Because They Were Just Tourists, You See

Of course, any act against the United States government is an act of terrorism. Just read the first graf of this Jeff Stein blog post:

He may yet turn out to be the avatar of Iranian democracy, but three decades ago Mir-Hossein Mousavi was waging a terrorist war on the United States that included bloody attacks on the U.S. embassy and Marine Corps barracks in Beirut.

So he was waging this terrorist war on the United States. In Beirut. Beirut, Lebanon. And what were these Americans doing? Oh, just minding their own business:

[W]hy were American and French troops in Beirut in 1983, the mid-point of Lebanon’s 15-year civil war (1975-1990)?

Israel’s 1982 Invasion of Lebanon

On June 6, 1982, Israel, led by gen. Ariel Sharon, invaded Lebanon. The goal was to destroy the Palestine Liberation Organization’s operation in Lebanon, where it had established itself as a full-fledged state-within-a-state: The PLO controlled most of West Beirut and most of South Lebanon.

Israel’s invasion was brutally, tactically efficient but strategically disastrous. In 18 weeks, according to the Red Cross, some 17,000 people, most of them Lebanese civilians, were killed in the invasion. The PLO was routed. But Israel created a power vacuum in its place. That vacuum was immediately filled by a new Shiite militia in South Lebanon receiving weapons and money from Syria and Iran, a group that called itself the Party of God, or Hezbollah.

Meanwhile the PLO agreed in August 1982 to exit Lebanon. To ensure a safe exit, the United States, France and Italy sent a multinational force to Beirut. By August 30, Yaser Arafat and the PLO were out of Beirut. Some 6,000 PLO fighters were evacuated, mostly to Tunisia. The Multinational force was gone by Sept. 10. Four days later, the U.S. and Israeli-backed Christian Phalangist leader and Lebanese President-Elect Bashir Gemayel is assassinated at his headquarters in East Beirut.

From Blunder to Massacre

On Sept. 15, Israeli troops invaded West Beirut, the first time an Israeli force enters an Arab capital, supposedly to maintain the peace. The invasion did the opposite. Israel bused dozens of Christian militiamen to the southern suburbs of West Beirut then unleashed the militiamen—many of them from villages that, several years earlier, had been the scene of massacres by Palestinians—into the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila. The militiamen’s orders were to find remaining Palestinian militants hiding in the camps.

But there were no such laggards. Israel knew that the Christian militiamen would attack civilians. Which they did, for two days and nights, under Israeli supervision. To enable the killings at night, Israeli forces launched flares into the night sky.

The Multinational Force Is Asked to Return

In the wake of the massacre, the Lebanese government of Amin Gemayel, brother of Bashir, asks the multinational force to return to help ensure peace. The Marines, the French paratroopers and the Italians land in Beirut again on September 24.

At first the American forces acted as objective peacekeepers. But gradually, the Reagan administration gave in to pressure by the Gemayel government to take its side against Druze and Shiite Muslims in central and southern Lebanon. American troops, welcomed with rice and roses in the Shiite slums of Beirut, slowly became pariahs in Shiites’ eyes. Mistrust turned to outright belligerence once American forces used their firepower to shell Druze and Shiite positions in the mountains surrounding Beirut.

On April 18, 1983, a suicide bomber drove his car into the American Embassy in Beirut, killing 63 people, including 17 Americans—and most of the CIA’s Middle East operatives, who were meeting that day at the embassy. That loss of human intelligence would cost the United States dearly in the months and years ahead.

The Barracks Attack

The United States did not change tactics in Lebanon. Instead, it amplified its ties to the Gemayel government, which had little legitimacy among most Lebanese, and escalated its attacks on Druze and Shiite positions.

On October 23, 1983, the suicide bombers attacked the American and French barracks.

The U.S.S. New Jersey, a World War II battleship with 16-inch guns and shells the size of Volkswagens, taken out of mothballs to support American troops in Vietnam, is called to duty in Beirut in December 1983, to shell Druze, Shiite and Syrian positions.

Lessons Not Learned

The American press characterized the attack as a cold-blooded act of “terrorism.” It wasn’t terrorism: an attack on military forces is, by definition, not terrorism but an act of war. The emotional response to the attack, while warranted, masked a more sober analysis that the likes of Thomas Friedman, The New York Times Beirut correspondent at the time, captured: “While the Marines were victims of their own innocence, they were even more the victims of the ignorance and arrogance of the weak, cynical, and in some cases venal Reagan administration officials who put them in such an impossible situation,” he wrote.

Friedman went on: “By blindly supporting Amin Gemayel, by allowing Israel a virtually free hand to invade Lebanon with American arms and by not curtailing Israel’s demands for a peace treaty with Beirut, the Reagan administration had tipped the scales in favor of one Lebanese tribe—the Maronites—and against many others, primarily Muslims. Washington was helping to inflict real pain on many people, and there was going to be a price to pay for that.”

8 thoughts on “Because They Were Just Tourists, You See”

  1. If we were over there then we were obviously doing good. We’re do-gooders. We have plans

  2. Anytime the U.S. gets caught up in Israel’s business its always ends in a mess. Those American troops should NEVER have been there. NEVER.

  3. Give Reagan credit. At least he pulled out and kept out. I wish Bush and Obama had as many brains, as to pull out, after all this mess.

  4. The Israelis had a foreknowldge about the attack on the marines but they chose to keep quite !

  5. Another reminder of how dishonest the Republican glorification of their late Dear Leader is. Add the Lebanese fiasco to the list of his crimes and blunders, among them making a secret deal with Iran to withhold the release of embassy hostages till after the 1980 election and the criminal Iran-Contra dealings that gave material support to Central American terrorists.

  6. Is this the same Thomas Friedman as today? Than he certainly has changed. But even John McCain voted against sending troops to Lebanon, so he`s not the only one who has become more interventionist since 1982.

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