Seeds of Hate:

White House Media Manipulation Nothing New in Middle East

Media Asia (Singapore)

 By Lawrence Pintak

Lawrence Pintak is a veteran international correspondent who has reported for many of the world’s leading news organizations from four continents. As CBS News Middle East correspondent in the 1980s, he covered the Iran-Iraq War and the birth of modern Islamic terrorism in Lebanon. More recently, he reported on the Indonesian revolution. He is currently Howard R. Marsh Visiting Professor of Journalism at the University of Michigan.

There was a certain irony in the fact that my last glimpse of American television before boarding a flight to the Gulf in the early days of the Iraq War was that of Fox News commentator Bill O’Reilly fulminating about the BBC’s “disgraceful” coverage (The O’Reilly Factor: 27 March 2003).

This from the channel whose reporters gushed that “liberty” was sweeping through Iraq (Getlin: 2003) and whose anchors dismissed as “ridiculousness” the idea that some Arabs considered the Americans invaders (Rosenberg: 2003).

Twenty-four hours later, when I turned on the television in my Gulf hotel room, the BBC was showing footage of a Baghdad market where at least 50 Iraqi civilians had been killed when it was apparently hit by an American missile. CNN, meanwhile, was leading with a story about pro-Saddam fedayeen “terrorizing civilians” in Basrah. When it finally got around to the Baghdad market story 15 minutes into the newscast, instead of showing footage of the scene, CNN’s anchors and reporters twisted themselves into knots pointing out all the reasons the disaster might not be America’s fault.

The BBC was, as reporters in the trenches like to say, committing journalism, taking seriously the injunction that “journalists are supposed to stand and watch so that the rest of the world might see” (Seib: 2002, 119). CNN was functioning as advocate; emphasizing a story that implicitly painted the U.S. as savior and downplaying a humanitarian disaster that was also a U.S. public relations fiasco.

It was emblematic of the jingoism that had taken root in the U.S. media since 9/11 as news organizations responded to the tidal wave of patriotism that had swept the country and the machinations of a highly efficient White House communications machine.

That jingoism was evident in the fervor with which U.S. media organizations painted the news in red, white and blue; evident in the media’s failure to challenge unsubstantiated White House claims of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, investigate dissenting views in the intelligence community or question widespread infringements of civil rights; and evident the sorry scene of Dan Rather, one of America’s most influential news anchors, declaring on national television: “George Bush is the president. He makes the decisions and … wherever he wants me to line up, just tell me where.” (Media Research Center: 2001)

Was it any wonder that during the Iraq invasion many “embedded” reporters would drop any pretense of detachment and use the adverb “we” when describing the U.S. units with which they were traveling?

What seemed to have been lost in the journalistic chorus of America the Beautiful was a recognition that lofty appeals to media patriotism is often government-speak for “management of the news” (Gup: 2001, 11)

“Every government is run by liars and nothing they say should be believed,” the famous American counter-culture journalist I.F. Stone once said (Knightley: 2000, 409). It is an adage to which, at least since the late 1960s, most U.S. reporters have traditionally subscribed. But post-9/11, the media’s adversarial relationship with the government -- and particularly the military -- was largely set aside. One survey of news coverage in the last three months of 2001 found that less than 10 percent of reporting was critical of the government’s viewpoint (Project for Excellence in Journalism: 2002, 2).

Objective journalism had transformed into “American journalism” (Waisbord: 2002, 206). It was us against them, but this time, instead of government officials, they were the amorphous Islamic “other” (Karim 2003, 1). In this war, the soldiers of truth were AWOL (absent without leave). They had crossed over to the traditional enemy for the duration.

With opinion in the Muslim world against the U.S. even before the invasion was launched (Telhami: 2003, 2), columnist Ellen Goodman, wondered in print “how we got from there to here” (Goodman: 2003). The bigger question for reporters and editors is: "Where were we while it was happening?" For many, particularly Washington insiders, the answer is that they were front and center, reading their lines from a carefully crafted script. In return for front page bylines and top-of-the-broadcast billing, they were dutifully serving as unquestioning conduits for well-choreographed Bush administration leaks about weapons of mass destruction, a claim that hawks like U.S. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz now admit was a “bureaucratic” device to give the administration an excuse to attempt to reshape the Middle East (Wolfowitz: 2003).

