Текст книги "The Arabs: A History"

Автор книги: Eugene Rogan

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Текущая страница: 36 (всего у книги 47 страниц)

Two nearly simultaneous bombs shook the very foundations of Beirut on Sunday morning, October 23, 1983. Within seconds, over 300 people had perished: 241 U.S. servicemen, 58 French paratroopers, 6 Lebanese civilians, and 2 suicide bombers. The U.S. Marines faced the highest single-day death toll since Iwo Jima, the French had absorbed the greatest single day’s casualties since the Algerian war, and the suicide bombers had transformed the conflict in Lebanon. The bombers approached their targets in trucks laden with tons of high explosives. One approached the U.S. Marines’ barracks, a concrete building in the Beirut International Airport compound, through a service entrance at 6:20 A.M. He gathered speed and smashed through the metal gates. The shocked sentries did not have time even to load their weapons to stop him. One survivor watched the truck speed by. All he could remember after the blast was that “the man was smiling as he drove past.”¹⁵ The driver was clearly delighted that he had penetrated the American compound, no doubt believing that his violent death would open the Gates of Paradise before him. The blast was so strong that it severed the building from its foundation; the compound collapsed like a house of cards. The ruins were rocked by secondary explosions as the Marines’ ammunition stores in the basement were detonated by the heat. Three miles to the north, another suicide bomber drove his truck into the underground parking garage of the high-rise building that served as headquarters to the French paratroopers. He detonated his bomb, leveling the building and killing fifty-eight French soldiers. Journalist Robert Fisk, who reached the ruins of the French compound moments after the explosion, could not grasp the enormity of the destruction. “I run up to a smoking crater, 20 feet deep and 40 wide. Piled beside it, like an obscene sandwich, are the nine floors of the building.... The bomb lifted the nine-storey building into the air and moved it 20 feet. The whole building became airborne. The crater is where the building was. How could this be done?”¹⁶ Even for war-shattered Beirut, the devastation wrought by the attacks of October 23, 1983, was shocking. The operations also revealed an unprecedented and deeply troubling degree of planning and discipline. Today we would say it bore the hallmark of an al-Qaida operation—a decade before that movement’s first attacks. No one knows precisely who was responsible for the attacks on the U.S. Marines and the French paratroopers in Beirut, but the prime suspect was a shadowy new group that called itself Islamic Jihad. In one of its earliest operations, in July 1982, members of the Islamic Jihad kidnapped the acting president of the American University of Beirut, an American academic named David Dodge. They also claimed responsibility for the massive car bomb that sheared a wing off the United States Embassy in downtown Beirut in April 1983, killing 63 and wounding over one 100. Radical new forces were at work in the Lebanese civil war. Islamic Jihad revealed itself to be a Lebanese Shiite organization collaborating with Iran. In an anonymous telephone call to a foreign press agency, Islamic Jihad claimed its July bombing of the U.S. Embassy was “part of the Iranian revolution’s campaign against the imperialist presence throughout the world.” Iran had dangerous friends in Lebanon, it seemed. “We will continue to strike at the imperialist presence in Lebanon,” the Islamic Jihad spokesman continued, “including the multi-national force.” Following the October bombings, Islamic Jihad once again claimed responsibility. “We are the soldiers of God and we are fond of death. We are neither Iranians nor Syrians nor Palestinians,” they insisted. “We are Lebanese Muslims who follow the principles of the Koran.”¹⁷

