The Risks of Provocation
By MICHAEL ADAMS AA s the Lebanon is the one Arab country which accepted without equivocation the Eisen- hower Doctrine, it has come to be regarded by the Americans as the one sure jumping-off point for any move in their Middle Eastern policy, directed for the past year at the containment (to put it no more strongly) of Nasser. For Nasser, whose unconcealed aim it is to put an- end to Western influence in the Middle East, since he regards it as aggressive and harmful (and since Suez this is surely a comprehensible aim for an Arab leader?), the Lebanon provides a dangerous bridgehead for his opponents. So when an insur- rection broke out in the Lebanon both sides were bound to become involved. The Lebanese Govern- ment alleged that it was the Egyptians (and Syrians) who had instigated the rising; the Ameri- cans, when the Lebanese Government found itself In danger, promised to send it first 'police equip- ment,' and then tanks.
American intervention is thus an established fact, for which we have the authority of both the Lebanese and the American Governments. As intervention ntervention by the United Arab Republic, it is fair to point out that we have only the word of the Lebanese Government and that the oppo- sition vigorously deny that they have sought or received outside help. Not many people believe them, and certainly the insurgents have received moral support and some material help from be- yond the frontiers. But the Government's allega- tions of 'massive support' for the rebels, of quantities of captured arms, Syrian infiltrators and secret instructions for sabotage and violence which it claims to have intercepted, are not very weighty when considered in the light of the peculiar conditions prevailing in the Lebanon. Virtually all Lebanese are armed, and the arms they carry come from every imaginable source— French, Belgian, Czech, British, American. It would be a simple matter to implicate almost any country which produces arms, or even has an army, by rounding up a substantial quantity of arms with that country's markings. As to the number of Syrians whom the Government claims to have captured, and whom it represents as in- filtrators from across the border, most of them, I suspect, are the ordinary folk I saw being rounded up in army trucks in the suburbs of Beirut last week. It is very probable that some Syrians have crossed the border to join the insur- gents, but it is also a fact that many thousands of Syrians live in the Lebanon and work here (my cook is one), and there is nothing sinister or unusual in their presence now.
But the most effective argument against the Lebanese Government's claim that this is a foreign-inspired insurrection is provided by a visit to the 'rebel' headquarters in their sector of Beirut. I have been there three times in the past week, and I found there not Syrians, not Egyptians, but Lebanese, some of whom I knew before, and whom I believe when they say that they have no wish whatsoever to join the United Arab Re- Public, and that their aim is to bring down Presi- dent Chamoun, put an end to an unpopular American alliance and set the Lebanon where
Beirut they claim she belongs, in the body of the Arab nationalist movement.
Nor does there seem to me to be any indication that President Nasser wants to add the Lebanon to his already considerable responsibilities. That he said so publicly on his return from Moscow will not convince his enemies, but it is worth asking what he would gain by the merger of the Lebanon with the United Arab Republic. In armed strength, nothing (the Lebanon has an army of 5,000 men, which at the moment is proving powerless even to control the capital); in economic resources, little more (the Lebanon pro- duces nothing except apples and hashish, and the foreign capital which is its lifeblood would flee from Beirut, as it fled from Cairo, to find an operating base perhaps in Istanbul); in stature within the Arab world, only the prestige of one more triumph at the West's expense, of which he has no need (the fate of the Lebanese, whom they dislike, would be a matter of unconcern to the other Arabs). Against these, Nasser would have on his hands the administration of a turbulent province one-half of whose subjects would be hostile to his regime, and whose history has been one of continual intrigue against whatever rulers they temporarily acknowledged.
The crisis in the Lebanon has been appthach- ing for some months, and in an attempt to forestall it the Speaker of the Lebanese Chamber of Deputies has recently made several journeys to Cairo. His mission was to try to win President Nasser's acquiescence in the re-election of Presi- dent Chamoun by promising that the Lebanon would not adopt an openly anti-Nasser policy. President Nasser refused, saying that he had no wish to annex the Lebanon, but that he could not tolerate the status which Chamoun had given the Lebanon of an American satellite. Now that one section of the Lebanese people, has taken his name as its battle-cry, Nasser cannot ignore them, any more than he could ignore the Syrians when they urged on him the union between Egypt and Syria. The champion of the Arabs cannot tell the Arabs of the Lebanon that their fate is of no interest to him—hence the propaganda cam- paign being waged by the Egyptian and Syrian press on behalf of the Lebanese insurgents. But further than this, and a little gunrunning and material 'support, Nasser is not likely to go, so long as half of the Lebanese people are Christians and fundamentally disinterested in the aims of Arab nationalism.
The one thing that could alter this attitude of relative detachment is provocation, in the form of a too open intervention by the Americans. If American marines land in Beirut, if the Sixth Fleet is flaunted too obviously, it will become very difficult for Nasser to ignore the challenge. Hence the force of the warning which the Lebanese insurgents sent to the American Am- , bassador in Beirut last week, and which their leader quoted to me when I passed through the barricades to visit him : The open intervention of your government in Lebanese internal affairs . . . would be liable to provoke other interventions, which we have always tried to avoid.
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