One Brief Miracle: The Diplomat, the Zealot, and the Wild Blundering Siege

By John Boykin and George Shultz

A fascinating man. An impossible situation. Thousands of lives at stake. And he pulls off a miracle. That sounds like a formula for novel, and this book does read like one. But the story is true. It is the dramatic tale of how American diplomat Philip Habib worked out a peaceful end to the 1982 Israeli siege of Beirut.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: May 1, 2002
• ISBN: 9781483535722

Book preview

Beirut

1

The Bellowing Diplomat

Phil had profile. He wasn't some obscure guy in a dark gray suit. I mean, he was Phil Habib! He was banging around and making noise in his unique way. What made him so memorable was his exceptionalism against the largely gray background of other people doing the same thing.

Brandon Grove

The East Room of the White House is a temple to high occasion, where all posture is perfect, all coughs are squelched, and all itches are left unscratched. On this Tuesday afternoon in September 1982, the Cabinet, the generals, and the diplomats had all come early to be sure to get a seat. Ronald Reagan had cut short his vacation to be here.

When the President and the First Lady appeared at the far end of the long red-carpeted entryway, a ruffle of polite applause began. But when the audience caught sight of the portly, balding man taking up the rear, the applause quickened, thickened, and lofted into a clamor rare for the East Room. The standing-room-only crowd started cheering. Some stuck their fingers in their mouths and whistled. As the party entered the room and stepped onto the stage, the soprano of whistles, the alto of applause, and the tenor of cheers were joined by a rumbling bass of feet stomping. The man stared resolutely forward. But as the din rose ever louder and went on for an embarrassingly long time, he lowered his head, and his facial muscles began to twitch. Don't cry now, Philip, thought his secretary. Don't cry now. Be happy.

Medal of Freedom ceremony, September 1982. On podium, left to right: Philip Habib, Ronald Reagan, Marjorie Habib, Nancy Reagan.

Source: Ronald Reagan Library

For most of the past three months, American diplomat Philip Habib had been the world's most conspicuous failure. The Israeli army, in an effort to destroy the Palestinian Liberation Organization once and for all, had been bombing the bloody hell out of the PLO's stronghold, the city of Beirut, Lebanon. The siege had degenerated into an aimless fiasco. Having gotten themselves into this unholy mess, neither the Israelis nor the PLO were willing to lose face to get themselves out of it. That was Philip Habib's lonely task. There were only two plausible outcomes: Either he would negotiate a peaceful end to the siege of Beirut, or Israeli soldiers would wade into the catacombs of the city and kill and kill and kill and kill and kill. As the well-entrenched PLO fought back, countless thousands of Israelis, Palestinians, and Lebanese would die.

To prevent that bloodbath, he would have to persuade some of the most intransigent zealots on earth to make decisions they feared would cost them their principles, their political careers, even their lives. He would have to persuade implacable enemies to cooperate, paranoids to trust, ditherers to commit. Written off by many people as a Quixote and pitied by many others as a Sisyphus, Habib struck out at nearly every turn.

But in the end he had worked out an unprecedented solution to this unprecedented crisis. He was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, and now he was about to become the first career diplomat ever to receive America's highest civilian honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

At the East Room podium, Reagan said, His successful negotiation of the cease-fire in Lebanon and the resolution of the West Beirut crisis stands out as one of the unique feats of diplomacy in modern times. Ambassador Habib's efforts conducted in the most difficult and trying of circumstances . . . saved the city of Beirut and thousands of innocent lives. Reagan concluded by turning to Habib and saying, In addition to the Medal of Freedom, Phil, you have earned a title beyond our power to bestow. You are a peacemaker.

When the ceremony ended, Habib turned to his wife, Marjorie, and said Not bad for a boy from Brooklyn.

A Novel Strategy

The moment was the pinnacle of an extraordinary man's extraordinary career. In hindsight, he seemed to have spent the prior three decades preparing to tackle just this crisis. And nearly killing himself in the process.

When Phil Habib joined the Foreign Service in 1949, the Ivy League blue-blooded WASPs who typified it in those days didn't know what to make of him: a son of Lebanese immigrants from a Jewish neighborhood of Brooklyn with a big nose, an odd name, and a degree in forestry from the University of Idaho. What kind of people are we taking into the Foreign Service these days? sniffed one of his first bosses.

