by Clement M. Henry
I cannot forget the explosions that awakened me, three miles away, one early Sunday morning in my campus housing at the American University of Beirut. 241 US marines and 56 French troops were murdered, and the remaining Americans were "strategically redeployed" four months later, in February, 1984, to cut our losses before they could become an issue in President Reagan's reelection campaign. So much for his administration's efforts ("central to our credibility on a global scale") to promote stability in Lebanon in the aftermath of the Israeli invasion of 1982. Now that President Bush has reentered the Arab world in force, our credibility as a global superpower is indeed at stake.
Three hundred times more numerous than those marines in Lebanon, today's American forces in the Gulf are recreating Beirut's tragedy on a far vaster scale. This time we are remaking much of the Arab world into a new Lebanon. Far more ominous than Saddam's oil slicks, our military machine is trampling the region's delicate political ecology, just as Israel and the PLO once ruined Lebanon's. We are upsetting the regional equilibrium that we had tried earlier to preserve by tilting toward Iraq in its war with Iran. We are endangering the regimes of traditional friends, Egypt and Morocco, by pushing their participation in the war. We are bullying others, especially Jordan, for articulating the sympathies of overwhelming majorities of their peoples--even as USAID received a new mandate under a Bush appointee to promote democracy in the third world. We are betraying our closest Arab intellectual kin by applying shared Wilsonian principles of self-determination selectively and brutally to Kuwait, whose ruling family occasionally allowed less than 8% of its 800,000 people to vote for restricted parliaments.
If Bush's crusade is driven by an analogy between (appeasing) Hitler and (diddling) a local despot, the war also accomplishes Israel's objective of reducing its potential equalizer to rubble. Why was Bush persuaded, in late October, to discard a prudent policy of sanctions in favor of war? Was it to avoid further hard choices--after the Jerusalem massacre of October 8, 1990--between sustaining his international alliance and supporting Israel's defiance of UN Security Council majorities? Why, instead of letting Israel off the hook after August 2, did he not intensify his earlier efforts to have Israel negotiate with the Palestinians and justify any unusual pressures on Israel by our need to keep the international coalition intact to squeeze Iraq?
Instead, the American buildup astride the Saudi oil fields displaced the attention of most Arab and Muslim peoples from the Iraqi occupation of Kuwait to issues of American imperialism as well as Zionist colonialism. In this sense "Saddam has already won the war," an Islamist leader explained to me in Tunis on January 11, for the "just war" is viewed as its antithesis, an exercise in imperialist aggression. Even friendly, somewhat liberal countries like Tunisia have distanced themselves from the United States.
In Lebanon we were perceived as wagging the tail of an Israeli dog. With the possible exception of a lone Arabist in the US Embassy, the tens of American bureaucrats and putative technocrats of economic reconstruction knew no better. In trying to prop up a vindictive, Maronite-dominated government, we took sides in a multipolar war among militia and finished by shooting Volkswagen-weight shells at some of them, anticipating today's naval action in the Gulf. If today we, not Israel, are doing most of the fighting, there is still another uncomfortable parallel, in addition to less than surgical shooting: when it ends, an American watchdog will be as unacceptable to the region and to much of the Muslim world as was Israel's presence in Lebanon, and our forces can be expected to suffer an equally disagreeable fate.
If the war grinds him out, Saddam Hussein, however demonized by some, will assume for others an image reminiscent of Lebanon's Musa Sadr, whose martyrdom (probably by Libyan hands) eventually rallied Islam against the Israeli occupation. Even Arab countries, such as Egypt, which may participate in the occupation of the Gulf, will feel the strain. How long can Arab collaborators face the converging wrath of radical Islam and of pro-Palestinian Arabism? Is it realistic to expect that the Arab Gulf oil dynasties can be insulated from it? Even if the ruling families kick out most of their Arab guests--the civil servants, engineers, teachers, and workers--can they continue to exclude their own people from political participation and, in Islam's geographic center, keep them in spiritual quarantine?
I recall those marines in Beirut outside my son's bedroom window, catching us all in multiple crossfires after 17 months of sentry duty. This time our ground forces in the Gulf may arguably win a president's reelection, but then, once we lose the peace, they will have to go. With them will go America's pretensions to be a superpower.
Dr. Henry is Professor of Government and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. He directed the Business School of the American University of Beirut from 1981 to 1984.