Playing with Fire

By Marguerite Johnson

Israeli jets and Syrian missiles score a high-risk conflict

The message that crackled across the air waves, and clattered over chancellery teletypes in a score of capitals, was charged with menace. Israeli Phantom fighter-bombers, firing air-to-air missiles, had just brought down a Syrian helicopter as it took off from an airbase near Riyaq in east central Lebanon. Later in the day, a second Israeli air attack downed another Syrian helicopter, killing all four crewmen aboard. Before wheeling back to Israel, according to Lebanese claims that were strongly denied by Jerusalem, the Israeli jets bombed and strafed Syrian positions above the city of Zahle, where Syrian peace-keeping forces and Lebanese Christian militiamen, armed by Jerusalem, have been locked in a battle for supremacy over the strategic Bekaa Valley and the towering Sannin Ridge.

The attacks touched off alarm bells around the world. The Israeli action, after all, posed high risks for the stability of the whole region.

Not since 1973 had Israel and Syria seemed so close to war. The delicate, tacit "red line" of understanding that has long kept Israel and Syria at arm's length in Lebanon had been dangerously violated.

Would Israel now be tempted to deliver a serious blow against Syria?

Would Damascus feel compelled to equal the score with retaliation? In either case, a wider Middle East conflict could have been in the making. Tragically, even the Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty would be at risk, and with it a half-decade of diplomatic labor. Following the Israeli attack, in fact, Egyptian Foreign Minister Butros Ghali--despite Cairo's antagonism toward Damascus ever since Camp David--dispatched a blunt warning to Jerusalem: "In the event of an all-out military action, Arab solidarity will prevail over the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty."

Ever since the Syrian-Christian hostilities heated up early last month, Israeli officials had claimed the right to intervene if the tide turned against their Christian allies. They were finally prompted to act after Syrian units scored significant gains in the Sannin Ridge over the weekend. The Ministerial Defense Committee, a top-level assembly of generals and senior Cabinet officials, adopted a bold policy: military warning strikes against the Syrians in Lebanon. The Syrian choppers were downed within hours of that meeting. In a combative statement the same evening, Prime Minister Menachem Begin threatened more of the same. Said he: "We will not tolerate a Syrian takeover in Lebanon, and we will not let the Syrians wipe out the Christians there. There are grounds to assume that we will not be content with this action."

Damascus defiantly raised the ante. In a highly visible and provocative action, the Syrians moved missile launchers carrying Soviet-made SA-6 surface-to-air missiles into the Bekaa Valley about three miles from the airbase where the helicopters had been downed. Now the scene seemed to be set for a showdown.

Fearful that the Israelis could spark open warfare by trying to take out the missiles, the U.S. launched a concerted diplomatic campaign to defuse what Secretary of State Alexander Haig called a "very, very tense" situation. In Jerusalem, U.S. Ambassador Samuel Lewis told Begin bluntly that the U.S. was terribly worried about the possible escalation. In Washington, a task force was set up to monitor events. Under Secretary of State Walter Stoessel met with Soviet Ambassador Anatoli Dobrynin and urged the So viets to restrain their Syrian ally. Meanwhile, the State Department scrambled to disavow any responsibility for approving the Israeli operation. Said State Department Spokesman Dean Fischer: "I want to make it fully clear that the U.S. has not given a green light to Israel to undertake any military action in Lebanon."

Privately, some American diplomats charged that Begin's saber rattling could have been a bold attempt to create a crisis that would ensure his re-election in June. Begin's aides angrily denied the charge. There were some signs that a debate was waging within Begin's Likud coalition over the possible political advantages of a Middle East crisis. The sensationalist leftist weekly Ha 'olam Ha 'zeh reported that proponents of war now argued that strife would 1) shatter the peace treaty with Egypt and thus permit Israel to hold on to the northern and eastern third of the Sinai rather than restore the territory to the Egyptians in 1982; and 2) enable the Israelis to ravage the fast-growing Syrian army before it became a more formidable foe. A third, frequently stated argument for Israeli intervention in Lebanon: it would enable the Israelis, in effect, to partition the country and thus neutralize the Palestinian presence along their northern border. Even the respected independent Tel Aviv daily Ha'aretz gave prominent play to an article by an ultranationalist who argued that the time was opportune for a successful war with Syria.

