Reagan Should Retaliate for Terrorism, Haig Says

Former Secretary of State Alexander M. Haig Jr. said Thursday that President Reagan could probably have prevented the deaths of 241 U.S. servicemen in Lebanon in 1983 by retaliating for earlier terrorist acts and declared that the White House “damn well better” seek vengeance for terrorism in the future.

Haig, who served as Reagan’s first secretary of state, appeared before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee as part of a broad review of U.S. foreign policy aimed at re-establishing a bipartisan consensus.

He said that the truck-bomb attack on the Americans, mostly Marines, in their barracks near the Beirut airport in October, 1983, probably would not have happened if the President had responded to a previous bombing at the U.S. Embassy by “taking Syrian casualties” in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley.

“Had we done that, we probably wouldn’t have been faced with the destruction of the Marine barracks,” Haig said. “That is my conviction.”

Seventeen Americans and 46 other persons were killed in the April, 1983, bombing of the American Embassy in Beirut.

Although the President threatened retaliation at the time of the Beirut bombings, he later explained that the United States did not take action against the terrorists because the CIA lacked positive proof of who was responsible. Reagan also said the U.S. government feared that innocent civilians might be hurt.

Haig, who was forced to resign from the Reagan Administration in June, 1982, after a series of policy disagreements with the White House, said there was little doubt within the U.S. intelligence community after the bombing of the U.S. Embassy that it had been carried out by Iranian militants acting on behalf of the government of Syria. At the time, Syrian military forces were based in the Bekaa Valley in eastern Lebanon.

“I happen to think the violence in Lebanon at the time of the destruction of the embassy was such that some very vigorous action against the Syrian camps in the Bekaa Valley would probably have been appropriate and not too difficult to do,” Haig said. “I don’t believe the consensus would have been against it, had it been carried out promptly, surgically and with success.”

Haig strongly advocated U.S. retaliation against terrorism as a matter of principle.

“Inaction in the face of terrorist assaults is a far greater risk in the long run because it convinces assorted hit men and fanatics and the calculating governments who help them that we are too confused and too fearful to resist,” he said.

“The point is to be sure that those who engage in terrorism know that we just might (retaliate), and where we have hard evidence that a nation was involved I would say we should, unless it is an act of imprudence.”

The former secretary of state noted that Reagan frequently has warned that the United States would retaliate against terrorism directed at U.S. personnel or facilities around the world but that the Administration has never followed up on that threat.

‘Resounding Rhetoric’

“I think he’s talked himself into a position where he damn well better,” he said. “The gap between our resounding rhetoric and our demonstrated resolve may be the most dangerous imbalance of all.”

A retired four-star general and former supreme commander of North Atlantic Treaty Organization forces, Haig said terrorists in the Middle East are controlled by Syria and Libya with help from the Soviet Union.

“It is not the Iranian government which is running terrorists in the Mideast today,” he said. But, he added, “Iran provided militant young fanatics who think they are going to paradise if they take care of the infidel.”