THE MIDDLE EAST: The Troops Depart

A potbellied Lebanese harbor pilot wearing a tarboosh wheezed up the gangway. Smoke belched from the stack as the engine-room crew poured the oil to their boilers. The U.S. Navy transport General Leroy Eltinge was about to cast off from a shabby Beirut dock, when suddenly from the deck an officer called down that Pfc. Lubinsky was missing. The voice boomed again, and on the dock an officer cracked: “They mean former Private First Class Lubinsky.” Finally the ship cast off, and was inching slowly away when the deck officer called down: “We found him.” “Where?” asked the officer on the dock, “Sleeping,” came the reply.

Thus quietly and without ceremony did the final shipload of 1,126 U.S. Army men, last of the 10,000 American troops brought to the Middle East last July, leave Lebanese soil last week. They left a wearied Beirut at last in some semblance of peace: movies reopened last week, and the curfew was eased. In a sense, U.S. troops sneaked out of town—but for a good reason. The embarkation timetable was deliberately kept secret in memory of the way Arab nationalist bravos in Egypt, when the withdrawing Anglo-French forces were reduced to a rearguard, began sniping and bomb-throwing and shouting about “throwing the invaders into the sea.” There was no other reason for U.S. troops to sneak away; brought in to stabilize a confused and desperate situation, provided with no clear directive on landing, and frequently under provocation from excitable rebels, they had kept order—and had done so without killing or wounding a single Lebanese.

Several hundred miles to the southeast, the British began evacuating Jordan. After embarking six shiploads of troops at Jordan’s Red Sea port of Aqaba, the British started a final airlift of 2,000 men to Cyprus. To do so, they had to overfly Nasser’s Syria. But with Nasser’s consent, Norway’s General Odd Bull posted U.N. supervisory teams at Syrian airport control towers for the estimated five days the airlift would take.

The British left behind a Jordan in far less promising shape than Lebanon. Young King Hussein was reported seriously considering following the British westward for a “vacation” in Europe. He professed to feel in no further need of help. But as ever, Jordan continued to exist largely on the sufferance of more powerful neighbors who were restrained, if at all, by the feeling that any other solution to the Jordanian problem would be even worse.