Beirut: Looking Past the Embassy Garden

• Share

Moscow disappoints its friends, but waits for the U.S. to stumble

For the second time since the invasion of Lebanon, Israeli shells falling short of their mark pounded the Soviet embassy in West Beirut last week, ripping through walls and shattering windows. After the bombardment, the Kremlin brusquely warned Israel that the Soviet Union could not be indifferent to what was going on in the Middle East. But at a time when efforts to end the Israeli encirclement of West Beirut were reaching a critical stage, the message from Moscow seemed a minor diplomatic footnote. If anything, it only underscored one of the more curious aspects of the war in Lebanon: the Soviet Union's unwillingness—or inability—to offer credible support to its battered friends in the area. Says a senior official of the Palestine Liberation Organization: "We have stopped thinking about Moscow. All the Soviets seem worried about are a few shells landing in their embassy's garden."

Moscow did issue one pointed reminder last week that it thought it still had a major role to play in the Middle East problem, when Soviet President Leonid Brezhnev put Washington on notice that any decision to send U.S. troops to Lebanon, however briefly, would force the Soviet Union to "build its policy with due consideration of this fact." But as Washington quickly noted, last week's message was not nearly as strong as the Soviet Union's support for the Arabs in 1973 during the October War. At that time, Moscow airlifted military supplies to Syria and mobilized its forces, prompting President Richard Nixon to respond by putting U.S. troops on worldwide nuclear alert.

Last week's letter to Reagan seemed vague enough to leave the Soviets the option of doing nothing at all. Indeed, despite official protestations at the beginning of the conflict that the Soviet Union supported the Arab cause "not in words but in deeds," the Kremlin fortunately has shown a greater willingness to use harsh rhetoric than to intervene on behalf of the two participants who depend heavily on Soviet political and military support, Syria and the P.L.O.

One explanation for Moscow's hands-off policy is that the aging leadership in the Kremlin already has enough worries without looking for more in the Middle East. While some 100,000 Soviet troops remain bogged down fighting guerrillas in Afghanistan, Moscow must keep a watchful eye on Poland's precarious military regime. And although the U.S. and the Soviet Union have finally begun arms-reduction talks in Geneva, relations between the two superpowers are getting increasingly strained. The latest irritant is the Reagan Administration's ban on the sale of equipment that Moscow badly needs to build a gas pipeline to Western Europe.