October 23, 2006
Beirut 1983 Posted by Fredric Smoler at 04:40 PM EST In today’s feature article at AmericanHeritage.com, Jack Kelly writes of the 1983 attacks on the Marine barracks in Beirut that “it has become axiomatic that the main lesson of the . . . debacle was about the danger of appeasing terrorists. This message was underscored by the Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, who pointed to the hasty withdrawal as proof that the Americans were ‘paper tigers.’ ‘The Marines fled after two explosions,’ he boasted. . . . Bin Laden’s simple-minded and ahistorical statement was taken to heart by many Americans. In Beirut, said John Lehman, a member of the national 9/11 commission, ‘we told the world that terrorism succeeds.’”
As far as I can tell, Bin Laden’s statement may have been ahistorical, if this simply means that Americans have not been at all times and places paper tigers. And if ahistorical statements are necessarily simpleminded, I suppose he was also simpleminded. He was not, however, wrong. We did flee after two explosions, and we then invaded Grenada, rather like the man in the adage who achieves a contemptible satisfaction by kicking his cat, after being berated by either his boss or his wife. John Lehman, admittedly an exasperating gentleman in many other respects, clearly had it right that time: We did tell the world that terrorism succeeds, and we paid a stiff price for it in the following decades.
It seems overwhelmingly likely that Saddam Hussein took what he thought was our measure in Beirut, and a few years later invaded Kuwait on the strength of this assessment. Even being very easily ejected from Kuwait failed to erase the memory of the American flight from Beirut, and Saddam failed to observe the requirements of the armistice agreement, a course of action which was almost certainly the necessary prerequisite for our invasion of Iraq in 2003. Syria’s Assad also took our measure in Beirut—he indeed boasted of having done so—and continued to use terrorist proxies against our allies (and probably against us). The Iranians formed their assessment of our resolve during the hostage crisis of 1979, when they broke the bedrock principle of international law with perfect impunity, but it seems certain that 1984 bolstered their assessment. On the strength of this assessment, Iran also used terrorists against us, and against our allies. Had the rulers of Iran thought this was the path to certain annihilation, they seem very, very unlikely to have pursued it: In the immediate aftermath of our initial victories in Iraq and Afghanistan, Iran apparently offered us far-reaching concessions and contemplated abandoning Syria (there is an interesting article on this in the current New York Review of Books). They did this, it seems, out of simple fear of American military power, fear they have now lost, with the result that they are developing nuclear weapons with no discernible fear of any consequence. Given how little we have been able to deter a non-nuclear Iran, it is interesting to speculate about how Iran’s ultras will behave with an even greater sense of impunity.
Mr. Kelly concludes that “It’s easy to read the tragedy in Beirut as a warning about the consequences of appeasement. But the incident has suggested to some a more nuanced lesson about the need for more careful strategic thinking before committing U.S. forces, about the limits of military intervention, and about the danger of ignoring excruciatingly complex realities in favor of ideology-tinted simplifications.” It is hard to fault this portion of Mr. Kelly’s analysis. Military intervention is not an easy and clearly not a certain route to turning tyrannies into modern democracies, and fragile multinational states like Lebanon and Iraq may be peculiarly unpromising places to try to build nations. But because American military power is not omni-competent, it does not follow that failing to use it in the face of extreme provocation is a path without significant risks of its own.
Contrariwise, if we had destroyed Syria’s armed forces and leadership in 1983, or annihilated Iran’s revolutionary leadership in 1979, or at any time since, we might have produced horrific chaos in those societies, but we would probably not have produced successor leaderships eager to provoke the government of the United States, or connive at the murder of our civilians, or of civilians anywhere. We might have produced anarchy, in which terrorist groups would have flourished, but since the states we made contemptuous of our power and resolve in Beirut in 1983 continued to themselves used terror against us, and against our allies, it is not obvious that we would have produced a much worse world by destroying the regimes that have tormented us than we have produced by allowing them to attack us at very low cost. In both cases, of course, the existence of the Soviet Union, adjacent to Iran and allied to Syria, served (in different ways) to complicate the problem and shelter those states. But the difficulty of the problem does not vindicate the policy we adopted. We have probably not yet paid the full price for allowing Syria and Iran the privilege of killing hundred of our soldiers without significant reprisals.
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