane. There was a problem —
a big one. Slipping on his bathrobe over his pajamas, the President walked into
the living room of the Augusta National Golf Club’s “Eisenhower Cottage” —
so-named in honor of another president who really was a serious golfer and used
the place on his own golfing vacations.
Already there was McFarlane and Secretary of State
George Shultz. The problem? The Organization of Eastern Caribbean States (OECS)
was urgently asking for the United States to intervene militarily on the island
of Grenada. Grenada had been on the president’s radar for months. In his famous
March speech on the Strategic Defense Initiative — “Star Wars” as it was
derided by liberals — Reagan had mentioned the growing problem of Grenada then.
There had been a Marxist coup in 1979, and along with the Soviet presence in
Cuba and Nicaragua, Reagan had spent a considerable amount of time discussing
what appeared to be yet another Soviet attempt to establish a military base in
the Western Hemisphere, a violation of the Monroe Doctrine. A 10,000 foot
runway had been built at the Grenadian airport. Since tiny Grenada didn’t even
have an air force, military analysts knew there could only be one purpose: to
accommodate Soviet transports bringing in weapons and ammunition. On top of the
military buildup, with both Soviet and Cuban aid flowing into the country,
there were threats from Grenada’s Communist government to take 800 American
medical students studying on the island as hostages. Always believing that
predecessor John F. Kennedy’s hesitation at following through in the 1961 Bay
of Pigs operation the Eisenhower administration had been organizing against
Fidel Castro’s Communist Cuba — a mere 90 miles off of Florida — was a mistake,
Reagan was determined that if similarly confronted he would not repeat the same
mistake. At Reagan’s directions, the Pentagon had been at work planning a
military option if one was needed.
Of a sudden, that October night the situation had
come to a head.
No comments:
Post a Comment