And if most Americans were naive about what was going on, reporters certainly were not -- after all, they had given prominent play to White House aide Andrew Card’s infamous comment about the packaging and selling of the war: “From a marketing point of view, you don’t introduce new products in August” (Bumiller: 2002).

By slavishly reporting the administration’s statements with little balance (Project for Excellence in Journalism: 2002, 2), the Washington press corps became the administration’s “publicists” (Gans: 2002, 47), reprising the media’s role in pre-Vietnam conflicts as “propagandists and myth makers” (Knightley: 2000, 526). More sinisterly, that symbiotic relationship contributed to “the rhetoric of war” (Zelizer and Allan: 2002, 7) and helped “prepare the cultural ground for violence” (Waisbord: 2002, 216). As journalist Robert J. Samuelson observed, by falling prey to the patriotic fervor, “We will become (and already partly have become) merchants of fear” (Samuelson: 2001).

Dissenting media voices, which argued that the watchdog role of the press was a cornerstone of democracy, were accused of being unpatriotic. “People have to watch what they say and watch what they do,” warned White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer (The White House: 2001), in a line that seemed to turn on its head the set of democratic principles that the administration said it was fighting to defend.

When, in the early days of CNN, Ted Turner ordered his team to substitute the word “international” for “foreign,” (McLeland) it gave rise to much talk of the globalization of news and the emergence of what might be called borderless journalism by individuals “who must disengage personally from allegiances to any one culture, nation, group, institution, etc.” (Karim: 184). Some observers went so far as to write of the emergence of a new “world news order” in which journalism was “charged with the responsibility of contributing to the establishment of a worldwide discourse that would be sensitive to the different perspectives” (Volkmer: 2002, 235).

Ironically, it was just such a stance that made the BBC the journalistic whipping boy of American and British conservatives alike.

"If Iraq proved anything, it was that the BBC cannot afford to mix patriotism and journalism,” responded BBC Director General Greg Dyke. “This is happening in the United States and if it continues, will undermine the credibility of the U.S. electronic news media" (Marr: 2003).

War is ugly. Smart or otherwise, bombs kill. Limbs are torn asunder. Flesh is peeled from the bone. The raw images of conflict are frightening, shocking, nauseating. It is humankind at its most savage. During the first “television war” in Vietnam, some viewers complained about the graphic coverage. The sight of mutilated soldiers on the news at dinnertime made them lose their appetite. But ultimately, those images turned the U.S. public against the war. American viewers saw little of that horror during the invasion of Iraq. It was a war the whole family could love.

This most highly covered and most sanitized of conflicts was the result of the administration’s brilliant tactic of “embedding” hundreds of reporters with military units in the field and making them agree to strictures on what they could say and when. It was an approach pioneered with great success by the British during the Falklands war, a fact that did not escape American notice.

Sound familiar?

White House image-makers knew human nature: when your life depends on the people you are covering, it is only natural to develop a bond. In short, you become one of the gang. Some reporters appeared on camera in full combat gear -- helmet, camouflage, flak jacket, American flag on the sleeve. Journalist as GI Joe. “Toy soldiers,” veteran Middle East reporter Robert Fisk disparagingly labeled them (Fisk: 2003).

The vast majority of the “embeds” had never seen war. Many had never been outside the U.S., pulled directly from Main Street to the turret of a Main Battle Tank. Some couldn’t even pronounce the name of the country they were covering (but then, neither could the president). Context was lost. Accuracy went wanting. How many times did we learn from some breathless reporter that Basrah had fallen (only to find out, yet again, it had not)?

As an editorial in Britain’s Financial Times put it, “Few conflicts … have produced such confusion, or so many spectacular news stories one day that seem strangely to disappear into the swirling Iraqi dust the next” (Nicholson: 2003). Bloodshed was kept to a bare minimum. U.S. viewers rarely saw badly wounded Americans writhing in agony or the body bags being shipped home. And what of the Iraqi civilians? Did no one die under those missiles? We still don’t have a count.

