Lebanon: a case of U.S. subversion.

In 1958, I found myself in the thick of the action in Lebanon. A lieutenant in the U.S. Marine Corps, I was among the several thousand U.S. troops (including Army personnel) who set up positions in and around Beirut in July of that year. Directed to do so by President Eisenhower and Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, we were supposedly the answer to an urgent call for help from Lebanese President Camille Chamoun.

A pro-Western, Christian anti-communist, Chamoun had requested assistance in combating the revolutionary activity in his country initiated by a Moscow puppet named Rashid Karami. By 1957, the detestable Karami had participated in the 40th-anniversary celebration of the Bolshevik Revolution, and he had returned home to direct the burning of a U.S. Information Service library in the Lebanese city of Tripoli. A U.S. News & World Report article made clear that this was "communist activity." President Chamoun, like virtually everyone at the time, believed that America was the premier force in the world offering opposition to communism, and so he appealed to us for help.

Shutting down Karami's thugs who were causing trouble should have been easy and done by the Lebanese army. But according to reports in the New York Times, the army's leader, General Fuad Chehab, was Karami's ally.

At precisely the same time in nearby Iraq, King Faisal and his family had just been murdered, setting that nation up for a succession of pro-Moscow dictators. Virtually the entire Middle East seemed to be on the verge of being swallowed up by the communist tide that had already engulfed all of Eastern Europe and China. Somebody had to do something!

We were sent into action, yet none of the Marines and Army personnel who joined in that deployment had a clue about why we were in Lebanon. The same could not be said of Eisenhower and Dulles. Claiming to be a friend of Chamoun, they arranged to relieve him of his post and place his enemies in power. What happened was a classic case of betrayal.

The Marines and soldiers were in Lebanon for a mere 11 weeks. Soon after we had taken up positions in the belief that we were protecting the nation from communists and their terrorist allies, Deputy Under Secretary of State Robert Murphy arrived in Beirut and set about to settle the uprising peacefully. As noted by Murphy in his 1964 book Diplomat Among Warriors, he promptly anointed General Chehab to succeed President Chamoun. And Chehab immediately selected Moscow's favorite, Rashid Karami, to be the nation's premier and defense minister. Karami then loaded the government with his rebel allies and purged Chamoun's pro-Western, anti-communist friends. We Marines and our Army allies then departed, totally unaware how we had been used in a classic operation that harmed one of our nation's true friends and helped a determined enemy. Lebanon has never been the same.

Most Americans reject the assertion that their own leaders could have been or are subverting friends and helping enemies, but one must either draw that conclusion or believe that our foreign policy for the past several decades has been directed by people with the IQs of chimpanzees. Consider that what occurred in Lebanon wasn't the only example of foreign policy "gone wrong." Generals and admirals always felt we could have won the still-unsettled Korean War if not for the interference of U.S. policymakers. We betrayed the Hungarian Freedom Fighters in 1956 and paved the way for Fidel Castro to take Cuba in 1959 (see article on page 37). And U.S. forces were sent into Vietnam with one hand tied behind their back with the result that three nations fell to the communist menace.

What these "policy failures" have in common is that they were directed by members of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). The architects of the 1958 subversion of Lebanon were CFR members Eisenhower, Dulles, and Murphy. Dean Acheson and Dean Rusk (both CFR) directed the Korean War. CFR founders John Foster Dulles and Allen Dulles were to blame for the betrayals in Hungary and Cuba. CFR veterans George H.W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and others sent U.S. forces into Iraq in 1991--another unfinished job. Today our nation finds itself bogged down in another Iraq war. Are CFR members behind this as well? Close to 500 CFR members are in government today, including Dick Cheney and Condoleezza Rice, though the CFR only has a total membership of slightly over 4,000.

The current Iraq War isn't going well. It has become a quagmire of fresh and coagulated blood. And if we are successful at installing the present government in Iraq, we will have installed Muslim theocracy--a type of government never long friendly to the United States. Is this another foreign policy "failure"? Not to the CFR. In the guise of fighting terrorism on the other side of the world, the long-range goal of the Council of Foreign Relations is being implemented: to have all nations succumb to international control led by unelected elitists.

As more and more Americans tire of the carnage and the seeming endlessness of Mideast conflicts, they will be prompted to call for UN/international control.