Middle East: Delay with Diplomacy

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The U.S. seeks a solution to the missile confrontation in Lebanon

They stood out like glistening white beacons against the green countryside, their silver warheads gleaming lethally in the sunshine. Beside the main highway from Beirut to Damascus, a dozen of them were poised on a gentle, flower-strewn ridge that overlooks the verdant Bekaa Valley in eastern Lebanon. Farther to the north, outside the airbase at Riyaq where Israeli Phantoms shot down two Syrian helicopters two weeks ago, another dozen were perched on newly dug mounds of earth. These were Syria's Soviet-made SA-6 missiles, one of the most potent antiaircraft weapons in the Syrian armory—and the potentially explosive epicenter of a dangerous new Middle East crisis.

The Syrians made no attempt last week to camouflage the menacing new weaponry they had moved into Lebanon in support of their 22,000 peace-keeping forces in the country. Syrian President Hafez Assad was obviously defying the Israelis, insisting that the missiles were necessary for the defense of his forces and that he had no intention of removing them. With equal vehemence, Israel insisted that the presence of the missiles was an unacceptable violation of the tacitly accepted status quo in Lebanon's complex political equation and that they had to be removed. Warned Prime Minister Menachem Begin: "There are possibilities that the problem will be solved peacefully, or otherwise"—meaning, clearly, by resorting to military action.

As Syria and Israel braced for a violent showdown that could bring war to the region once again—and one, moreover, that conceivably could drag in the superpowers—the U.S. and the Soviet Union moved swiftly to restrain their respective allies. Caught in the middle, as always, battered Lebanon waited anxiously for others to settle its fate.

Frantic diplomatic efforts by the U.S. succeeded in persuading Israel to hold its fire in the dangerous, 72-hr, period after the Israelis discovered the missiles. By that time, Washington had prepared its own initiative to relieve the pressure on both Damascus and Jerusalem. U.S. Ambassador to Israel Samuel Lewis personally hand-carried a 1¼-page letter from President Ronald Reagan to Begin. The letter reiterated U.S. assertions that Washington wanted to pursue diplomatic avenues before military action was taken. Begin interpreted the message as a continuing sign of U.S. sympathy for Israel's position on the missiles and agreed to hold off any action for "a reasonable period." Then, last week, Begin sent a letter of his own warning Reagan that the situation was similar to the crisis that preceded the 1967 Six Day war, when Israel took preemptive military action.