Television was the most overtly impacted by government efforts to control the message. The fact that all the U.S. networks pulled their staff correspondents out of Baghdad on the recommendation of the Pentagon only exacerbated the reliance on official sources and images. Veteran Middle East television correspondents were largely prevented from doing what they do best, ferreting out the truth under dangerous and difficult conditions. Their absence -- coupled with network self-censorship that prevented use of some Arab TV footage -- made this -- in the U.S. at least -- a one-sided television war. The striking exception was the exemplary reporting for PBS’s NewsHour by the Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times correspondent John Burns. But his balanced analyses primarily consisted of the print reporter being interviewed on camera by the U.S. anchor. They were largely devoid of compelling images. Which was precisely as the administration had planned.

But the Bush White House was not the first U.S. administration to manipulate the media to further its Middle East agenda. Far from it. In the days after the U.S. Marine Corps barracks in Beirut was destroyed by a suicide bomber -- marking the birth to modern Islamic terrorism -- the United States invaded Grenada, effectively shifting the spotlight and allowing Middle America let off steam. That evening, reporters at the bar of Beirut’s Commodore Hotel cynically speculated about how many Islamic militants U.S. forces would find on that Caribbean island (Pintak: 2003, 178). A year later, on the eve of Reagan’s re-election, the administration would try to frighten American reporters into leaving Beirut, where another attack on American interests was expected. Like the sound of a tree falling in the woods, if there was no press corps there to cover the latest American humiliation, any impact on the election would be minimal (Pintak, 255). The tactic would be echoed in warnings to American journalists to pull out of Baghdad on the eve of the Iraq war.

It was in the soil of Lebanon that the seeds of the anti-American terrorism -- which would provide cover for the invasion of Iraq -- were planted; seeds of hate that were then fertilized by the detritus of a flawed U.S. foreign policy that alienated our friends and lent succor to our enemies.

It was in Lebanon that America told Muslim civilians it would protect them, then watched them die. It was in Lebanon that supposedly neutral U.S. forces fired in anger on Muslim forces for the first time since World War Two. It was amid the Crusader fortresses of Lebanon that American "peacekeepers" sided with the Christians and their Israeli allies against the forces of Islam, reopening a thousand year-old wound.

And, as documented in this excerpt from my new book, Seeds of Hate: How America’s Flawed Middle East Policy Ignited the Jihad (Pluto Press: 2003), it was in Lebanon that the media came up against Washington’s finely honed propaganda machine; an infrastructure so effective that two decades later few Americans would remember the official mistakes that started the nation down the slippery slope that would put them at loggerheads with the Islamic world.

Even more distressing, few in the media would try to remind them that history was repeating itself. Again.

The Commodore Hotel vibrated as if its foundations had been shaken by an earth tremor. We were in the heart of the business district, a dozen city blocks from the sea. Tall buildings surrounded us on all sides. And still, every time the 16-inch guns of the battleship New Jersey fired, windows rattled in their frames and curtains rustled as the wall of pressure slammed into the city. So fearsome was the power of those guns that with each volley, the 59,000-ton battleship was shoved several feet sideways in the sea.

Sitting at a typewriter trying to pound out a script about the latest outbreak of shelling on the airport, I could feel the force of the air press in on my eardrums a few seconds after every deep-throated rumble.

"New Jersey Diplomacy." That was what the local press had dubbed America's latest endeavor to sort things out. Watching from the States, Middle East scholar Fouad Ajami had another phrase for it: "The fireworks of a frustrated power" (Ajami, The New York Times: 12 Feb. 1984).

For a while there had been a lot of talk about a new security plan that was going to end the war. It was supposed to create buffer zones between the militias and, most important to Washington, declare the airport neutral territory. Ronald Reagan was hopeful, as usual; Amin Gemayel was enthusiastic. Syria shot it down.

