The United States And The 1958 Lebanon Crisis PDF Download

The 1958 United States intervention in Lebanon was a direct result of the failur e of American policy to achieve the objectives established by the Eisenhower Adm inistration for the Middle East. Partly as a result of its preoccupation with Co ld War concerns, the Eisenhower Administration failed to devise a regional polic y capable of coping with the rapid political changes that swept the Arab world i n the post-World War II period. The absence of a coherent regional policy provid es the key to resolving the paradox of why the United States chose to use such o verwhelming military force to quell a crisis in a country that was, in and of it self, neither politically nor strategically important to Western interests. This study relies on an examination of recently declassified primary source material at the National Archives (Washington, D.C.) and the Eisenhower Presidential Lib rary (Abilene, KA) to determine the policy process and the course of events surr ounding the 1958 United States intervention in Lebanon. Intra-Administration doc uments reveal that the decision to respond favorably to a Lebanese request for e xternal intervention was made in mid-May of 1958, two months before the July 14 Iraqi coup prompted the actual intervention. As a consequence, political options to resolve the crisis were never fully explored. The Eisenhower Administration saw the crisis in Lebanon, a country peripheral to Arab and superpower interests , as an opportunity to demonstrate its commitment to safeguarding Western intere sts in the Middle East without incurring any substantial political costs or mili tary risks. This study concludes that the Lebanon intervention did not have last ing consequences for either political developments within Lebanon or the Middle East as a whole. It did not significantly retard the progress of the Arab nation alist movement, which was the Eisenhower Administration's primary objective. Nor did the use of military force advance the United States relationship with the A rab world. Perhaps more importantly, the intervention did not constitute a preco ndition for peacefully resolving the Lebanese crisis and it did not provide the basis for a continuation of Lebanon's pro-Western foreign policy orientation.