The conflict in Lebanon had grown infinitely more complex in the six years between the Syrian intervention in 1977 and the suicide bombings of 1983. Though it had started as an internal war between Lebanese factions with Palestinian involvement in 1975, the war was by 1983 a regional conflict that drew in Syria, Israel, Iran, Europe, and the United States directly—and many more countries indirectly, such as Iraq, Libya, Saudi Arabia, and the Soviet Union, which bankrolled different militias and provided them with weaponry. The war had also led to significant shifts in the balance of power among the different Lebanese communities. The Syrian army, which entered Lebanon in 1976 as part of an Arab League peacekeeping force, had first sided with the beleaguered Maronite Christians to prevent the victory of the Leftist Muslim factions headed by Kamal Jumblatt. Syria was jealous of its dominant position in Lebanon and acted quickly to prevent any one group from gaining a clear victory in that country’s civil war. This led Syria to change its alliances with some frequency. No sooner had Syria’s army defeated the leftist Muslim militias than it turned against the Maronites and sided with the rising new power of Lebanon’s Shiite Muslim community. Long marginalized by the political elites, the Shiites had emerged as a distinct political community in Lebanon only since the onset of the Lebanese civil war. By the 1970s the Shiites had become the largest Lebanese community in terms of numbers, though they remained the poorest and most politically disenfranchised of the country’s sects. The traditional centers of Lebanon’s Shiite communities were in the poorest parts of the country—South Lebanon and the northern Bekaa Valley. Increasingly, Shiites fled the relative deprivation of the countryside, moving to the southern slums of Beirut in search of jobs. In the 1960s and 1970s, many Lebanese Shiites had been drawn to secular parties promising social reform, like the Ba’th, the Lebanese Communist Party, and the Syrian Social Nationalist Party. It was only in the 1970s that a charismatic Iranian cleric of Lebanese ancestry named Musa al-Sadr drew the Shiites together into a distinct communal party known as the Movement of the Dispossessed (Harakat al-Mahrumin) and began to compete with the leftist parties for the loyalty of the Lebanese Shiites. Upon the outbreak of the civil war in 1975, the Movement of the Dispossessed created its own militia, known as Amal. In the first stages of the Lebanese civil war, Amal sided with the leftist Muslim parties of the National Movement, headed by Kamal Jumblatt. But Musa al-Sadr soon grew disenchanted with Jumblatt’s leadership, accusing the Druze leader of using the Shiites as cannon-fodder—in al-Sadr’s words, “to combat the Christians to the last Shi’i.”¹⁸ Tensions had also emerged between Amal and the Palestinian movement, which since 1969 had used South Lebanon as a base for its operations against Israel. Not only did the Shiite community suffer great hardship from Israeli retaliatory strikes provoked by Palestinian operations from the south, but it grew to resent the control the Palestinians exercised over South Lebanon. By 1976 Amal had broken with Jumblatt’s coalition and the Palestinian movement to side with the Syrians, whom its followers saw as the only counterweight to Palestinian influence in the south. It was the beginning of an enduring alliance between Syria and the Shiites of Lebanon that has survived until today. The Iranian Revolution and the creation of the Islamic Republic in 1979 transformed Shiite politics in Lebanon. The Shiites of Lebanon were bound to Iran by common religious and cultural ties that spanned the centuries. Musa al-Sadr was himself an Iranian of Lebanese origins, and he promoted political activism very much in line with the thinking of the Islamic revolutionaries in Iran. Al-Sadr never lived to see the Iranian Revolution. He disappeared on a trip to Libya in 1978 and is widely assumed to have been murdered there. The 1979 revolution galvanized the Shiites of South Lebanon by giving them a host of new leaders to rally behind at a crucial moment when they were still coming to terms with the recent disappearance of their leader. Portraits of Ayatollah Khomeini flanked those of Musa al-Sadr in the southern slums of Beirut and the Roman ruins of Baalbek. The Iranians did all they could to encourage the enthusiasm of Lebanese Shiites, as part of their early bid to export their revolution, and to extend their influence to the traditional centers of Shiite Arab culture in southern Iraq, the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and Lebanon. Through this network, Iran could put pressure on its rivals and enemies—particularly the United States, Israel, and Iraq.