At first, word was, all the warlords had agreed, except for one or two minor "technical details." Well, maybe they weren't all that minor. After a couple of euphoric weeks in which the Lebanese convinced themselves (again) that they could see the light at the end of the tunnel, the power was cut off. By mid-January 1984, the airport was closed and it was painfully clear that the security plan was nothing more than another ceasefire that was going nowhere.

Clear to everyone, that is, except Reginald Bartholomew, the new U.S. ambassador to Lebanon. In late January, he gathered together his top advisors to review the situation. Between them, according to participants in the meeting, the Lebanon veterans painted a picture of gloom. The political officers predicted that the Muslims would soon resign from the government, while the military experts said they expected a major new outbreak of fighting. So bleak was the prognosis that several of those present recommended the evacuation of embassy wives and children. After listening to the sobering assessment, Amb. Bartholomew vetoed an evacuation and, according to witnesses, announced cheerily, "Well, I'm optimistic."

Meanwhile, the new Middle East envoy, Donald Rumsfeld, made the rounds, but he was doing no more than running in place. Rumsfeld had replaced Robert McFarlane, whom President Reagan had promoted to National Security Advisor, presumably so he could employ on a global scale the skills that had turned Lebanese Muslims against the U.S., which they initially saw as their protector. It took Rumsfeld three trips to Damascus before Assad finally condescended to receive him. Even then, the Syrian president set the tone by announcing before the meeting, "Peace cannot be established under the American gun barrel."

The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. John Vessey, was apparently thinking the same thing when he visited Beirut in January. After a round of talks with Gemayel and his army commander, and a tour of the Marine compound, Vessey took a senior U.S. official aside and told him to do whatever he could to convince the Lebanese to ask the Americans to leave.

The Joint Chiefs of Staff had long ago decided that the Marines' position was untenable. The Pentagon was examining a variety of options, including a pullback to the fleet. Vessey and his colleagues realized that the Reagan administration was not prepared to withdraw unilaterally and leave the impression that the United States had been driven out by terrorists. But if the host government said, "Thank you, you can go home now," the U.S. would have a good excuse to do exactly that."

Brig. Ibrahim Tannous, the highly respected commander of the Lebanese Army, agreed to go along with the plan for a price: $600 million and six months. That was the value of the hardware American experts calculated the army needed to bring it up to strength and the amount of time it would take to train the new recruits.

It was a small price to pay to buy a way out. As one senior U.S. military official put it, "The U.S. has left bags of money behind when we abandoned other places. This is cheap."

The groundwork had been laid.

An insistent pounding beckoned to me from the other side of a layer of fog. Gradually, the haze lifted and I focused on the source. I emphatically did not want to get out of bed. When I had finally lain down sometime around 2:00 a.m., I hadn't slept for 36 hours. I had spent the previous night on the filthy floor of the hotel's basement while shells crashed outside and half a dozen taxi drivers entertained the assembled neighborhood with bongos and tambourines. Then I went out and got shot at some more. Now that the fighting had subsided, I had hoped to get at least six hours in the sack.

Cursing, I pulled on a pair of pants and opened the door. Lucy Spiegel, my producer, was standing there wearing a robe and a look of panic, waving a telex in my face. "The Marines are leaving!" she shouted, storming into the room. "Reagan has ordered them out! I just found this telex from the foreign desk downstairs."

"When are they going?" I asked, throwing on a shirt and a pair of shoes.

"I don't know. It doesn't say," she said, looking incredulously at the telex. "They could be gone already for all I know. I can't believe they didn't call me to tell me this."

New York regularly woke us up with inane queries, minor housekeeping or to ask why we hadn't done our expenses. They had let us sleep through the announcement that U.S. military involvement in the country we were covering was about to end. Questioned about it later, the people on the foreign desk said they hadn't wanted to disturb us.

Much to my relief, the Marines were still there when our car came skidding up to the compound a little while later, but they were already packing. About 250 "nonessential" personnel were being moved out to the ships that day. The officers said it had nothing to do with Reagan's announcement, which had not "officially" reached them yet. According to Gen. James Joy, the 22nd MAU's commanding officer, the "redeployment" was part of a previously existing plan "to test a sea-basing concept that would provide amphibious support as opposed to the more traditional means of support." Joy and his spokesmen would stick to that story until they and a couple of bodyguards were about the only men left on the beach.

