What have Grenada and Beirut taught us?

By Vince Guerrieri
210 west Managing Editor [send email]

Within about two days two decades ago, the United States endured the worst act of terrorism at the time and started to remove the monkey of Vietnam from our back.

Then as now, things in the Middle East were, um, interesting. A pro-American regime in Iran had been supplanted by a fundamentalist dictatorship led by the Ayatollah Khomeni. At that point, Iran was fighting with Iraq, making Iraq our friend by default.

Lebanon was in the middle of a particularly bloody civil war that turned Beirut, a city that used to be one of the most beautiful in the world, into the Dresden of the Middle East. Yasser Arafat was about 15 years away from the Nobel Peace Prize and the respectability it conferred. His Palestinian Liberation Organization was using Lebanon as a staging area for terrorist offensives into Israel, leading to Israeli invasion and weakening the pro-American government and opening it to civil war between Christians, Muslims, Jews and basically anyone else there with a grudge and a gun.

Ronald Reagan was in the second year of his first term as president, and had deployed the Marines to Beirut after a suicide bomber drove an explosives-laden truck into the embassy, killing 63 people. The Marines were deployed to keep the peace, because that’s what Marines do. At least, that’s what they did in the early years of the 20th century and American imperialism, being sent to Haiti, the Philippines and Central America.

But by 1983, the gild was off the lily of U.S. military. We had made the world safe for democracy in two World Wars, but were locked in a stalemate against the Soviet Union. The Cold War flared up twice in Asia, but Korea ended with an uneasy truce, and Vietnam ended with an American pullout and eventual communist takeover.

Around 6:20 a.m. on Oct. 23, 1983, a Sunday morning, about 300 Marines were in the barracks, most asleep. A stolen Mercedes-Benz truck circled the parking lot before crashing through the barbed wire and through the embassy wall. The truck contained a ton of explosives, enough to level the four-story building.

More than 80 Marines got out of the rubble alive, but 241 were killed. At the time, it was the bloodiest day for the Marines since Iwo Jima, and the largest act of terrorism against the United States.

Meanwhile, in South America, Grenada – described by President Reagan as having 110,000 people on an island about the size of Washington D.C. – was without a government. A pro-Communist regime had collapsed after making diplomatic overtures to the United States, and about 1,000 Americans were in Grenada, then under the rule of a pro-Castro military junta.

On Oct. 25, Reagan sent in the Marines, some diverted from Lebanon, to get the Americans – most medical students – home. Nineteen U.S. soldiers were killed, but a pro-American government was installed, with elections the following year.

It was the first victory by American military forces in more than a generation, and overshadowed the American withdrawal from Lebanon in March 1984. Emboldened, America launched operations into Libya and Panama, which Mike Royko compared to Joe Louis’s “Bum of the Month Club,” when the heavyweight would fight local people and win, and everyone would feel better.

In 1991, American forces launched into Kuwait to liberate them from Iraqi occupation. Iraq was repelled in a ground war lasting less than three days, prompting then-President George H.W. Bush to say that the monkey of Vietnam was off our back.

By then, Lebanon’s civil war was on its way to resolution. An uneasy peace was brokered. Three years later, Bill Clinton brought representatives of Israel and the Palestinian Liberation Organization together to negotiate peace in the Middle East. Communism had been vanquished, and the federal government was moving into surplus – Reagan’s peace dividend. It looked like a Pax Americana was upon us.

Since then, we’ve seen a presidential election the likes of which hasn’t been experienced since the days after the Civil War. The 241 Marines killed in the barracks bombing is less than one-tenth of the number of Americans killed on Sept. 11, 2001. Since then, American forces have invaded Afghanistan because the Taliban, the regime controlling the country, gave aid and comfort to Osama bin Laden, the mastermind behind 9/11. After that, we invaded Iraq because…well, I’ll get back to you on that one.

So what lesson are we to take away from the Beirut bombing and the invasion of Grenada? Maybe Beirut sent the message to our enemies that we’ll back down when faced with heavy casualties. Maybe Grenada made us realize that we like our conflicts quick and painless

Maybe it taught us that Middle East politics were more complicated than we’d thought.

Or maybe Beirut taught us that terrorism was the way that the wars of the world would be fought. Maybe we just didn’t learn it for a while.