American-Iranian relations deteriorated rapidly after the Islamic Revolution in 1979. The new Iranian government mistrusted the American administration because of its past support for the shah, Mohamed Reza Pahlevi. When the U.S. government allowed the deposed shah into the United States for medical treatment (he was terminally ill with cancer), a group of Iranian students overran the American Embassy in Tehran and took fifty-two American diplomats hostage on November 4, 1979. U.S. president Jimmy Carter froze Iranian assets, applied economic and political sanctions on the Islamic Republic, and even attempted an aborted military rescue mission to relieve the hostage crisis?to no avail. The American government was powerless and humiliated as its diplomats were held captive for 444 days. In a calculated swipe at Jimmy Carter, whose reelection campaign had been derailed by the hostage crisis, the American diplomats were released only after Ronald Reagan had been sworn in as president, in January 1981. The gesture did not endear the Iranian government to the Reagan administration, and the damage caused by the hostage crisis has troubled American-Iranian relations ever since. The new Iranian regime denounced the United States as the Great Satan and the enemy of all Muslims. The Reagan administration?and those that followed?branded the Islamic Republic a rogue state and sought all means to isolate Iran and bring down its government. The outbreak of the Iran-Iraq War in 1980 exacerbated the antagonism between the Islamic Republic and the United States, with dire consequences for Lebanon. Headed since 1978 by President Saddam Hussein, Iraq invaded its northern neighbor without warning on September 22, 1980. Hussein attempted to take advantage of the political turmoil within revolutionary Iran and the country’s international isolation during the hostage crisis to seize disputed waterways and rich oil fields in Iranian territory. By far the most violent conflict in the history of the modern Middle East, the Iran-Iraq War lasted eight years (1980–1988) and claimed an estimated 500,000–1,000,000 lives amid tactics reminiscent of the World Wars—trench warfare, gas and chemical weapons, and aerial bombardment and rocket attacks on urban centers. It took the Iranians two years to drive the Iraqis from their soil and go on the offensive. As the war turned to Iran’s advantage, the United States gave its open support to Iraq, in spite of that country’s close ties to the Soviet Union. Starting in 1982, the Reagan administration began to provide arms, intelligence, and economic assistance to Saddam Hussein for his war against Iran. This compounded Iranian hostility toward the United States, and the Iranians took every opportunity to strike at American interests in the region. Lebanon soon emerged as an arena for the Iranian-American confrontation. Iran enjoyed two allies in Lebanon—the Shiite community, and Syria. The Iranian-Syrian alliance was in many ways counterintuitive. As an overtly Arab nationalist, secular state engaged in a violent struggle with its own Islamic movement, Syria was an unlikely ally for the non-Arab Islamic Republic of Iran. What bound the two countries together were pragmatic interests—primarily their mutual antagonism toward Iraq, Israel, and the United States. In the 1970s Iraq and Syria had been engaged in an intense competition for leadership of the Arab world. Both countries were governed as single-party states under rival variants of the Arab nationalist Ba‘th party. As a result, Ba’thism actually served to undermine unity of action or common purpose between Iraq and Syria. So deep was the antagonism between the two Ba’thi states that Syria broke ranks with the other Arab countries to side with Iran in its war with Iraq. In return, Iran provided Syria with arms and economic aid, and reinforcements in Syria’s conflict with Israel. And the Syrian-Iranian alliance completed a triangle of relations binding Syria and Iran to the Lebanese Shiite community. The catalyst for activating this fateful triangle was the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in the summer of 1982.

Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon opened a new phase in the conflict in Lebanon. Violence and destruction reached unprecedented levels. And, by invading Lebanon, Israel came to be drawn into the factional politics as an outright participant in the Lebanese conflict. The Israelis were to remain in Lebanon for over eighteen years, with enduring consequences for both countries. The Israeli invasion of Lebanon was triggered by an attack on British soil. On June 3, 1982, the Abu Nidal terror group—the same organization that murdered the PLO’s London diplomat Said Hammami in 1978—attempted to assassinate Israeli ambassador Shlomo Argov outside a London hotel. Though Abu Nidal was a renegade group violently opposed to Yasser Arafat and the PLO, and though the PLO had observed a year-long cease-fire with Israel, the Israeli government nonetheless took the assassination attempt as grounds for war against the PLO in Lebanon. Israel’s prime minister, Menachem Begin, and his militant defense minister, General Ariel Sharon, had ambitious plans to reshape the Middle East by driving the PLO and Syria out of Lebanon. Begin believed the Christians in Lebanon were a natural ally for the Jewish state, and, since coming to power in 1977, his Likud government had developed an increasingly open alliance with the right-wing Maronite Phalangist Party (with predictably adverse consequences for Syrian-Maronite relations).¹⁹ Phalangist militiamen were brought to Israel for training, and the Israelis provided over $100 million in arms, ammunition, and uniforms to the Christian fighters. Begin believed Israel could secure a full peace treaty with Lebanon if both the PLO and Syria were driven from the country and Bashir Gemayel, son of Pierre Gemayel, founder of the Phalangist Party, were to become president. Peace with Lebanon, following the peace with Egypt, would isolate Syria and leave Israel a free hand to annex the Palestinian territories in the West Bank, occupied by Israel in the June 1967 War. For both strategic and ideological reasons, the Likud government was determined to integrate the West Bank, which it consistently referred to by the Biblical names Judea and Samaria, into the modern state of Israel. However, although Israel?s government sought the territory of the West Bank, it did not want to absorb its Arab population. Sharon?s solution was to drive the Palestinians out of the West Bank and to encourage them to fulfill their national aspirations by overthrowing King Hussein and taking over Jordan, a country whose population was already 60 percent Palestinian. This represented what Sharon liked to call the ?Jordan option.?²⁰ These were ambitious plans that could only be achieved by military means and—upon reflection—a callous indifference to human life. The first step would be to destroy the PLO presence in Lebanon, and the Likud used the assassination attempt in London as the grounds on which to initiate hostilities. The very next day, on June 4, 1982, Israeli aircraft and naval vessels began a murderous bombardment of South Lebanon and West Beirut. On June 6, Israeli ground forces swept across the Lebanese border in a campaign dubbed “Operation Peace for Galilee.” Over the next ten weeks, UN figures reported more than 17,000 Lebanese and Palestinians killed and 30,000 wounded by the Israeli invasion, the overwhelming majority of them civilians. The Israelis unleashed the full force of their military on Lebanon. While Lebanese towns and cities were bombed from the air and sea, the Israeli army advanced rapidly through South Lebanon to lay siege to Beirut, where the PLO had its headquarters in the southern suburb of Fakhani. The residents of Beirut became the helpless victims of a conflict between Israel, the Palestinians, and the Syrians. The Israelis targeted the leadership of the PLO in particular, hoping to decapitate the movement by killing Yasser Arafat and his top lieutenants. Arafat was forced to change residence daily to avoid assassination. The buildings in which he was reported to take shelter were quickly targeted by Israeli bombers. Lina Tabbara, who assisted Arafat with his 1974 speech at the UN General Assembly, had survived the first phase of the Lebanese civil war with her family in Muslim West Beirut. Her marriage, however, did not, and she reverted to her maiden name, Lina Mikdadi. Living in West Beirut during the 1982 siege, Mikdadi witnessed the leveling of an apartment building that Arafat had left only minutes earlier. “I noticed a space where a building had been, right behind the public gardens.... I ran to the spot. An eight-story building had disappeared. People ran around half-crazed, women screamed their children’s names.”