No Escape from a Stricken Land

By Roger Rosenblatt

Brutal fighting and a Muslim takeover in West Beirut produce an American withdrawl-- of sorts

Some easy questions to begin with. Last Tuesday (which after last Friday feels like a month ago), President Reagan announced that the U.S. was simultaneously going to open fire on Syrian positions and withdraw the Marines, in slow stages, to ships offshore. Was this a retreat that looked like an escalation or an escalation that looked like a retreat? Perhaps it was merely the "redeployment" the President called it, a way of offering help to the Gemayel government from a more secure military position. Never mind that there was no Gemayel government, that West Beirut, swirling in its own fires as usual, now belonged to the Amal and Druze militiamen. Were we in or out? If in, how deeply? And was it not dangerous to pull back gradually, over a month or months, while taking massive potshots at the enemy? If out, it meant that the U.S. policy in Lebanon had failed, which should thus have constituted a political defeat for Reagan. Except that the Democrats, evidently not grasping the meaning of "redeployment" either, hailed the Administration for finally moving the Marines. Does anybody know what's going on? Enough for starters.

Odd that these first questions asked by most Americans last week concerned themselves. It was Lebanon, after all, that seemed to be in trouble. Lebanon again; the world's nervous breakdown on public display one more time, the now familiar blanched apartment houses of Beirut crowned with rocket smoke, the collapsing balconies, the stained, scorched skeletons of cars. Every street seems to be either a wilderness or occupied by wild-looking young men crouching and running. One wonders if anyone will ever again walk casually in Beirut. And the inevitable ambulance sirens, the anguished women pleading with the television cameras, small children, arms limp, supine on stretchers. Still, Americans looked homeward, and not solely because of fear for the Marines. Now the questions grew more difficult. First: What were we doing there? Then: What are we ever doing there, "there" being the Lebanons of the world, which for decades have both characterized and exasperated American foreign policy?

As helpless as Americans began to feel about Lebanon, they have felt just as helpless about their nation's position in the world, and for a good deal longer. Superpower? Where? What does it mean to be a superpower in a world whose burning center is not Washington or Moscow but friable Beirut? Where is the leverage a superiority of arms is supposed to bring; or is arms superiority the wrong tool for leverage? If the U.S. is willing to use force in messy places, how much, and for how long? No great shakes at covert operations, it has fared no better in the open. True, after the U.S. "loses" Lebanon to the Muslims, and indirectly to the Syrians, and even more indirectly to the Soviets, not much may be lost in practical terms. Even the loss of prestige or face may be recoverable. Those are not the disasters. The real loss lies in what America has yet to find: a way to use power discriminately and effectively.

For the folks at home, it was an interesting week for the old problem to arise, as they sat back among the confusions, watching Lebanon with one eye and with the other a U.S. astronaut floating gloriously in the blackest space, at once free and alone. Is that what the country wants to be in the end, free and alone? Too late for isolation. Yet what does the nation mean when it sails into cauldrons like Lebanon--let's fight to the death until someone gets hurt? Oh, if every beach were Grenada's. After the easy questions, the hard ones, and then a silence, as the nation sways, like its Marines, between the devil and the sea. --By Roger Rosenblatt