another Israeli unit broke through to the Beirut-Damascus road. On the far side

another Israeli unit broke through to the Beirut-Damascus road. On the far side of Lebanon’s capital city, they linked up with Bashir Gemayel’s Phalangists. I remember a mix of feelings at the time. Partly, amazement that through sheer determination and political maneuvering, Arik seemed to have pulled off his grand plan — or at least the Lebanon part of it. Yes, we’d ended up fighting a kind of half-war against the Syrians which, though we’d won it, still left 30,000 of Assad’s men in Lebanon. And they showed no signs of leaving. Our main strategic threat north of the border was not, in fact, the Palestinians. Syria was in military control of Lebanon and, after the peace with Egypt, our most powerful adversary. And no matter what Big Pines might have achieved, it seemed to clear to me that the Syrians would be free simply to replace the weaponry we’d destroyed and fight another day. In Arik’s mind, Bashir Gemayel would soon be in a position to fix that. But beyond my skepticism from having met some of his boy officers in Tel Aviv, I couldn’t see how that would work. I strained to imagine Gemayel daring to form what would amount to a formal alliance with Israel and ordering the Syrian troops to leave. And given what would be at stake for Damascus, I certainly couldn’t see the Phalangists being able to drive them out by force. The more immediate, open question involved Arafat and the Palestinians. Our other two invasion forces had driven almost all the PLO fighters out of south Lebanon, though not without costs and casualties. Most of the Palestinians, however, had retreated north to their de facto capital, the southwestern neighborhoods of Beirut. The idea of a ground assault — street-to- street battles in an area packed with fighters, weapons and tens of thousands of civilians — didn’t bear thinking about. After the war, some of the officers around Beirut said Arik seemed to hoping that the Phalangist milita would go into the overwhelmingly Muslim western side of Beirut. At one point, he was even considering an Israeli attack. Fortunately, given the Phalangists’ record of violence bordering on savagery during the Lebanese civil war, Bashir Gemayel wasn’t willing to send them in. As for an Israeli assault, Begin’s ministers weren’t ready to sign off on it, and the Americans let it be know, repeatedly, that they were vehemently opposed to the idea. Arik again turned to a fallback plan. He knew that Begin did share his determination to get Arafat and the PLO out of Lebanon. Even the Americans were ready to support such an arrangement, assuming it could be negotiated and implemented in a way that would bring the fighting to an end. Whether by intent or political fortune, the mere prospect of Arik further expanding the 202 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_028050