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Getting Tough on Syria
| Article
# : |
10355 |
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Section : |
Current Issues
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| Issue
Date : |
12 / 1986 |
839 Words |
| Author
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Evan Galbraith
Evan Galbraith served as U.S. ambassador to France from 1981
to 1985. He is now an investment banker in New York. |
France and the United States have been strangely reluctant to act against Syria in its involvement in terrorism.
Credit for the present wave of bombings in Paris has been claimed by a group linked by the French police to the Lebanese Armed Revolutionary Faction (LARF), the group most certainly responsible for the murder of our military attache Colonel Charles Ray in Paris when I was ambassador to France in 1982. The murder gun was later found in an apartment controlled by LARF leader Georges Ibrahim Abdallah, now in jail in France.
Much effort has made to identify LARF and Ibrahim Abdallah, and we now know of his loyalty to Syria and of Syria's support for LARF. He comes from an area in Northern Lebanon close to the Syrian border and was active in the Syrian Popular Party, an organization that advocated Syrian control of Lebanon. He, friends, and relatives formed a Marxist cell which became known as LARF some three or four years before Ray was murdered. The French are convinced of his association with Syrian intelligence.
There are other data to contemplate. After the defeat of the Palestinians by the Israelis in the summer of 1982, the power vacuum thereby created in Beirut was filled by Syria's arming or acquiescing in the arming of various warring factions in Lebanon in order to prevent the establishment of a strong central government in Lebanon. During this period Syria also acquiesced in the bombing of our Marine barracks. The French launched an air strike against a Shi'ite group in the Syrian-controlled Bekaa Valley, but we did nothing and soon withdrew from Lebanon. Since that time both the United States and France have made
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