As it is, Israeli jets have long enjoyed aerial supremacy over Lebanon. They are able with impunity to operate reconnaissance flights, often at supersonic speeds, over the length and breadth of the country--240 sorties in just one 48-hr, period last week, for example. Syrian MiGs have occasionally challenged these overflights, to their detriment: 13 MiGs have been lost in dogfights to Israeli jets over the past 18 months. As if to underscore that superiority, Israel last week also intensified its aerial attacks against Palestinian positions all across southern Lebanon. In one particularly lethal raid, Israeli jets flew repeated bombing runs over the Lebanese ports of Tyre and Sidon, killing at least 25 civilians.

In response to these attacks, and to heavy artillery duels with the Israeli-backed Christian forces under the command of Major Sa'ad Haddad, Palestine Liberation Organization Chief Yasser Arafat ordered Palestinian guerrilla forces to go on full alert. At midweek, he summoned Arab ambassadors in Beirut to describe Israel's actions in southern Lebanon as "systematic genocide against the Palestinian and Lebanese people."

The current Lebanese conflict has its genesis in the tangled political alliances that developed in the wake of the 1975-76 civil war. Under a mandate from the Arab League, Syria moved in a 22,000-man peace-keeping force to act as a buffer between the warring Lebanese factions, mainly Muslim leftists vs. Christian militias known as Phalangists. At the time, Syria fully supported the Christians. That alliance ended in 1978, however, when the Christian Phalangists suddenly declared the Syrians to be an army of occupation and drove them out of Beirut's Christian-held areas. The Christians thereupon made another alliance of convenience--this time with Israel.

The righting between the Syrians and Phalangists sputtered on through various ceasefires, then erupted into a new round of clashes. The latest flare-up began when the Christians covertly moved some 4,000 heavily armed militiamen into the hills surrounding Zahle. The biggest Christian city in Lebanon (pop. 200,000), it happens to be located just off the strategic Damascus-to-Beirut highway, Syria's main supply route. When the Syrians learned of the Phalangist buildup there, they charged that an Israeli-Christian plot was in the works to drive them out of the Bekaa Valley and link up Christian forces in the north with Major Haddad's Christian forces in the south. The Syrians, moreover, consider the valley their "soft underbelly," through which Israel could mount a flanking attack on Damascus and thus bypass its heavily fortified defense lines along the Golan Heights. So Syria unleashed the heavy attacks on the Christian positions, launching another chapter in Lebanon's bloody history.

But nothing in Lebanon's byzantine political maneuverings is quite as simple --or as complicated--as it appears on the surface. Even when they were at each others' throats, the Syrians had never really severed communications with their onetime Christian allies. Indeed, talks that seemed to point to some sort of Syrian-Christian detente got under way two weeks ago. On the very day that the Israelis downed the Syrian helicopters, in fact, Syrian Foreign Minister Abdel Halim Khaddam arrived in Beirut for wide-ranging talks with Lebanese government officials and representatives of every political faction in the country.

The talks were intended to seek a political solution that would be satisfactory to everyone. In spite of the Israeli-Syrian face-off, both Khaddam and Lebanese officials remained optimistic last week that the meetings had laid the groundwork for a plan of possible "national reconciliation." The main sticking point was Syria's insistence that the Christians sever their alliance with Israel. There was no real sign yet that the Christians would go quite that far. But it was worth noting that Pierre Gemayel, leader of the Christian Phalange Party, went out of his way last week to praise Syria's "big role in bringing about entente among the Lebanese."

U.S. diplomatic pressure on Israel, meanwhile, also seemed to be paying off. After talks with Ambassador Lewis, Begin suddenly muted his tone. Holding out an olive branch of sorts, the Prime Minister now declared: "We don't want war with Syria and we think Syria has reasons not to want war with Israel." Even more significant, perhaps, was Begin's statement that Israel had no official confirmation of any Syrian missile deployments in Lebanon. His refusal to acknowledge the presence of the missiles was possibly calculated to give Damascus a face-saving chance to remove them without appearing to be knuckling under to an Israeli threat.

With Begin downplaying the confrontation with Syria, there were hints that an even broader agreement might be in the works. One report had it that Syria agreed not to seize the Sannin Ridge, but would retain control over the Bekaa Valley; in exchange, Israel promised not to attack the Syrians again on behalf of their Christian allies. Such a deal, if adopted, would remove the immediate cause of last week's flare-up. Thus, if a lasting peace in Lebanon seemed as elusive as ever at week's end, the dangers of a new Middle East war, at least, seemed a little less imminent. --By Marguerite Johnson. Reported by David Aikman/Jerusalem and William Stewart/Beirut

With reporting by DAVID AIKMAN, William Stewart

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