He started at the bottom of the bottom, writing reports about Canadian crop yields. He instantly recognized that, to get ahead, he would need a novel strategy. He was never going to be the most patrician sipper of tea. But he could jolly well be the most hard-working, well-informed, and blunt Foreign Service officer in the business. He resolved to always become the authority on whatever issue or country he worked on.

To carry out that strategy, the first thing he did in each assignment was to get to know as many of the local players as possible: politicians, cabinet ministers, generals, bureaucrats, reporters, businesspeople. He developed an incisive bullshit detector. That detector got a workout during his posting to South Korea. He arrived in 1962, ten years after the Korean War and one year after a military coup. The Korean government was run by generals, and the capital was crawling with American soldiers. So, many of local players Habib got to know were military men only too happy to bend his ear. This constant exposure to military thinking instilled in him a lifelong skepticism about generals' penchant for seeing military solutions to political problems – precisely the kind of thinking that would later produce Israel's siege of Beirut.

His strategy next landed him the plum assignment of political counselor in South Vietnam in 1965, just as the Vietnam War was heating up. His colleagues there found him gruff, profane, candid to the point of insult, and smart—oh, so smart, says a Foreign Service officer (FSO) who worked with him in South Vietnam. He had insights into insights, which constantly astounded us mere mortals in the embassy's political section. He had no time for blowhards, yes-men, or smilers. He demanded facts, details, precision. If any of his proteges —Phil's boys - ever gave him generalities, he would throw a pencil at him.

Whereas some diplomats would try to get ahead by holding their tongues, Habib's strategy meant getting ahead by saying what he thought. He expressed his relentlessly pragmatic views in plain, loud, and usually salty English. He was, after all, the diplomat from Brooklyn; and if you didn't know that before you met him, you never forgot it after. As Alexander Haig put it, He was the exact opposite of what you expect of the typical State Department diplomat: a cold-blooded, steely-eyed bastard who you don't ever know what he's thinking. You knew what Phil was thinking. What you saw was what you got.

For example, one day in October 1965 Habib was in one of my particularly irascible moods when an American professor walked into his office in Saigon. The ambassador had invited him to come assess the situation in Vietnam. Professor, I'm a busy man, and you don't know a goddam thing about Vietnam, Habib told him. I'll give you a couple of my boys, you go spend two weeks flying around the country, come back, and then maybe I'll talk to you. In the meantime, get the hell out of my office.

The professor's name was Henry Kissinger.

Stop the Bombing and Negotiate

An episode in 1968—which two prominent journalists called one of history's turning points—put the bellowing diplomat on the map as a heavy hitter in Washington.

Phil Habib's strategy of always being the authority on his issues had now carried him back to Washington to be Mr. Vietnam, the State Department's point man for anything about the war. When North Vietnam's devastating 1968 Tet Offensive knocked Washington for a loop, he was the one State sent to Saigon to assess the facts on the ground.

What he saw and heard there disturbed him deeply. The war was going badly. Very badly. Worse, everything he saw and heard convinced him that the US would have to either artificially prop up the corrupt, ineffectual South Vietnamese government indefinitely or find a way out of this deepening rathole. That was a report his superiors would not want to hear.

One group who did want to hear Habib's blunt assessment was a handful of elder statesmen dubbed the Wise Men, whom President Johnson had asked to advise him about the war. The group gathered March 25, 1968, to prepare for a meeting the next day with the president. Joining them at this gathering were LBJ's secretary of defense and national security advisor and Habib's own chain of command, including the secretary of state.

After dinner, Habib and two other experts briefed the group about the mess in Vietnam. Habib pulled no punches about the corruption and ineptitude of the South Vietnamese leaders or their low odds of pulling themselves together within any reasonable amount of time. He estimated it might take five to seven years to achieve any real progress in Vietnam. The group was dumbfounded.

Phil was extremely candid in summarizing a lot of facts that some people refused to recognize, said one of the Wise Men. He did not resort to the kind of ambiguities and deliberate confusion that the military briefers had done. He had a reputation for candor and straightforwardness, and he made a deep impression on my colleagues because we recognized that this was a man speaking the truth.