²¹ The destruction of that one building in which Arafat had been taking refuge claimed 250 civilian lives, according to Mikdadi. One of Arafat’s commanders said the raid had left Arafat distraught. “What crime has been committed by these children, now buried under the rubble?” Arafat asked. “All they are guilty of is having been in a building I visited a couple of times.” Thereafter, Arafat slept in his car, away from built-up areas.²² For ten weeks of unspeakable violence the siege continued. Survivors reported hundreds of raids conducted within a single day. There was no safe haven, no place to take refuge. As casualty figures spiraled into the tens of thousands, international pressure mounted on Israel to bring its siege of Beirut to a close. The violence reached its peak in August 1982. On August 12 the Israelis carried out eleven hours of nonstop air raids, dropping thousands of tons of ordinance on West Beirut. An estimated 800 homes were destroyed, with 500 casualties. In Washington, President Ronald Reagan placed a call to Prime Minister Begin in Israel and convinced him to stop the fighting. ?President Reagan,? Mikdadi asked rhetorically, ?why didn?t you make your phone call earlier??²³ Begin relented under U.S. pressure, and the Reagan administration brokered a complex cease-fire agreement between the Israelis and the Palestinians. The PLO combatants would withdraw from Beirut by sea, and a multinational force composed of U.S., French, and Italian troops would be deployed to take up positions vacated by the Israelis. The first stage of the disengagement plan went very smoothly. French troops arrived on August 21 to take control of the Beirut International Airport. The next day, the first of the PLO forces began their withdrawal from Beirut’s sea port. There was a great deal of concern for the security of the departing Palestinians. Many Lebanese had grown hostile to the Palestinian movement, blaming the PLO for causing the civil war in the first place and for provoking the Israeli invasions of 1978 and 1982. Yet when Lina Mikdadi, herself half-Palestinian, went to the assembly point to bid the Palestinian men farewell, she found that many citizens of West Beirut had done the same. “Women lean out of windows that no longer have any panes to throw rice; they wave from half-destroyed balconies. Many cry as they watch the trucks go by. The Palestinians have already said goodbye to their children, wives and parents at the municipal stadium.”²⁴ The departing Palestinian fighters were to be scattered among a number of Arab countries—Yemen, Iraq, Algeria, Sudan, and Tunisia, where the PLO established its new headquarters. Their expulsion from Beirut marked the end of the PLO as a coherent fighting force. Yasser Arafat was the last to leave, on August 30, and with his departure the siege of Beirut was effectively over. The whole process had gone so smoothly that the international forces, originally deployed for thirty days, withdrew ten days early, believing their mission accomplished. The last French contingent left Lebanon on September 13. The retreating Palestinian fighters left behind their parents, wives, and children. The Palestinian civilians that remained were left completely defenseless. One of the main tasks of the multinational forces was to ensure the security of the families of Palestinian combatants who were vulnerable in a hostile country. As those forces began to withdraw, no one was left to protect the Palestinian refugee camps from their many enemies.

At the same time the PLO was withdrawing from Lebanon, the Lebanese parliament was scheduled to meet on August 23 to elect a new president. Due to the civil war, there had not been a parliamentary election since 1972. The parliamentarians? numbers had been reduced by mortality from 99 to 92, of which only 45 were actually in Lebanon. Only one candidate had declared his intention to run for office: Israel?s ally Bashir Gemayel of the right-wing Maronite Phalangist Party. To this Lebanon?s vaunted democracy had been reduced. Yet for the war-weary and pragmatic Lebanese, Gemayel was a consensus candidate. His connections to Israel and the West might just win the Lebanese some much-needed peace. There was genuine celebration across Lebanon when Gemayel?s election was confirmed. Bashir Gemayel’s presidency proved short lived—as did Lebanon’s peace. On September 14, a bomb destroyed the Phalangist Party headquarters in East Beirut, killing Gemayel. There is no evidence of any Palestinian involvement in the assassination; in fact, a young Maronite named Habib Shartouni, a member of the pro-Damascus Syrian Socialist National Party, was arrested two days later and confessed to the