Lebanon and staying power.

THE NEWSPAPERS tel me that America's role in Lebanon is now on "hold"; and that President Reagan has been defending his peace plan for the Near East, in an interview in the Paris daily Le Monde. In the interview, which appeared in the newspaper dated March 21, the President claimed, with some justification, that his plan, announced in September of 1982, was a good and a realistic one, and if anybody had a better plan, he would like to hear about it.

The trouble seems to be that the U.S. is in no shape to get the interested parties--Israel, Lebanon, Jordan, and Syria, principally--to sit down and discuss any peace proposals, America's or anybody else's. Instead, the King of Jordan, fresh from talks with Mr. Reagan in the White House, launches two bitter attacks on his host within one week; while in Lausanne, Switzerland, leaders of the rival Lebanese factions alternately swap insults and terms of quite spurious endearment. It is enough to make grown observers weep.

Most of those involved in the multifaceted dispute are, by now, deeply discomfited. the Israelis, because their costly incursion into Lebanon a couple of years ago doesn't seem, in the end, to have achieved very much (although the removal and partial discrediting of the PLO's Yasir Arafat is something, to be sure). the Americans, because of the impotence already mentioned. The Saudis, because of this demonstration that the power of oil money is, after all, limited. And, not least, the Lebanese president, Amin Gemayel, who has just lost the last threads of an already limited authority.

Two countries, or rather regimes, on the other hand, are not doing too badly: The Syrian regime of President Hafez el-Assad, who more than anybody else is sitting pretty and may well, in the end, consolidate his country's claim as the dominant influence in what used to be called the Fertile Crescent; and, of course, the Assad regime's protectors, the Soviets, who have played an exceptionally passive role, needing only to arm and support Assad.

Although this almost perversely unhappy situation offers no unalloyed joy to those in our camp, it does offer lessons in the difficult art of projecting power. By definition, geography can make things easier, or harder, as the case may be. Power being what you can get away with, it was relatively easy for the Soviets to get away with their brutal invasion of Afghanistan (even though they subsequently got bogged down in that tragic country). Similarly, it was relatively easy for President Reagan to get away with the liberation of Grenada. (I am not equating the two in moral terms, merely in those of geopolitical expediency.)

When it comes to the projection of power over vast distances, the Russians normally win hands down, and for very good reasons: the self-righteous "moral" justification of Leninism, ample means for either military or non-military ("active measures") action, and above all no public opinion or Congress to worry about.

It is, of course, a genuine consolation to note that the Soviet empire is by now severely overstretched, so that it was powerless to prevent the liberation of Grenada and opted, in Mozambique, for the easy way out by allowig the Samora Machel government to accept a peace (however temporary) dictated by South Africa.

Which brings me back to Lebanon. On paper, the United States has all the military power, the "muscle," it might need to get its way in the Near East or indeed in many other places. In practice, it is very difficult, if not impossible, for the U.S. to project its power in far-off places, because of the obstructive power of Congress and of existing legislation.

All governments wrap up their real objectives in terms of moral righteousness, to some degree or another. In the Near East, if I may borrow some arguments from the very erudite Julian Amery, Conservative MP, a former Minister of State in the Foreign Office and a man who deserved on merit and knowledge to have been appointed Foreign Secretary in 1979, there is an interesting, though unpalatable, parallel between the role of Britain and France in the ill-fated Suez expedition of 1956 and the current "strategic alliance" between the U.S. and Israel.

Likewise, there is a parallel between Nasserism in 1956 and Syria's "Assadism" today. In 1956, Nasser enjoyed Soviet support, as does Assad today. The Assad regime is a good deal nastier than was Nasser's. It is a minority regime, in that his own Alawite community represents only 13 per cent of the Syrian population. It is also, along with the regime of Saddam Hussein in Iraq, one of the two most brutal dictatorships in the Arab world.

Limits of Power

A MORALLY AND politically justified objective of U.S. policy in the Near East would be to remove the Syrian military presence in Lebanon; and even, if things worked out that way, to remove Assad himself, if not by direct intervention, then at least by the chain-reaction that a Syrian reverse might precipitate.

The President, alas, is hampered by the War Powers Act of 1973 and by the inevitably unfavorable public reaction to the heavy casualties inflicted by terrorist action on the Marines in the international "peace-keeping" force. Not to mention the constraints of an election year.

The decision to pull out of Beirut and freeze the U.S. peace-keeping role is thus a major reverse that points, yet again, to the de facto limitations of American power.