When Habib finished his briefing, Defense Secretary Clark Clifford asked, Phil, do you think a military victory can be won?

Habib paused a moment, then replied, Not under present circumstances.

What would you do if the decision was yours to make? Clifford asked.

Another pause. Stop the bombing and negotiate.

When the Wise Men met with LBJ the next day, they conveyed Habib's advice to the president, with their endorsement. Johnson was angry and demanded to know who poisoned the well? What did those damn briefers say to you? Only ten days earlier he had stormed, Let's get one thing clear! I'm telling you now that I am not going to stop the bombing! Now I don't want to hear any more about it. But, as Wise Man Cyrus Vance put it, the hard facts and recommendations that Habib had presented made a profound effect on the president.

As a result, over the next few days, LBJ reversed his position. On March 31 he delivered the most important speech of his presidency, in which he offered to stop the bombing of North Vietnam and begin negotiations. American involvement in Vietnam peaked and thereafter declined, never again to return to spring 1968 levels.

And Phil Habib was now a certified legend in diplomatic circles.

Flight Simulator

When North Vietnam accepted LBJ's offer to negotiate, LBJ appointed Habib the American negotiators' chief of staff.

The Paris Peace Talks between America, North Vietnam, and South Vietnam opened amid a media circus, promptly fell flat on their face, and never went anywhere. The main reason was that the Americans were the only party really motivated to reach an agreement. The North Vietnamese knew they could outlast the US, so they had little reason to make concessions. The South Vietnamese had nothing to gain and everything to lose in any agreement that brought US troops home, so they did everything they could to prevent any agreement from jelling.

President Johnson sees off his delegation to the Paris Peace Talks, 1968. Left to right: Philip Habib, Cyrus Vance, Andrew Goodpaster, Johnson, Averell Harriman, William Jorden. Vance and Harriman were among the Wise Men.

Source: Y.R. Okamoto

But the Paris Peace Talks did serve as something of a flight simulator for Habib's later negotiations in the Middle East. He got accustomed to working with people at the highest levels on a protracted, complex, enormous issue of global importance. He got accustomed to trying to mediate irreconcilable differences, exploring for slivers of common ground, and dealing with intransigent counterparts who were willing to talk but unwilling to compromise. He learned that the closer negotiations are to the TV lights, the lower their likelihood of success. And he learned that, if you want to solve a problem, you've got to talk to the people with the clout.

Saving Face

After three years of beating his head against the wall in Paris, Habib went back to Asia, this time as ambassador to South Korea. In addition to imbuing him with a deep understanding of the interplay of military thinking and diplomatic thinking, Asia gave him a deep appreciation that diplomatic success requires enabling the other guy to save face. A telling case in point occurred in August 1973.

The Korean military junta kidnapped opposition leader Kim Dae Jung. Habib instantly ordered his embassy staff and the American military officers to get word to their Korean counterparts that, if Kim did not turn up alive pronto, it would be a terrible setback to US-Korea relations and we are not going to argue with you about it.

But Habib chose not to talk to South Korean President Park Chung Hee about the matter directly. Why? He judged that a direct message would give Park a powerful incentive to kill Kim: If Habib told Park to produce Kim or else, and Kim then reappeared, his reappearance would be proof that Park controlled the kidnappers. If, however, Kim turned up dead, then Park could claim that his inability to produce Kim alive proved that he did not control the kidnappers. To save Kim's life, then, Habib had to let Park save face.

It worked. A few days later a limousine dumped a battered but breathing Kim Dae Jung on a deserted street in Seoul. Habib's discreet but forceful intervention had helped save his life.

You're Still Wrong

Soon after the Kim Dae Jung episode, Washington swore in a new secretary of state: Henry Kissinger. The former professor had never forgotten getting thrown out of Phil Habib's Saigon office eight years earlier. But nor had he ever forgotten the unconventional diplomat's command of the facts, pragmatic judgment, and absolute discretion. He brought Habib back to Washington to be his point man for all of Asia. In May 1976 he promoted Habib to undersecretary of state for political affairs, the top job to which a career diplomat can aspire. The simple strategy Habib had chosen decades earlier had now paid off beyond his grandest ambitions.