The British didn't try to disguise their withdrawal as anything other than what it was. By 8:00 a.m., their entire 110-man contingent had packed up, lock, stock and teapot and cleared out for Jounieh, where helicopters were waiting to ferry them to the safety of HMS Reliant offshore.

No matter what you said about Ronald Reagan, he was a convincing communicator:

January 16: "There are terrorist elements who know they cannot succeed in their cause while the Multinational Force is there."

February 2: "He [House Speaker Thomas 'Tip' O'Neill, Jr.] may be ready to surrender, but I'm not. ... If we get out, that means the end of Lebanon."

February 4: "Yes, the situation in Lebanon is difficult, frustrating and dangerous. But that is no reason to turn our backs on friends and to cut and run. If we do, we'll be sending one signal to terrorists everywhere -- They can gain by waging war against innocent people."

February 6: "The commitment of the United States to the unity, independence and sovereignty of Lebanon remains firm and unwavering."

February 7: "I have asked Secretary of Defense Weinberger to present to me a plan for redeployment of the Marines from Beirut Airport to their ships offshore. This redeployment will begin shortly and proceed in stages. ... These measures, I believe, will strengthen our ability to do the job we set out to do."

February 22: "We are redeploying because, once the terrorist attacks started, there was no way that we could really contribute to the original mission by staying there as a target just hunkered down and waiting for further attacks."

The fact that Beirut was falling apart had a lot to do with Reagan's sudden change of heart. So did the rising chorus of congressional dissent and the plunging election year polls. Reagan had once told reporters that he would consider pulling the Marines out "if there was a complete collapse and there was no possibility of restoring order." That was happening now, with a vengeance.

The Lebanese prime minister and other Muslims in the cabinet quit, Muslim militiamen retook control of West Beirut, the army split along religious lines, with Muslim troops laying down their weapons or joining the rebels, and the entire city was being shelled into dust.

On Sunday, February 3, after Prime Minister Wazzan submitted his resignation, Gemayel went on television. The Lebanese president sounded like a schoolboy pleading for the other kids to like him. He still didn't want to share his candy, though. "Everything is open to discussion," he said, referring obliquely to the May 17 agreement, but even with his government collapsing around him, Gemayel refused to give in to Muslim demands to scrap the accord. Nor did he actually offer to share power. Even the Americans, who insisted that he stand by the May 17 pact with Israel, were flabbergasted at Gemayel's continued failure to form a genuine coalition cabinet.

The Reagan administration still wanted it both ways.

The United States didn't give up, though. Carrier-based warplanes bombed artillery positions in the mountains while naval guns opened up in a U.S. bid to prop up its tottering ally. But the situation was far beyond American help. On Monday, half of West Beirut was engulfed in fighting as Shi'ite and Druze militiamen battled it out in the streets with army units that remained loyal to Gemayel. By 1:30 in the afternoon, the government had clamped a total curfew on the Muslim sector of the city. Anyone outdoors would be shot. With so many Muslim soldiers joining their coreligionists or standing aside, however, government loyalists were outgunned. By nightfall, Gemayel's army had resorted to blanket shelling.

Lying in the hotel basement, we listened to artillery rounds scream in at the rate of one every few seconds. We knew Druze guns up in the hills were pounding Christian areas just as mercilessly. I had once asked Walid Jumblatt what he thought about at times like that, when he ordered his men to point them guns toward neighborhoods full of women and children.

"You don't think in such occasions, you just react. It's purely reaction," he said, stretching out his long, scrawny legs.

"But you know it's going to prompt shelling on Muslim civilian areas," I reminded the Druze warlord.

"I know that." He raised his bushy eyebrows and shrugged his bony shoulders in a gesture that suggested it was out of his hands. "It's terrible, but it's part of the Lebanese political game."

"How do you justify --" He broke in before I could finish.

"There are no justifications. And we haven't been able to reach a gentlemen's agreement not to shoot our civilian areas." Jumblatt's answers were always abrupt and matter-of-fact. No embellishments. He didn't care what anybody thought. Interviewing him was like talking to an unrepentant juvenile delinquent.

