In June 1982, Israel launched what it called “Operation Peace for Galilee” to target Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) militants in southern Lebanon who had been launching rockets at Israeli towns. While pledging this incursion would extend only 40 kilometers into the country, Israeli officials in fact intended to reach Beirut and “break the backbone of Palestinian nationalism” in Lebanon. Prime Minister Menachem Begin and Defense Minister Ariel Sharon discussed how they might remake Lebanese internal politics in the midst of a wider civil war, propping up Maronite Christian rule and transforming the country into an ally. These ambitious plans were shared in advance with US Secretary of State Alexander Haig, who gave the Israelis the go-ahead for a “limited operation”—or in Haig’s unnerving phrase, “a lobotomy.” Yet some US officials already saw the writing on the wall: Special envoy to the Middle East Philip C. Habib, who had attended an earlier meeting in Jerusalem about Israel’s plans, gave President Ronald Reagan and other senior officials a prescient warning about what would happen: “We were going to see American-made munitions being dropped from American-made aircraft over Lebanon, and civilians were going to be killed . . . and the United States—which didn’t look very good in the Middle East anyway at the time, for being so inactive—was going to take a full charge of blame,” Habib’s assistant later recalled in a ten-year retrospective on American involvement in Lebanon…..more