Kissinger insisted that anything pertaining to China go through Habib or two other top aides. Here, Habib meets Mao Zedong in 1975 as President Gerald Ford looks on.

Courtesy of Marjorie Habib

The two made a remarkable team. Kissinger was the grand strategist, Habib the nuts-and-bolts tactician. They agreed about most things, certainly about the broad strokes. But Habib was the master of the fine strokes: How should we present this? Who should we tell first? How will so-and-so react? Phil was the great practitioner of the possible, says one of his proteges. About 95 percent of decisions are 48-52: Phil lived within that narrow band.

Habib and Henry Kissinger

Courtesy of Marjorie Habib

Kissinger and Habib liked and deeply respected one another. They also fought like brothers. Both were voluble personalities, and their frequent arguments would peel paint. Neither had any shortage of ego or confidence that he was right. Kissinger would sometimes begin a meeting by announcing his decision on the question at hand, and Habib would bellow, The secretary has no right to act without first hearing me out! In one instance, Habib was giving his reasons why the approach Kissinger wanted to take on some issue was wrongheaded. A colleague paraphrases their exchange:

No, Phil, I want to do it this way.

Mr. Secretary, that's not the way to do it, Habib said, and reiterated his reasons.

Phil, I'm going to do it this way, and that's all there is to it.

Mr. Secretary, I'm telling you that that's a mistake.

Shut up, Phil.

I'll shut up, Mr. Secretary, but you're still wrong.

When Cyrus Vance replaced Kissinger as secretary of state in 1977, he took the rare step of keeping his predecessor's undersecretary. Whether under Vance or Kissinger, Habib's job was to oversee State's handling of any crisis anywhere on earth that the secretary of state was not actively worrying about at the moment. Both sent him around the world to negotiate in various hotspots, and he got a reputation as the best natural-born negotiator in the business. He routinely worked fifteen- and eighteen-hour days seven days a week and never took a day off.

He loved it. In fact, the greatest mystery to Phil Habib was how anyone privileged to be a Foreign Service officer could want to do anything but work around the clock. He often said, If you go home at 5 and your wife is happy, you're not doing your job.

Caged Lion

And then came December 16, 1977.

Habib was on top of the world: fielding international crises, the number-three official in the State Department, due for a 7 a.m. meeting with the secretary of state to prep for a breakfast at the White House with President Carter and the Israeli prime minister.

A chauffeur-driven car was assigned to him, but he wouldn't hear of having a chauffeur drive him to and from work. He was outside scraping the ice off the windshield of his own car when he started getting severe pains in his chest. He barely made it to the office—it apparently never occurred to him to go back into the house. As he lay down on his office sofa, one of his proteges, Tom Miller, took one look at him and said, You look like crap.

Aaaaa, I'm just tired. He had, after all, just gotten back from a two-week trip to Moscow and the Middle East, working his customary eighteen-hour days the whole time.

I'm calling an ambulance.

I'm OK, dammit!

Miller called an ambulance anyway. A few hours later, in the Walter Reed ICU, Habib had a massive heart attack. The doctors restarted his heart with shock paddles. A priest gave him last rites. A few days later, his heart again stopped, and again the doctors restarted it.

He pulled through and tried to go back to work. But the 57-year-old inveterate workaholic simply no longer had the stamina to do a fraction of his job. A State Department doctor sat him down, stared him in the eye, and said, You either retire or you die.

For Phil Habib, there wasn't much difference. This was a man who loved life—every rich, juicy minute of life—with a passion that few people ever muster. And the Foreign Service was his life. Retire? What?

This had actually been Habib's second massive heart attack. The first, five years earlier, had terrified him. But there was no escaping this one. At the peak of his career, he had to resign as undersecretary. No more adrenaline rush fielding crises. No more making decisions about major world events. No more advising presidents. He was devastated. As he glumly cleaned out his office, piling books and papers into boxes, he muttered over and over, I just can't imagine sitting around in California at some fucking university. He was near tears.