crime, denouncing Gemayel as a traitor for his dealings with Israel. Yet the Phalangist militiamen harbored such deep hatred for the Palestinians, cultivated over seven years of civil war, that they sought revenge for the assassination of their leader in the Palestinian camps. Had the American, French, and Italian troops of the multinational force seen out their full thirty-day mandate, they might have been able to provide the necessary protection for the unarmed Palestinian refugees. Instead, the Palestinian camps had come under the protection of the Israeli army, which reoccupied Beirut immediately after Gemayel’s assassination was announced. On the night of September 16, Israeli defense minister Ariel Sharon and chief of staff Raphael Eitan authorized the deployment of Phalangist militiamen into the Palestinian refugee camps. What followed was a massacre of innocent, unarmed civilians—a crime against humanity. Though the massacres at Sabra and Shatila were conducted by Maronite militiamen, they were given full access to the camps by the Israeli forces, which had secured all points of entry to the area. The Israelis knew their Maronite allies well enough to know the danger they posed to the Palestinians. Any doubts about Maronite intentions were dispelled when Israeli officers overheard the radio exchanges between the Phalangists shortly after they entered the Palestinian camps. One Israeli lieutenant followed an exchange between a Phalangist militiaman and Maronite commander Elie Hobeika. Hobeika had lost his fiancйe and many family members in the Palestinian siege of the Christian stronghold of Damour in January 1976—his hatred of Palestinians was legendary. The militiaman reported to Hobeika in Arabic that he had found fifty women and children and asked what he should do with them. Hobeika’s reply over the radio, the Israeli lieutenant recounted, was: “This is the last time you’re going to ask me a question like that, you know exactly what to do.” Raucous laughter broke out among the Phalangist militiamen following the radio exchange. The Israeli lieutenant confirmed he “understood that what was involved was the murder of the women and children.?²⁵ Because of their complicity in the massacre, the Israeli armed forces—and General Ariel Sharon in particular—were stained by the Maronite crimes against the Palestinians of Sabra and Shatila. Over a thirty-six-hour period, the Phalangists systematically murdered hundreds of Palestinians in the Sabra and Shatila camps. Maronite militiamen made their way through the fetid alleys of the camps, killing every man, woman, and child they found. Jamal, a twenty-eight-year-old member of Arafat’s Fatah movement, had remained in Beirut after the PLO’s withdrawal and was an eyewitness to the massacres. “On Thursday the flares over the camp began at 5.30 P.M. . . . There were aircraft dropping light bombs too. The night was like day. The next few hours were terrible. I saw people running in panic to the small mosque, Chatila Mosque. They were taking shelter there because apart from being a sanctuary it was also built with a strong steel structure. Inside were 26 women and children—some of them had horrible injuries.” These may well have been the refugees that Hobeika had condemned over the radio. While the killing was going on, the Phalangists set to work leveling the refugee camp with bulldozers, often killing the people sheltering inside. “They killed everyone they found, but the point is the way they killed them,” Jamal recounted. The old were cut down, the young were raped and murdered, family members were forced to witness the murder of their loved ones. The Israelis estimated 800 were killed, but the Palestinian Red Cross reported that over 2,000 died. “They must have been crazed to do things like that,” Jamal concluded. He spoke of these events with some detachment and saw the massacre as part of a bigger plan. “Psychologically it is clear what they were trying to do to us. We were trapped like animals in that camp, and that is how they have always tried to show us to the world. They wanted us to believe it ourselves.”