Abstract
The US has used military force abroad on a number of occasions since the end of the Second World War. While many of these interventions have been the direct application of military force into a conflict which it wished to end or keep from spreading (Korea, Vietnam, the Dominican Republic, Grenada, Kuwait), they have also been for peacekeeping operations. These have increased more recently with the end of the Cold War (Lebanon, Somalia, Haiti, Iraq and Bosnia). Without getting into an extended definitional debate about this often confusing term, suffice it to say the purpose of peacekeeping is the deployment of military forces to promote or preserve peace or some semblance of it. Peacekeeping is not the employment of military force to impose an outcome achieved through force of arms. The first deployment of US ground forces in a peacekeeping operation, and the most costly one in American lives lost, occurred in Lebanon.
The views expressed in this chapter are those of the author alone and are not policy statements of Air University, the United States Air Force, the Department of Defense or the Government of the United States.
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Notes
Augustus Richard Norton, Amal and the Shi’a: Struggle for the Soul of Lebanon, Austin, Tex.: University of Texas Press, 1987, p. 80.
Among some fairly general sources on Lebanese history and politics see Helena Cobban, The Making of Modern Lebanon, Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1985
P.K. Hitti, A Short History of Lebanon, New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1965
Samir Khalaf, ‘The case of nineteenth century Lebanon’, in Milton J. Esman and Shibley Telhami, (eds), International Organizations and Ethnic Conflict, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995
Don Peretz, The Middle East Today, 2nd edn, Hinsdale, Ill.: Dryden Press, 1971.
Sandra Mackey, Lebanon: Death of a Nation, New York: Anchor Books, 1989, p. 117. This is a highly readable and very detailed commentary on the fate of modern Lebanon.
See excerpts from President Eisenhower’s Message to Congress on 5 January 1957 proclaiming the Eisenhower Doctrine in M.S. Agwani, The Lebanese Crisis, 1958: A Documentary Study, New Delhi, for the Indian School of International Studies by Asia Publishing House, New York, 1965, pp. 4–13.
Roger J. Spiller, ‘Not War But Like War’: The American Intervention in Lebanon, Leavenworth Papers No. 3, Ft Leavenworth, Kan.: Combat Studies Institute, US Army Command and General Staff College, January 1981, p. 9. This is the most detailed account of the military aspects of the intervention.
Walid Khalidi, Conflict and Violence in Lebanon: Confrontation in the Middle East, Cambridge, Mass.: Center for International Affairs, Harvard University, 1979, p. 38. The most serious breach by Chamoun was offending Msgr Paul Meouchy, the Maronite Patriarch.
Fahim Qubain, Crisis in Lebanon, Washington, DC: Middle East Institute, 1961, pp. 55, 58.
Robert McClintock, ‘The American landing in Lebanon’, United States Naval Institute Proceedings, Vol. 88, No. 10, October, 1962, pp. 66–7.
Reported in the New York Times, 27 July 1958, Part 4, p. 1, cited in Jack Shulimson, Marines in Lebanon, 1958, Washington, DC: Historical Branch, G-3 Division, HQ, US Marine Corps, n.d., pp. 12–13. This is a highly detailed typescript report of the Marine portions of Operation BLUEBAT.
Among the numerous accounts of 1958 and its aftermath, other than those already cited, see Erika G. Alin, The United States and the 1958 Lebanon Crisis: American Intervention in the Middle East, Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1994
Marius Deeb, The Lebanese Civil War, New York: Praeger, 1980
Agnes Korbani, U.S. Intervention in Lebanon, 1958 and 1982, Presidential Decisionmaking, New York: Praeger, 1991.
A comment made by a Pentagon spokesman, quoted in the New York Times, 16 July 1958, p. 1, cited in Spiller, op. cit., p. 24.
Itamar Rabinovich, The War For Lebanon, 1970–1983 Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984, p. 48.
Gerald B. Helman and Steven R. Ratner, ‘Saving failed states’, Foreign Policy, No. 89, Winter 1992/93, pp. 3–20.
Selim Nassib with Caroline Tisdall, Beirut: Frontline Story, Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1983, p. 27.
For a succinct overview of these events, see Ch. 8, ‘The battles of Beirut (1982–4)’, in Cobban, op. cit., pp. 181–208.
See Raymond Tanter, Who’s At the Helm? Lessons of Lebanon, Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1990.
See Mackey, op. cit., pp. 178–82, and Daniel P. Bolger, ‘Fire in the Levant: operations in Lebanon’, Americans At War, 1975–1986: An Era of Violent Peace, Novato, Calif.: Presidio Press, 1988, Ch. 4, pp. 191–260, especially pp. 194–5.
This information, in different formats, is cited in ibid., pp. 192, 194 and 201, and is drawn from the Institute for Strategic Studies, Military Balance, 1983–1984, Air Force Magazine, December 1983, pp. 97–100, and Chaim Herzog, The Arab—Israeli Wars, New York: Random House, 1982, pp. 387–93.
For a detailed description and chronology of these operations and an assessment of them see Ralph A. Hallenbeck, Military Force as an Instrument of U.S. Foreign Policy: Intervention in Lebanon, August 1982–February, 1984, New York: Praeger, 1991.
Korbani, op. cit., p. 79 and Chapter 6 entitled ‘The 1982 interventions: policy of a “Quick Fix”’, pp. 79–100.
Information from the New York Times, 10 March 1992, cited in As’ad AbuKhalil, ‘The longevity of the Lebanese Civil War’, in Karl P. Magyar and Constantine P. Danopoulos (eds), Prolonged Wars: A Post Nuclear Challenge, Maxwell AFB, Ala.: Air University Press, 1994, p. 63, note 1.
An excellent reference in this regard is John Mackinlay (ed.), A Guide to Peace Support Operations, Providence, RI: The Thomas J. Watson Institute for International Studies, Brown University, 1996.
See Joint Pub. No. 3–07.3, Joint Tactics, Techniques and Procedures for Peacekeeping Operations, Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 29 April 1994.
See, for example, the work of Norman Dixon, The Psychology of Military Incompetence, New York: Basic Books, 1976
Irving Janis, Victims of Groupthink, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1972
Richard Gabriel, Military Incompetence, New York: Hill & Wang, 1985.
The excellent work done by Eliot Cohen and John Gooch, Military Misfortunes, New York: Vintage, 1991, is an exception to the rule and a great contribution to military history.
See Eric A. Nordlinger, Isolationism Reconfigured: American Foreign Policy for a New Century, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995.
Charles Tilly, ‘Reflections on the history of European state-making’, in Tilly (ed.), The Formation of National States in Western Europe, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975, p. 42.
See also the excellent discussion of this point in Bruce D. Porter, War and the Rise of the State: The Military Foundations of Modern Politics, New York: Free Press, 1994.
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Hammond, G.T. (1998). The Perils of Peacekeeping for the US: Relearning Lessons from Beirut for Bosnia. In: Moxon-Browne, E. (eds) A Future for Peacekeeping?. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-26027-0_5
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