"Does your conscience bother you?" I asked.

Big sigh. "Of course," he said, his voice rising in pitch as if to say the answer was obvious. "And there's no way to avoid that. But I told you, it's purely an automatic reaction."

A series of "automatic reactions" between February 3 and February 7 left somewhere in the neighborhood of 250 people dead and many times that number wounded.

In his statement announcing the "redeployment" (read by a spokesman), President Reagan said he had authorized naval gunfire and air strikes to support the Gemayel government and promised to "vigorously accelerate" the training program for what was left of the Lebanese Army. On Wednesday, February 8, just hours after the announcement, the New Jersey let loose with the most sustained attack on antigovernment positions since the Marines had arrived. For nine hours the battleship dropped more than 250 16-inch shells on the Syrian and Druze gun batteries that had been bombarding East Beirut, while the destroyer Caron lobbed in another 300 5-inch rounds.

It was all window dressing. Ronald Reagan's Lebanon policy, starring George Schultz and Robert McFarlane, was as dead as the corpses stacked in the refrigerators at the AUB hospital morgue.

John Stewart, the U.S. embassy spokesman, was having a hard time explaining why the families of diplomats and nonessential embassy personnel were climbing onto helicopters just behind him when the U.S. government felt that the evacuation of the other 1,500 American civilians in West Beirut was "not justified at this time." Although Stewart couldn't say it, the White House was gambling with the lives of its citizens in an attempt to keep Gemayel in power. A full-scale evacuation, Washington feared, would send the wrong signal and might be a blow from which Amin Gemayel could not recover. So, if you didn't work for the government, you were on your own.

"If somebody calls or comes down and asks what we think of the situation and what [they] should do, we at least would recommend them reconsidering the necessity for being here," the usually elusive Stewart said, making his first appearance before reporters since the February crisis had begun.

"Yes, but how do they get out if they do reconsider?" he was asked.

"Well," Stewart stammered, "in the last couple of days, they would find it very difficult to do so."

Difficult indeed. The airport was closed and fighting blocked all roads out. Just getting Stewart's unreassuring message was a challenge, since the embassy's phones weren't working and most U.S. citizens who came to the embassy gates were unceremoniously told to go away.

The sound of the New Jersey's big guns was what most shook the confidence of many American residents of the Lebanese capital, even some of those who had stayed through many other rounds of war. Washington said the ship was firing to protect Americans in Beirut, but many of those same citizens wanted to call the White House and tell the president not to do them any favors. Schultz and McFarlane had pushed hard for the naval action to demonstrate U.S. resolve and to counteract the loss of face brought by the withdrawal announcement. But the American residents feared that it would only make things worse for them, compounding the damage already inflicted by what they saw as a naive and misguided policy based on ignorance.

Walid Jumblatt underscored their concerns when he charged that Druze villagers were being slaughtered under the brutal barrage (a claim never backed up with evidence) and warned darkly of "serious consequences" for American civilians in West Beirut.

The next day, as the Marines helped British officials airlift their nationals out of the seafront compound shared by the two embassies, Washington finally bowed to pressure and announced helicopters would start evacuating holders of U.S. passports and residence cards in the morning. Bring one suitcase and leave your guns and pets at home.

Once work spread among the militiamen that the Marines were leaving, the Americans at the airport were pretty much left alone. An odd round fell here and there, but this really was spillover fire. The gunmen had lost interest. Even when the Lebanese Army's Fourth Brigade south of the airport disintegrated (the Christian officers jumped on helicopters and boats and took off, leaving their Muslim troops to join the militias), while Druzes from the mountains and Shi'ite militiamen from the slums linked up at Khalde thus encircling the Marines, it was all very low-key. Gunmen who raced up and down the coastal road between the main Marine compound and U.S. positions on the beach sometimes waved, sometimes sneered but never interfered with the Americans as they packed up and shipped out their gear.

