Haboob - Part III
The critical two weeks of the Fifth Arab-Israeli War, also known as the Lebanon War or the Golan War to some, came from May 13-27, the back half of one of the most critical months in Middle Eastern history. It was by May 13 that the Iraqi Expeditionary Force of 80,000 men and a full tank division would be in place to press towards Lebanon and the Golan from southwestern Syria, and it was around the same time that the four squadrons of Iraqi planes Saddam had promised would be integrated into what came to be known as the "Joint Coordination Center" of the Ba'ath Bloc. Loathe as he was to ever cede an inch of power to anyone, ever, Saddam had conceded - with some prodding by Primakov - to allowing his air forces to be placed under the direct command of the smaller but better-equipped (and more experienced, as the Hama Massacre suggested) Syrian Air Force, thus eliminating split commands. To avoid further trodding on toes, the IEF under newly-promoted General Ahmad Zeidan was assigned the first-order task of the entire war - to attack the critically strategic crossroads at Chtoura, where the main north-south road through the Beqaa Valley of Lebanon intersected with the equally critical Beirut-Damascus Road. The Syrian Army, meanwhile, would then mass south of Damascus and strike under heavy air and artillery cover towards the Golan Heights, and retake it, under the command of Rifaat al-Assad.
For as much as Saddam barked about driving the Jews into the sea, Assad and his immediate circle had much more experience actually dealing with Israel in close proximity over the past decade and knew that that was simply not going to happen. That Egypt was sidelined for this war as well, having betrayed the Arab world in signing the Rose Garden Agreement in 1979, meant that Israel's full aerial and armored attention would be on the Ba'ath Bloc, even if Jordan's semi-participation in the air campaign as a closed airspace for Israeli planes and an open route for Syrian aircraft in particular meant that attention needed to be focused on the Jordan Valley. As such, Assad outlined in a confidential memorandum to Primakov not declassified until 2007 the three strategic goals of the Lebanon War: to retake the Golan Heights, to eject Israel from Lebanon and impose a fully Ba'athist government of Syria's choice in Beirut, and to reinforce PLO camps in southern Lebanon so that Israel would not be tempted to push back in for the next decade. This strategy, he concluded, if successful, was cabined and realistic enough to be eminently feasible, and would restore Syrian prestige in the Levant and help supplant Egypt as the Arab world's leader, thus promoting the Ba'athism of Syria and Iraq as
the ideology to replace the failure of Nasserism.
As the Ba'athist armies prepared in mid-May, Israel was dealing with their own struggles in attaining the so-called "Peres Line" that marked the maximum advance that the Prime Minister had assured Western allies he would pursue. The "line" ran from Khalde on the Coast to a point just north of Chtoura, and then east-northeast to the Syrian border, essentially placing the southern half of Lebanon under Israeli occupation with support from the Gemayel and Haddad factions, who would control this "Southern Zone" day-to-day. From this Zone, Israel would control the most important crossroads in the country and place Beirut in range of its major artillery, and would then negotiate a withdrawal of the PLO from their camps throughout Beirut to the north of Lebanon. Unspoken in this was the implication that Israel would not withdraw from Lebanon until this evacuation of the PLO was completed, and that with the advantages already enjoyed by the Maronites in and around Beirut, that Tel-Aviv was seeking to tip the scales of the war definitively in one faction's favor. Confidential Mossad documents from 1982 suggest that the eventual, long-term plan would be a further evacuation of the PLO not just into northern Lebanon but into Syria, as far from Israel as possible, and that this was a prerequisite for regional peace. The CIA was less convinced, and briefings to the White House around this time suggested that while Lebanon was, as it had been since 1975, extremely difficult to predict, the likelier result of all this was an informal partition of the country in which the Syrian-backed Sunni and Shia militias of northern and northeastern Lebanon controlled their half of the country, and the Haddad Shias and Gemayel controlled the southern and central coastal areas.
As Israel dug in along the road from Chtoura to Bar Elias to Deir Zemoun and managed to finally secure on May 16, after days of bloody fighting, the town of Masnaa in the mountains near the Syrian border, the Peres government continued its charm offensive overseas as the air war raged overhead of Lebanon and southwest Syria. The West had helped found Israel after the horrors of the Shoah and the Munich attacks of 1972 and Arab oil embargo of 1973 had badly damaged the Arab cause in the halls of power in Washington, London, and continental Europe; that Israel's chief enemies were erratic, saber-rattling weirdos like Muammar Gaddafi and Saddam Hussein or butchers like Hafez al-Assad did not help, either. But it was also the case that while Arabophilia was in short supply in the West, Israel's star had begun to dim, subtly but noticeably, by the late 1970s, as reports of wanton attacks against PLO camps and refugees in Lebanon reached the news, and as a younger generation of leaders and activists emerged across the West who were children at the oldest during the Holocaust, and thus had a much weaker emotional attachment to Israel. Arafat's talent for media presentation had helped here; sympathy for Palestinians, especially those in the West Bank, had grown even as distaste for Arab dictators had grown with it. As such, Israel in 1982 faced a much more difficult public relations environment than they had just nine and especially fifteen years prior, utterly unhelped by the fact that they had launched an unprovoked attack on Osirak first. To Israel-skeptics across the West, it seemed like Israel had just launched a destabilizing war of choice against Iraq and Syria in order to not just eliminate an unlikely nuclear threat but also have their way in Lebanon.
One could see the split in opinion clearly even in the United States, where former State Department official George Ball gave an interview on May 14th sharply criticizing Israel and implying that they were effectively on their own unless the situation turned truly dire; contrast this with Katzenbach, who flew to NATO headquarters in Brussels to coordinate a joint policy. French and Italian leaders, nudged by Giscard and Spadolini, both men of the liberal center, gave Israeli diplomats in Paris and Rome a frosty reception; an Israeli ambassador in Bonn signaled back his incredulity that Franz-Josef Strauss was so staunchly supportive of their air campaign, but only because he harbored deep contempt for Arabs. Unspoken in all of this was something quiet but, in the view of Peres, rather insidious; having been burned in 1973, Europeans were now desperate not to offend the Arab world, especially as oil prices spiked 25% between May and late July of 1982 before falling quickly to prewar levels in over the course of August and the first half of September. No sheikh or emir threatened to turn off the taps in 1982 as they had nine years before, but from the reactions across much of the West, perhaps they didn't have to even threaten any more - petrol politics still worked, even if more silent.
Due to the fact that Israel had triggered the war preemptively, the Carey administration qualified its support to Peres; it would move a carrier group to the waters near Cyprus from Italy out of an "abundance of caution" but would rally no further support than that. Israel was not on its own, but it would have to solve its problems first. And it arguably did that in the week of May 20th, when Iraqi Expeditionary Forces arrived at the Masnaa Border Crossing, buffeted by a small brigade of Syrian troops and Lebanese militias attacking from the north into the meat of the defenses between Chtoura to Bar Elias. It would be the biggest battle of the war until eighteen hours later, when Syrian forces in the dawn hours of May 21st launched a massive combined arms attack against the Golan Heights.
