| “Once, I remember, we came upon a French ‘man-of-war,’ senselessly firing cannon shots into the African jungle,” narrates Marlow in Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness,” his novel about madness and power in 19th Century Africa. “In the empty immensity of earth, sky, and water, there she was, incomprehensible, firing into a continent. Pop, would go one of the six-inch guns; a small flame would dart and vanish, a little white smoke would disappear, a tiny projectile would give a feeble screech — and nothing happened. Nothing could happen. There was a touch of insanity in the proceeding, a sense of lugubrious drollery in the sight.” |
Conrad’s description of the pointlessness of Western naval power against the impassivity of a continent came to mind with Washington’s announcement in February that it was sending warships to patrol the Levantine coast in a less than subtle message to its opponents in the region.
“This is an area that is important to us, the eastern Med,” said Admiral Mike Mullen, the chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff. “It does signal that we’re engaged, we’re going to be in the vicinity, and that’s a very, very important part of the world”.
The first ship to steam to the Lebanese coastline was the USS Cole — which was badly damaged in an Al-Qaeda suicide attack in Yemen in 2000. The symbolism of deploying a ship closely associated with the “war on terror” was not lost on the Lebanese, and predictably sparked intense speculation as to what it all meant.
“Arrival of destroyer USS Cole: Is it a show of force or for the use of force?” asked a headline in Al-Hayat.
The USS Cole soon departed to be replaced by the USS Philippine Sea and the USS Ross, all part of the US Navy’s Nassau battle group, consisting of six ships including amphibious troop carriers.
Of course, US warships regularly ply the waters of the eastern Mediterranean, it falls within the purview of the US Navy’s Sixth Fleet. But the difference this time was the decision by Washington to pointedly announce the deployment beforehand.
The affair was clumsily handled by the US, however. Having apparently received no prior notice of the deployment, an embarrassed Prime Minister Fouad Siniora had to fend off opposition accusations that he was an American stooge forced to rely on US military muscle to prop up his weak government. It is hardly likely that Siniora would have requested the presence of US warships and he may well have registered his objection to a public declaration if he had been previously notified.
The Hizbullah-led opposition was handed a propaganda coup. It could point to US aggressiveness in sending warships to Lebanon, as well as the impotence of the gesture. Hizbullah and Syria, the presumed recipients of the US muscle-flexing message, would not be impressed by a couple of ships sailing a few dozen kilometers of the Levantine coast. After all, the USS Cole and the other guided missile destroyers that replaced it were hardly likely to fire their armaments of Tomahawk cruise missiles into Lebanon or Syria.
Indeed, it was a strangely old fashioned gesture for the US to make. It was redolent of a bygone era when Europe’s imperial powers responded to crises in their far flung colonies by sending a battleship — giving rise to the phrase “gunboat diplomacy”.
It may also have symbolized the frustration felt by the Bush administration at the continuing impasse in Lebanon and the inability of the US or its French and Arab partners to break the deadlock. Deploying warships to the eastern Mediterranean paradoxically demonstrated the limitations of US power in influencing developments in Lebanon and Syria. Syria long ago chose to ride out the storm of Bush administration displeasure and wait for a change in the White House. Naval maneuvers in the eastern Mediterranean will not persuade Damascus to change course.
Indeed, the history of US military muscle-flexing in Lebanon is not a happy one. The last time there was such a public display of US naval might this close to Lebanon was in 1983 during America’s ill-fated intervention in Beirut. The USS New Jersey, a World War II dinosaur armed with massive 16-inch guns, arrived off Lebanon two months after the US Marine barracks in Beirut was destroyed by a suicide bomber, killing 241 US servicemen. The USS New Jersey fired on Syrian troops and allied militia positions in what was the heaviest shore bombardment since the Korean War. Many Lebanese still recall the “flying Volkswagens”, the name given to the huge shells that struck the Chouf. The sporadic barrage, which lasted nearly two months, killed the top Syrian general in Lebanon. The shelling, in which civilians also were killed, helped cement anti-American sentiment.
In early February 1984, pro-Syrian militias took over West Beirut, spurring President Ronald Reagan to order a Marines evacuation. The Marines left by the end of the month, ending what then US Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger called a “particularly miserable assignment.”
Nicholas Blanford is a Beirut-based journalist and author of “Killing Mr. Lebanon — The Assassination of Rafik Hariri and its Impact on the Middle East.”
