Congressional Innocents Abroad

It was a slapstick combination of The Innocents Abroad and Sylvester the cat stalking an unsuspecting Tweety. The six-member congressional group had set out on July 22 on a self-assigned ten-day fact-finding tour of the Middle East, hoping somehow to contribute to a peaceful solution of the bloody Lebanese standoff. That they did not do. As the contingent prepared to head back to Washington last week, having visited five countries and attracted a great deal of unwarranted attention, the five Democrats and one Republican no longer appeared to be a shrewd bunch of legislators honing their perceptions of the region. In stead, they stood revealed as a coterie of naive bumblers wandering helplessly among the battle-hardened chieftains of the Levant. A grand master of Middle East intrigue, P.L.O.

Chairman Yasser Arafat was all smiles and cordiality during the group's visit to his underground shelter in besieged West Beirut. Ambiguously suggesting a willingness to come to terms with Israel, the canny guerrilla leader pulled out a black felt-tipped pen and, on a page of lined notepaper, wrote the words: "Chairman Arafat accepts all the U.N.

resolutions relevant to the Palestinian question." In the furor that followed, California's Paul McCloskey, the only Republican in the group, triumphantly declared that the statement implied that the P.L.O. was about to recognize Israel's right to exist. The Congressman said he would urge the U.S. to open direct dealings with the P.L.O. But McCloskey's euphoria was soon punctured. Within hours the so-called Arafat document was denounced by Israel as a propaganda ploy, and explicitly disavowed as a recognition of Israel by official P.L.O. spokesmen in Beirut, New York and Paris. That blow came after a stinging cable from House Speaker Tip O'Neill instructing the congressional delegation, whose trip he had routinely authorized, to refrain from making statements in his name. It was only the beginning of the Americans' troubles. Representatives Nick Rahall of West Virginia and Mary Rose Oakar of Ohio, both of Lebanese descent and both persistent critics of Israel, told the press that the damage they had seen in Tyre and Sidon was the worst that they had ever observed in any war area, only to have to admit they had never seen any other war areas. The group proved to be totally out of its depth too when meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, who chided his visitors schoolmarmishly for being "taken in" by Arafat. Begin asked McCloskey to point to the West Bank on an unmarked map. The nonplused Californian was unable to do so. Nor did McCloskey improve his standing in Israeli eyes when, in a CBS-TV interview after the meeting, he said that Begin had claimed the Israelis' right to "destroy Beirut even though they kill ten Lebanese and five Palestinians for every Palestinian soldier." Furious, Begin telephoned U.S.

Ambassador Samuel Lewis, who had been present at the meeting, and confirmed that the Prime Minister had not said "anything like that." Publicly, President Reagan observed that the trip was not "a good idea"; privately, aides say, he felt that the six legislators "ought to stay the hell out of there."

On Capitol Hill, says one Democratic leader, "nobody was happy about them going. Within Congress there is ridicule." The trip was such an ordeal for the U.S.

embassy in Beirut that Ambassador Robert Dillon reportedly asked the State Department to keep such groups out of the war zone in the future.

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