He despised retirement. He moved to California and taught at Stanford as diplomat-in-residence, but felt like a caged lion. The State Department was dealing with crises around the world without him. That hurt. He could not endure the boredom of being out of the action. He did remain technically a Foreign Service officer, and as he regained his strength Vance gave him a few small assignments, largely so he'd have something to do.

Despite his radically slower pace, his health remained precarious. In 1978 he went to Israel, but he could barely walk up three steps without having to stop and gasp for breath. During a cardiac test on a treadmill, he collapsed and had to be resuscitated. A heart bypass operation in August 1978 went fine, but two days later a blood clot apparently reached his brain and he suffered a stroke. His left side was paralyzed. After two days, though, the paralysis cleared. His cardiologist said his recovery from the stroke was absolutely miraculous. I've never seen anything like that before.

But two years after his second heart attack, the man who had made a career of mastering the brutal facts finally had to face up to the most personally brutal fact of all: that he was not coming back. He could no longer do the work. On February 29, 1980, he formally retired from the Foreign Service, thirty years after having joined it.

At age 60, Phil Habib was washed up.

Habib at his home in Belmont, California

Courtesy of Marjorie Habib

2

The War That Got Away

Let's face it, Sharon was just waiting for an incident to move across that border. He had already repositioned a lot of troops as part of his long-standing plan of how to solve the Palestinian question.

Philip Habib

Phil Habib was in Florida to play golf in late April 1981 when he got a phone call from his old friend General Alexander Haig. They went back twenty years together to the time Haig, then a rising star in the Pentagon, visited South Korea during Habib's first tour there. When both were posted to Vietnam in 1966 or '67 they sometimes went out for greasy hamburgers together late at night in Saigon. They worked together some during the Paris Peace Talks when Haig was Kissinger's military adviser. And Haig had spent the night in Habib's residence during a swing through Asia while Habib was ambassador to Korea.

Now Habib was a has-been and Haig had just become secretary of state for the new president, Ronald Reagan. Haig was calling about the new administration's first foreign policy crisis: A war was brewing in the Middle East, and he wanted Habib to go try to avert it. Haig had always been impressed with the agility and the ability of the guy. He's just as bright as hell, full of energy, and able to handle tough ones.

This would be a tough one. Few assignments would seem less appropriate for a man with Phil Habib's heart condition than trying to avert a looming war in the Middle East. But Habib leaped at the chance to get back in the big leagues. He did check first with his cardiologist. Dr. Melvin Cheitlin knew him well enough to know that pacing the cage of retirement would do a man like this at least as much harm as the mission, so he told him to go ahead.

This crisis would turn out to be only act one of a tragedy that would play out over the next two years and would echo loud over the next twenty. Making sense of it all requires a bit of background.

How the Arena Was Created

None of the national borders in the Middle East is over a hundred years old. Most of the region was part of the vast Turkish Ottoman Empire until the end of World War One. The Turks had made the fatal mistake of siding with Germany in that war, after which the victorious French and British carved up the Turks' empire into the countries we know today. They generally drew the border lines arbitrarily, with little regard for who identified with (or hated) whom locally. So there is ample room for disputing the legitimacy of any border that one dislikes.

The French took control of the area now known as Syria and Lebanon. Most people in that area were Muslim. France, a largely Roman Catholic country, had for four-hundred years been the designated protectors of Christians within the Ottoman Empire. Now that they controlled this part of it, they were in a position to give special protection to their proteges, the local equivalent of Roman Catholics, called Maronites. The Maronites and other Christians were concentrated in an enclave in Mount Lebanon, the mountain range east of Beirut. Rather than turn the land they possessed into a single overwhelmingly Muslim nation with a tiny Christian minority, the French in 1920 partitioned it to create two new nations: Syria (mostly Muslim) and Lebanon (mostly Christian). The Christian enclave was too small to be economically viable as an independent nation, though, so the French included just enough Muslim-filled surrounding lands to leave the Christians with a slight majority. Thus was created the modern state of Lebanon.

The land within those new borders had for centuries been a patchwork of turfs ruled by rival clans divided nominally along (and within) religious lines: Maronite, Greek Orthodox, Greek Catholic, Sunni Muslim, Shi'a Muslim, Druze, and others. Those clans were not about to join hands just because some Europeans had drawn lines on a map. Nor did the Syrians accept the idea that Lebanon was really a separate nation. So, while Lebanon worked at functioning as a putative nation, it did not really jell into a strong, cohesive whole. To a significant extent, having a national government just gave the clans something else to fight for control over. And Syria never came to view Lebanon as much more than its own front yard.

