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U.S. Ambassador to Lebanon Robert Murphy speaks with General Chehab, commander-in-chief of the Lebanese Army just before American Marines entered Lebanon on July 15, 1958. |
The United States involvement in the Middle East fills today’s headlines and television news broadcasts. Controversies with Iran and turmoil in Iraq, Syria, Jordan, Israel, and Lebanon are often the main topic of discussion among Americans and people throughout the world. Here’s the story of the first U.S. president to send combat troops into the region.
At the eastern end of the Mediterranean Sea, Lebanon has been a major crossroads of civilization since before biblical times. Bordered by Syria to its east and north and Israel to the south, Lebanon has long been far more important than its physical characteristics suggest. A nation about the size of Connecticut, in 1958 it had a population of only 1.5 million people almost equally divided among various Christian and Muslim faiths. Once a part of the French empire in the Middle East, Lebanon had acquired independence in 1944, and the newly created state joined the United Nations the following year.
Lebanon’s subsequent political history involved an intricate balance act that left the nation always on the edge of disaster. It was a democratic republic led by President Camille Chamoun, who sustained a delicate political balance between Lebanese Christians and Muslims while at the same time maintaining strong commercial and diplomatic ties with Europe and the United States. The steady influx of Arabs fleeing Palestine over the years since the establishment of Israel, had changed Lebanon’s demographics and politics. The newcomers hated the western nations for having given statehood to Israel. They believed that Lebanon should be ruled by Muslim religious leaders instead of elected representatives because the clerics would quickly abandon Lebanon’s close relationships with Europe and the United States.
Syria, whose land border nearly surrounds Lebanon, began supplying arms and munitions to the refugees and Lebanese insurgents dedicated to overthrowing Lebanon’s government. As the anti-government terrorist attacks spread throughout southern Lebanon, President Chamoun pleaded with the United Nations to stop the flow of weapons from Syria into Lebanon. In response, the U. N. Secretary General, Dag Hammarskjöld led a delegation of diplomats to the area and urged Syrian leaders to cease arms shipments into its neighbor’s territory. While the transfer of munitions never actually stopped, the amount of weapons sent in by Syria diminished to the point that Lebanese police and army units could control their territory.
But just as the leaders of Western governments began to believe that a crisis had been avoided, events in the Middle East boiled over in 1958. On July 14th a mob uprising, backed by the military, overthrew the Hashemite monarchy in Iraq. The king and his top government officials were murdered and their bodies dragged through the streets of Baghdad. At the same time a bloody uprising in Jordan failed in an attempt to kill King Hussein but civil chaos ruled the streets of Amman. Syria, seeing an opportunity to dominate Lebanon with an Islamic puppet regime, sent convoys of munitions laden trucks into the southern Lebanon insurgent strongholds.
President Chamoun, backed by all his cabinet ministers, urgently asked President Eisenhower to send in United States troops to stop the overthrow of its democratically elected government. Lebanon’s army consisted of only about 9,000 soldiers and its police force only had some 2,500 gendarmes. There seemed no way that these small forces could withstand the insurgency coming from the south and maintain order throughout the country.
Eisenhower knew that Syria’s aggression was the major source of Lebanon’s grave peril. He believed that under the United Nation’s charter every nation reserved the right to seek collective security from other countries if their own was being attacked. He also felt an obligation to protect the 2,500 Americans then in Lebanon.
Before taking action, the President met with his national security staff, the Secretary of State, the CIA director, and the military Chiefs of Staff. Even though they recognized the possibility of grave consequences, the meeting ended with consensus that the United States should grant Lebanon’s petition for American military assistance. Eisenhower’s view was that U. S. troop activity should be limited to protecting the city of Beirut, where the most of the Americans were and where the American University was located. That would free Lebanon’s own army to quell the aggression in the southern portion of the country. Ike rejected the recommendations of his military advisors who wanted a much larger area of operations. As he explained later, “If the Lebanese army were unable to subdue the rebels when we had secured their capital and protected their government, I felt, we were backing up a government with so little popular support that we probably should not be there.”
Later the same day, President Eisenhower met with twenty-two Congressional leaders from both parties and briefed them on the situation. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and his brother Allen Dulles, who was Director of the CIA, attended the meeting to provide their assessments. There appeared to be no Congressional opposition to this temporary use of our troops after President Eisenhower agreed to go to the Congress if any change in the mission’s scope became necessary.
A battalion of U. S. Marines landed on the beaches of Lebanon on July 15th and was welcomed by the people. Not a shot was fired. By August 8th the entire U. S. contingent of 8,515 Army soldiers and 5,842 Marines was in place guarding Lebanon’s capital and the nearby airport.
Eisenhower presented this issue to the United Nations, but the Soviet Union twice blocked Security Council resolutions on Lebanon during the next there weeks. On August 15th President Eisenhower delivered a major address to a special emergency session of the UN General Assembly in which he defended U. S. military assistance as consistent with the United Nations Charter.
As a result of by-passing the Security Council by going directly to the General Assembly, Eisenhower was able to break the diplomatic logjam at the UN finally. The General Assembly passed a resolution along the lines set out in President Eisenhower’s speech. This action fundamentally terminated the crisis. The troubles in Lebanon did not end suddenly, but over the next eight weeks the Lebanese government gained full control of its territory and the last American troops were withdrawn on October 18, 1958.
