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.”
Bush’s Empty Words
“We are not going to let a bunch of insidious terrorist cowards shake the foreign policy of the United States,” Vice President George Bush said while visiting the site of the bombed out Marine headquarters on Oct. 26, 1983. “Foreign policy is not going to be dictated or changed by terror.”
But it was. On February 26, 1984, the Marines surrendered their positions in Beirut and withdrew. Ronald Reagan called it a “redeployment.”