Around the same time that the French were creating Lebanon, the British were creating Palestine just to the south. Over the millennia, Jews, Arabs, Turks, Romans, Christians, and others had alternated controlling that land. In 1948 immigrant Jews declared the modern state of Israel on most of it as a homeland for Jews. In the War of Independence that followed, many of the Palestinian Arabs who had been living there became refugees; of those, many settled in Lebanon and Jordan.

The emergence of the modern state of Israel and displacement of the Palestinians who had been on that land set in motion the fundamental dispute that has roiled the Middle East ever since: Who is entitled to control the land on which the state of Israel sits? And if neither Israelis nor Palestinians can control all of it, how shall they go about sharing it?

After Israel humiliated the Arab states and took control of more land in the Six Day War of 1967, the Palestine Liberation Organization, or PLO, emerged as the leader of Palestinian efforts to win back that land—all of it. Israelis of course recognized the PLO's efforts as a mortal threat to their very existence. Being weak, the PLO resorted to the weapon of the weak, terrorism, to afflict Israelis at every opportunity. The PLO was then an umbrella for a wide assortment of factions. Yasir Arafat headed the largest faction. He thus became chairman of the PLO as a whole and, in Israel's eyes, the personification of terrorism.

In the late 1960s the PLO struck at Israel from both Lebanon and Jordan, but its main base of operations was Jordan. Its rocket attacks and raids inevitably drew retaliation from Israel. Jordan's King Hussein did not need such problems, so in time he forbade the PLO to use Jordanian soil to launch any more attacks on Israel. The PLO responded by trying to assassinate him and take over his country. After a bloody struggle, culminating in Black September 1970, he finally managed to drive them out of Jordan. Those 20,000 or so PLO fighters therefore washed up in Lebanon, the only country in the region too weak to keep them out. The PLO already had a state within a state in Lebanon. The influx of comrades from Jordan intensified PLO control of southern Lebanon, concentrated the PLO leadership in Beirut, and increased their presence in the rest of the country.

The Old Antagonisms

By this time the Lebanese had had fifty years to develop a working modern government. The one they developed was hobbled by structural defects, but it limped along well enough to get by. Lebanon—thanks not to the strength of its government, but to ancient traditions and the exceptional talents of its entrepreneurial people—was the crossroads of East-West commerce. Their Phoenician forebears had, after all, invented bookkeeping and money in the modern sense. The story goes that, when asked by his teacher, How much is two and two? a Lebanese schoolboy supposedly replied, Am I buying or selling? No matter how much one clan might hate their next-door neighbors, they were not going to let that interfere with making money. So, while ancient antagonisms simmered beneath the surface, the Lebanon of the 1940s, '50s, and '60s seemed like an oasis of tolerance, a Switzerland of the Middle East. Its glamorous, vibrant capital, Beirut, was considered the Paris of the Middle East. In the mid-'60s Sports Illustrated and Reader's Digest respectively dubbed Beirut the new star of Mediterranean tourism and the world's most exciting city. Besides having more restaurants per capita than Paris, it had more banks per capita than Berne, making Beirut the leading banker to the Arab world. The American University of Beirut was the premier seat of learning in the Arab world, and its renowned hospital trained the region's leading doctors. Sophisticates, investors, smugglers, spies, sheiks, and tourists crowded the city for the shopping, the gambling, the dancing, the horse racing, the water skiing, the fine dining. Champagne glasses clinked under crystal chandeliers. All seemed well.

Seemed. The new flood of PLO fighters—on top of the influx of at least 200,000 Palestinian refugees since 1948—shattered Lebanon's fragile equilibrium. On April 13, 1975, Palestinians tried to assassinate the patriarch of the strongest Maronite clan, Pierre Gemayel. His militia retaliated against a busload of Palestinians. The tit for tat quickly mushroomed into a free-for-all civil war of everybody against everybody. All of the old antagonisms quickly bubbled back up to the surface. Party A would ally with Party B to fight Party C—until A inevitably betrayed B, at which point B and C would ally to fight A. But the core fight remained Maronite versus PLO. As far as the Maronites were concerned, Lebanon was supposed to have been the land of the Maronites, and here the newcomer PLO was ruining everything.

