Tonight I went to the San Francisco Commonwealth Club where John Boykin was speaking on high stakes crisis diplomacy and promoting his book Cursed is the Peacemaker (I think the Bush administration could use some pointers in this subject). The book details the amazing efforts of a true american hero, Philip Habib of the U.S. Foreign Service, to avert a disastorous war in Beirut in the summer of 1982.
Boykin is an articulate and compelling speaker, who obviously has dedicated a significant (over a decade) amount of time into researching his subject. Of course, Ariel Sharon is the anatgonist in the book. History has shown him to be a "one trick pony," basically a warmonger eager to destroy the Palestinian Liberation Organization no matter the cost. Boykin points out that in the recent media attention of Sharon's statement that he should have killed Arafat when he had the chance in 1982, that the chance he refers to is when Arafat and the rest of the P.L.O. were evacuated out of Israeli seige of Beirut under the protection of Italian, French and U.S. soldiers. Sharon's contempt for the United States during this war is outlined clearly in the book. At one point during the seige when Israeli tanks had surrounded the presidential palace in Beirut and Habib protested such treatment of a legal soverign government, within hours Sharon instead moved the tanks to surround the American consulate several miles east.
In the end, Habib succeeds in preventing a massive bloodbath in the streets of Beirut, despite being forbidden from speaking directly to the P.L.O., being constantly undermined by Ariel Sharon's defiant trickery, and lacking proper support from the U.S. government (who fired his boss Alexander Haig in the midst of the negotiations creating political turmoil back home). Unfortunately as soon as the international peace keeping troops were pulled out of the region, Sharon went though with his planned massacre at the Sabra and Shatila Palestinian refugee camps in southern Lebanon where over 2000 palestinian refugees were killed. Many of this number were women and children, who were utterly helpless since any P.L.O. militia members had been escorted out of the country under the negotiated terms of the end of conflict. In fact none of the number killed that night could be confirmed as members of the P.L.O..
Sharon's actions in 1982 are widely considered by Isarelis to be the worst blunder in the nation's history, and his subsequent rise to being elected Prime Minister is the best political comeback in recent international history. The rise was fueled by the current Israeli population's desire for military solutions as opposed to diplomatic solutions as championed by american hero Philip Habib.
You can read more about the Summer of '82 at this link: RAND
[[[latitude=33.61664908622742]]] [[[longitude=35.95215386238101]]]
Comments