²⁶ The massacre in the Sabra and Shatila camps provoked widespread condemnation across the world—not least in Israel, where opposition to the Lebanon War had grown increasingly vocal over the course of the summer. On September 25, some 300,000 Israelis, representing 10 percent of the total population of the country, gathered in a mass demonstration in Tel Aviv to protest Israel’s role in the atrocity. In response, the Likud government was forced to convene an official commission of inquiry—the Kahan Commission—that in 1983 would charge the most powerful Israeli officials involved—Prime Minister Begin, Foreign Minister Yitzhak Shamir, Chief of Staff General Eitan—with responsibility for the massacre. The commission also called for the resignation of Defense Minister Ariel Sharon. More immediately, the international outcry led to the return of the multinational forces and American engagement in resolving the crisis in Lebanon. U.S. Marines, French paratroopers, and Italian soldiers returned to Beirut on September 29, too late to provide the security they had promised the families of the deported PLO fighters. If at first they had been deployed to see out the Palestinian fighters, the multinational forces were now sent in as a buffer for the Israeli withdrawal from Beirut. The Israelis, for their part, did not want to move until they had concluded a political agreement with Lebanon. First a replacement president had to be elected. On September 23, the day Bashir Gemayel had been due to take up office, Lebanon?s parliament reconvened to elect his older brother Amin as president. Whereas Bashir had worked closely with the Israelis, Amin Gemayel had better relations with Damascus and showed none of his brother?s enthusiasm for close cooperation with Tel Aviv. However, with nearly half his country under Israeli occupation, the new President Gemayel had no choice but to enter into negotiations with Begin?s government. Talks opened on December 28, 1982, and shifted between Khalde, in Israeli-occupied Lebanon, and the northern Israeli town of Kiryat Shimona. Thirty-five rounds of intense negotiations were conducted over the next five months, facilitated by American officials. U.S. secretary of state George Schultz spent ten days in shuttle diplomacy to help conclude the Israeli-Lebanese agreement on May 17, 1983. The May 17 Agreement was condemned across the Arab world as a travesty of justice, in which the American superpower forced the powerless Lebanese to reward its Israeli ally for invading and destroying their country. Less than the full peace treaty the Israelis initially hoped for, the agreement nevertheless represented more normalization with the Israeli occupier than most Lebanese could accept. It terminated the state of war between Lebanon and Israel and placed the Lebanese government in the difficult position of ensuring the security of Israel’s northern border from the Jewish state’s many enemies. Lebanon’s army was to be deployed in the south to create a “security region” covering approximately one-third the territory of Lebanon, extending from the town of Sidon south to the Israeli border. The Lebanese government also agreed to integrate the South Lebanon army, an Israeli-funded Christian militia that had gained notoriety as collaborators, into the Lebanese army. It was, in the words of one Shiite official, a “humiliating accord” concluded “under the Israeli bayonet.”²⁷ The Syrian government was particularly aggrieved by the terms of the May 17 Agreement, which would only isolate Syria and alter the regional balance of power in Israel’s favor. In the course of the negotiations, the United States had deliberately bypassed Syria’s president, Hafiz al-Asad, knowing he would obstruct negotiations between Israel and Lebanon. Nor did the May 17 Agreement include any concessions for the Syrians. Article 6 of the agreement would have required the withdrawal of all Syrian troops from Lebanon as a precondition for Israel’s withdrawal. Syria had invested too much political capital in Lebanon in the six years since it first intervened in the civil war to permit the country to pass into Israel’s sphere of influence under U.S. auspices. Syria quickly mobilized its allies in Lebanon to reject the May 17 Agreement. Fighting resumed as the opposition forces began to shell Christian areas of Beirut, underlining the weakness of the Gemayel government. They also fired on the American troops of the multinational forces, whose role as disinterested peacekeepers had been fatally compromised by the regional politics of the United States. When American forces returned fire?often very heavy fire from the massive guns of U.S. warships?they went from being intermediaries above the fray to participants mired in the Lebanon conflict. Though a superpower, the United States was at a disadvantage in Lebanon. Its local allies, the isolated government of Amin Gemayel and the Israeli occupation forces, were more vulnerable than its enemies: Soviet-backed Syria, Iran, and the Shiite Islamic resistance movements. Like the Israelis, the Americans believed they could achieve their objectives in Lebanon through use of overwhelming force. They were soon to discover how the deployment of their military to Lebanon left the superpower exposed and vulnerable to its many regional enemies.