This Monday October 23 we will commemorate the bombing in Beirut of the US Marines barracks and the French Paratrooper compound by Iran's Hezbollah on 23 October 1983. Tally: 243 US Marines and servicemen, 58 French paratroopers killed.
Forty years separate us from that deadly event.
Back then, the imbecile Republican president Ronald Reagan, who sold weapons to the Iranian Islamic Mullahs to fund the Contras of Nicaragua, had sent his Marines along with French, Italian and British soldiers as part of a Multi-National Force (MNF) to Beirut to oversee the withdrawal of Yasser Arafat's PLO forces after the Israeli siege of Beirut.
At the time, Syria, the PLO and the newly established Islamic Republic of Iran were on a campaign to ethnically cleanse the Christians of Lebanon, evict all western presence from Lebanon, and take control of the country for the specific purpose of using Lebanon's border as a war front against Israel. They succeeded thanks to American cowardice and greed for oil.
Yet, like all successive US Republican administrations - Reagan, Bush Sr. and Bush Jr. - the US administration decided to withdraw in the face of the Syrian-Iranian threat, selling Lebanon to its own enemies, only to appease the Saudis, the Kuwaitis, the Egyptians.... and maintain oil deliveries at low prices.
Indeed, the next morning after that deadly Sunday of October 23, 1983, Ronald Reagan decided to invade the Caribbean island of Grenada, supposedly because he worried about a handful of US students due to the instability of the island government. Not a bad way to divert the attention of the dumb American public and media from the disaster unfolding in Beirut.
To add insult to injury, Reagan quickly pulled his remaining Marines from Lebanon, followed soon by his European poodles France, Britain and Italy. Reagan thus handed Syria and Iran and their terror organization Hezbollah a victory by surrendering Lebanon to them. Soon afterwards, Hezbollah began bombing western embassies, kidnapping and holding western hostages, hijacking TWA flight 847, all of which were used to extort the US for concessions.
George H. W. Bush Sr. repeated the sellout to Syria a few years later, even as Syria's Soviet backers were falling apart. Lebanon was facing a presidential election, and the Lebanese people and last free government were demanding an honest democratic election battle. But the lackeys of Saudi Arabia and Syria, State Dept Secretary James Baker, and envoys Richard Murphy, Edward Djerejian, and a horde of other State Department assholes - known as Arabists - sided with Syria and threatened the Lebanese with "chaos" if they didn't vote for Syria's favorite puppet candidate Mikhail Daher. The reason? The US was crawling at dictator Assad's feet to release the Hezbollah-held US hostages and it obviously succumbed to the terrorist blackmail. The Lebanese refused the Syrian puppet as president, and Syria, with the full backing of the US, besieged the Christian enclave, killed thousands of people, and evicted the last free Lebanese government from Beirut. Thirty years of a brutal Stalinist Syrian occupation followed. Thank you America, for your values.
Why did the Americans behave like cowards back then? For Arab oil. At the time, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Egypt, Libya and other "respectable" Arab Muslim countries were backing Syria, Iran, the PLO and Hezbollah's war on tiny Christian Lebanon. America decided to sacrifice Lebanon to appease the Arabs, even as the latter were holding US hostages, blowing up embassies, and killing US soldiers.
Fast forward to today: An entire fleet of US warships is headed to the eastern Mediterranean for the specific purpose of deterring... guess who? Hezbollah's and Syria's imminent war with Israel. Had the US have the courage to deal with Hezbollah and the Syrian-Iranian threat back then, a lot could have been different in the region today. Unfortunately, the essence of US foreign policy is just that: a cesspool of treachery and foreign policy failures, which it then tries to rectify with equally fumbling military means and is then disappointed again and again by discovering that might rarely makes right. Failures in Lebanon, Somalia, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Korea....
Had the Americans stood by principle rather than sell out to economic expediency back in the early 1980s, Hezbollah would not even exist, the Syrian regime would probably have fallen, and the heartache we see today in Palestine-Israel would not be looming so large over everyone's life. Lebanon itself would have ended its suffering back then in the 1980s, rather than succumb to the misery that Syria's and Iran's occupations have inflicted on it during 40 long years.
Some surmise that this was the plan all along. I hate to believe in conspiracy theories. But the behavior of both the US and Israel - determined as they seem for decades to never find a permanent solution - suggests that they want to maintain insecurity and instability in south Lebanon and in Palestine precisely to always have a pretext to intervene and, when circumstances allow, to steal land and expand. How come the Balkan wars, the creation of Muslim Bosnia and Kosovo in the heart of Europe, were all done within a couple of years? How come the tiny Christian country of East Timor, an artificial creation of Portuguese colonialism, was sliced off the mastodon country of Indonesia by the US, Australia and their allies who sent an armada to kick the Indonesians out?
Lebanon used to be a friend of America, back when President John Kennedy sent 10,000 US Marines to Beirut to protect it from the Arab onslaught of Gamal Abdel-Nasser in 1958. But no more. Lebanon has been reeling under Syrian and Iranian occupations for five decades, and every time there was a chance to extricate it from their stranglehold, America would yield to terrorism, make a deal with Satan, and sell Lebanon to Arabs and Muslims. The resentment against America today has slowly crawled from the traditionally hostile Muslim segments of Lebanese society to its traditionally friendly Christian community. America no longer has any credibility in Lebanon, not even among its friends.
Like America, Lebanon is now facing a war that Hezbollah and Israel might unleash on its soil for the umpteenth time. Have the Americans finally learned their foreign policy lessons of failure? Or will they, yet again, sell Lebanon as a bribe to Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia and others?
America is reaping the bitter harvest of the mercantile seeds it sowed. Its Marines are buried in dishonored graves because of failed treasonous policies. Now, even after 40 years, time has come to honor the lives of those US Marines who had come to Lebanon as peacekeepers in 1983. Will Biden's America live up to that much deserved honor?
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