Lebanon: a case of U.S. subversion.(THE LAST WORD)

In 1958, I found myself in the thick of the action in Lebanon. A lieutenant in the U.S. Marine Corps, I was among the several thousand U.S. troops (including Army personnel) who set up positions in and around Beirut in July of that year. Directed to do so by President Eisenhower and Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, we were supposedly the answer to an urgent call for help from Lebanese President Camille Chamoun.

A pro-Western, Christian anti-communist, Chamoun had requested assistance in combating the revolutionary activity in his country initiated by a Moscow puppet named Rashid Karami. By 1957, the detestable Karami had participated in the 40th-anniversary celebration of the Bolshevik Revolution, and he had returned home to direct the burning of a U.S. Information Service library in the Lebanese city of Tripoli. A U.S. News & World Report article made clear that this was "communist activity." President Chamoun, like virtually everyone at the time, believed that America was the premier force in the world offering opposition to communism, and so he appealed to us for help.

Shutting down Karami's thugs who were causing trouble should have been easy and done by the Lebanese army. But according to reports in the New York Times, the army's leader, General Fuad Chehab, was Karami's ally.

At precisely the same time in nearby Iraq, King Faisal and his family had just been murdered, setting that nation up for a succession of pro-Moscow dictators. Virtually the entire Middle East seemed to be on the verge of being swallowed up by the communist tide that had already engulfed all of Eastern Europe and China. Somebody had to do something!

We were sent into action, yet none of the Marines and Army personnel who joined in that deployment had a clue about why we were in Lebanon. The same could not be said of Eisenhower and Dulles. Claiming to be a friend of Chamoun, they arranged to relieve him of his post and place his enemies in power. What happened was a classic case of betrayal.

The Marines and soldiers were in Lebanon for a mere 11 weeks. Soon after we had taken up positions in the belief that we were protecting the nation from communists and their terrorist allies, Deputy Under Secretary of State Robert Murphy arrived in Beirut and set about to settle the uprising peacefully. As noted by Murphy in his 1964 book Diplomat Among Warriors, he promptly anointed General Chehab to succeed President Chamoun. And Chehab immediately selected Moscow's favorite, Rashid Karami, to be the nation's premier and defense minister. Karami then loaded the government with his rebel allies and purged Chamoun's ...