Beirut was really two cities. West Beirut was the generally Muslim half, East Beirut the generally Christian half. The Maronites had long dominated East Beirut. By the mid-1970s, the PLO had turned West Beirut into its headquarters. The civil war formalized that division, with a booby-trapped no-man's land called the Green Line separating East from West. At only three points along the Green Line could anyone cross—if, that is, one were willing to risk getting shot for having set foot on the wrong side of town. Bullets and rocket-propelled grenades crossed the Green Line freely and routinely.

The government, meanwhile, could only wring its hands as the country exploded in street battles, car bombings, sniping, assassinations, and massacres. The wan power of the government evaporated as the army split along religious lines. So in 1976 the helpless Lebanese president invited the Syrian military to come try to quell the anarchy. The US facilitated the arrangement. Henry Kissinger brokered an informal understanding whereby Israel assented to this Syrian mission in Lebanon as long as the Syrians came no closer to Israel than a certain red line. The Syrians did respect that line. And by the end of 1976 their brutal methods did succeed in putting a lid on the violence.

But then they stayed. The civil war had not entirely died down, and they considered Lebanon an estranged province of Syria anyway. So they never saw any reason to go home. Indeed, they started drawing up plans to install a puppet government in Beirut. By overstaying their welcome to the point of irritation and then anger and then rage, the Syrians inspired violent designs to drive them out.

Meanwhile the PLO continued harassing Israel with rockets and terror attacks launched from southern Lebanon. In the absence of an effective Lebanese government able to restrain the PLO, the Israelis felt entitled to do that job themselves in Lebanon on their side of the red line.

The Jews in Israel and the Maronites in Lebanon had at least three things in common: a determination to survive in the midst of enemies, a mutual enemy in the PLO, and a desire to dislodge the Syrians from Lebanon. The heart of Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin, a Holocaust survivor with a romance for the righteous quest, went out to the Maronites as a persecuted minority—never mind the history of atrocities they had committed against their rivals and against one another. Begin loved the idea of Jews protecting Christians. So in December 1980 Bashir Gemayel, Pierre's most ambitious son, cemented an alliance with Israel. There was no way his family's militia, called the Phalange, could whip the Syrian army. But the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) certainly could. Emboldened by his alliance, Bashir promptly started picking fights with the Syrians in Lebanon's Bekaa Valley.

Bashir went too far, the Syrians felt, when he started building a road to connect the Maronite heartland in Mount Lebanon with the valley's main Christian town, Zahle. The Syrians considered Zahle a strategic part of their turf, and they considered that road a serious threat: a preparation for an Israeli-supported Phalange push into their turf. In April 1981 the Syrians started helicoptering troops into position to block the progress of that road and confront Bashir's militia. On April 28 Begin vowed not to allow Syria to perpetrate genocide in Lebanon. The same day the Israeli Cabinet voted to authorize a limited attack on the helicopters—but then kept debating the issue. As soon as the vote was taken, though, the chief of staff left the Cabinet room to issue orders to the air force. The Cabinet ministers were still arguing about whether an attack was a good idea when the chief of staff returned to report that the mission was already accomplished: Israeli jets had just shot down two of those helicopters.

The next day Syria responded by moving surface-to-air missiles near Zahle, poised to shoot down Israeli jets. Begin responded by threatening to destroy the missiles.

Informal Understanding

This was the point at which Al Haig phoned Phil Habib.

News that Habib would be coming to try to work out a settlement reached Israel on April 30, soon after the Israeli Cabinet had authorized an attack to destroy the missiles. Bad weather had scrubbed the attack. When Begin heard that an American special envoy would be coming, he suspended the attack order indefinitely.

Back in the saddle, Habib positively vibrated with a new sense of purpose. He arrived in the Middle East May 5, 1981, and immediately started putting in twenty-two-hour days zipping back and forth between Jerusalem, Damascus, Beirut, and other capitals in the region.

Neither Begin nor