Some marines were bitter when they heard the news that they were pulling out. The president's words left them feeling kind of hollow inside when they thought of the friends they had lost. "He said they did die for a reason, to keep peace," said a corporal sitting on the ground outside his tent. "But then when you pull out like this, you know their lives didn't amount to nothin'."

"Alan Soifert, he got shot up there on the road." Staff Sgt. Claude Sabo talked slow and sad. "I took his place here. I think we're letting him down real bad."

But most of the men were happy to be getting out alive. "We all feel pretty good," said Lance Cpl. Nick Mattola.

"Last days of Beirut," shouted Sgt. Troy Matthews with a big grin. "I think it's great. Perfect. Fantastic."

Where U.S. military and diplomatic expertise had failed, American PR know-how was called in to save the day. With the same vigor with which it had sought to save Lebanon from itself, the Reagan administration set out to put the best possible face on an election year failure.

A salty Army colonel by the name of Ed McDonald was sent in from European Command in Germany to ride herd on the media. On the rare occasions when he unbuttoned his lip, the answers that came out were opaque. McDonald's vague style was in sharp contrast to the informal openness of the Marine spokesmen, whose noses were put out of joint by the arrival of McDonald and three other Army officers. The Army team had been brought in on orders of Gen. Bernard Rogers, commander in chief of U.S. forces in Europe (directly above the MAU in the chain of command), who told them what to say.

Reporters never heard the word "withdrawal" or "pullout" escape McDonald's lips. Instead, he used the term "redeployment." The Marines weren't leaving; they were "redeploying to the ships," or so McDonald and his bosses wanted to the world to believe. After a McDonald briefing, you were never quite sure exactly how many marines were still ashore or when they would leave. For weeks, we watched men and equipment pile onto landing craft and helicopters, but according to McDonald, the operation still hadn't started. Finally, on February 21, McDonald fessed up: The "redeployment" had officially begun. But he stayed vague on when it would end, right up to the final weekend, when the last amphibious vehicles crawled off the beach and bobbed toward the fleet like a family of seaborne hippopotami.

The idea was to make the pullout so drawn out, so routine, so boring, that viewers and readers back home would have grown fed up with it by the time that final, humiliating day rolled around. McDonald and his staff also set out to ensure that no single image would forever symbolize the U.S. failure in Lebanon. And the media managers succeeded. Although marines splashing onto beached troop transports and the sight of militiamen raising the Amal flag over abandoned Marine bunkers were telling pictures, neither began to approach the classic photograph captured seconds before the last chopper lifted off the roof of the U.S. embassy in Saigon.

The only ceremony took place in the monochrome shadows of the hour just before dawn. As a squad of marines stood at attention, the last American flag was lowered over the last bunker, while the Star Spangled Banner blared from a cheap tape recorder. There was barely enough light to take a picture.

The most enduring memory of that final day in Beirut came after the last marines were aboard ship. It was the sight of angry fireballs licking from the barrels of the New Jersey as it aimed a few parting shots into the descending dusk, like a spoiled little boy throwing one more rock before ducking behind his mother's apron.

In the early days of the Marine mission, the Reagan administration had set for itself several goals: The creation of a strong Lebanese government, the reconciliation of the warring factions, the withdrawal of foreign forces (Syria, Israel and the PLO), and a secure northern border for Israel. As far as the administration was concerned, the May 17 agreement was the key to it all and Syria was the main roadblock to peace.

On February 26, 1984, as the final Marine platoon loaded back on board ship, Amin Gemayel's government was teetering on the verge of collapse; the Lebanese Army had disintegrated; Muslim militias were in control of West Beirut; Syria, Israel and the PLO still occupied 90 percent of the country; and rockets were again falling on settlements in northern Israel. Three days later, Amin Gemayel flew to Damascus and threw himself into Hafez al-Assad's warm embrace. Not long after, the May 17 agreement was formally scrapped.

"I don't think ... that you can say that we have lost as yet," President Reagan declared a couple of days before the redeployment was complete. Maybe not, but as the last marines walked down the beach, the only witnesses were a gaggle of reporters and a small knot of grim-faced young fighters waiting to radio Muslim militia units to move in.

There were no waving flags, no cheering crowds and no victory parades.

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