From Beirut to 9/11

[thedrifter]

October 23, 2008
Op-Ed Contributor
From Beirut to 9/11
By ROBERT C. McFARLANE

IN the summer of 1983, I became President Ronald Reagan’s special representative to the Middle East, with the mission of restoring a measure of calm to Israel’s relations with her neighbors, starting with Lebanon. At the time, Lebanon was occupied by Syrian and Israeli forces — Syria since shortly after Lebanon’s civil war began in 1975, and Israel since its invasion in June of the previous year.

Scarcely three months into that assignment, however, I was recalled to Washington and named the president’s national security adviser. Just after midnight on Friday, Oct. 21, I was awakened by a call from Vice President George H. W. Bush, who reported that several East Caribbean states had asked the United States to send forces to the Caribbean island of Grenada to prevent the Soviet Union and Cuba from establishing a base there. I called the president and Secretary of State George Shultz, who were on a golfing trip in Augusta, Ga., and received approval to have our forces prepare to land within 72 hours.

Then, less than 24 hours later I was awakened again, this time by the duty officer at the White House situation room, who reported that United States Marine barracks in Lebanon had been attacked by Iranian-trained Hezbollah terrorists with heavy losses. Again, I called the president, and he prepared for an immediate return to Washington to deal with both crises.

Today is the 25th anniversary of that bombing, which killed 241 Americans who were part of a multinational peacekeeping force (a simultaneous attack on the French base killed 58 paratroopers). The attack was planned over several months at Hezbollah’s training camp in the Bekaa Valley in central Lebanon. Once American intelligence confirmed who was responsible and where the attack had been planned, President Reagan approved a joint French-American air assault on the camp — only to have the mission aborted just before launching by the secretary of defense, Caspar Weinberger. Four months later, all the marines were withdrawn, capping one of the most tragic and costly policy defeats in the brief modern history of American counterterrorism operations.

One could draw several conclusions from this episode. To me the most telling was the one reached by Middle Eastern terrorists, that the United States had neither the will nor the means to respond effectively to a terrorist attack, a conclusion seemingly borne out by our fecklessness toward terrorist attacks in the 1990s: in 1993 on the World Trade Center; on Air Force troops at Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia in 1996; on our embassies in Tanzania and Kenya in 1998; on the destroyer Cole in 2000.

There was no effective response from the United States to any of these. It was not until the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, that our country decided to go to war against radical Islam.

A second conclusion concerns the age-old maxim never to deploy a force without giving it a clear military mission. In 1983, the Marine battalion positioned at the Beirut Airport was assigned the mission of “presence”; that is, to lend moral support to the fragile Lebanese government. Secretary of State Shultz and I urged the president to give the marines their traditional role — to deploy, at the invitation of the Lebanese government, into the mountains alongside the newly established Lebanese Army in an effort to secure the evacuation of Syrian and Israeli forces from Lebanon.

Secretary Weinberger disagreed. He felt strongly that American interests in the Middle East lay primarily in the region’s oil, and that to assure access to that oil we ought never to undertake military operations that might result in Muslim casualties and put at risk Muslim goodwill.

Cabinet officers often disagree, and rigorous debate and refinement often lead to better policy. What is intolerable, however, is irresolution. In this case the president allowed the refusal by his secretary of defense to carry out a direct order to go by without comment — an event which could have seemed to Mr. Weinberger only a vindication of his judgment. Faced with the persistent refusal of his secretary of defense to countenance a more active role for the marines, the president withdrew them, sending the terrorists a powerful signal of paralysis within our government and missing an early opportunity to counter the Islamist terrorist threat in its infancy.

Since 9/11 we have learned a lot about the threat from radical Islam and how to defeat it. Our commitment to Iraq is now being vindicated and, if sustained, will enable us to establish an example of pluralism in a Muslim state with a flourishing economy.

First, however, we must win in Afghanistan — truly the decisive battleground in this global struggle. Never has there been a greater need for experience and judgment in the White House. Unless our next president understands the complexity of the challenge as well as what it will take to succeed, and can lead his cabinet and our country in resolute execution of that strategy, we will lose this war.

Robert C. McFarlane was the national security adviser from 1983 to 1985.

Ellie

[thedrifter]

October 23, 2008
Op-Ed Contributor
Lebanon’s Bloody Sunday
By RANDY GADDO

I REMEMBER that the morning of Oct. 23, 1983, in Beirut was pleasant and sunny; there was a light breeze, and it was very quiet. Sunday was generally a day of rest. We were usually given an extra ration of sleep and then a treat, omelets, at the barracks mess hall. We had no more omelets after Oct. 23.

I had gotten up early because I had work to do. As a Marine staff sergeant and a photographer, I had been sent to Beirut to document the deployment of the troops that were going to try to bring peace to Lebanon after years of civil war. That morning I had eight rolls of film to develop and print before I helped the rest of my unit waterproof our bunker, a necessity because we were heading into the rainy season. I had set up a makeshift photo lab in the only place we could find running water, a third floor bathroom in the barracks, although I didn’t sleep in the building.

At 6 a.m. I was halfway over to the barracks from my tent, and I remember the birds were singing louder than I’d ever heard them, maybe because for a change there was no distant sound of artillery in the mountains. I decided I needed a cup of coffee before I went to work, so I turned back to the combat operations center and got a cup and sat down at my little field desk to plan my day.

About 20 minutes later I heard two or three shots from an M-16. Before I had time to wonder, I felt a hot rush of air on my face, like a blast furnace. Then I heard and felt a thunderous thud and was lifted up and tossed back several feet like a rag doll.

I was dazed, but fortunately I had my helmet and flak jacket on, and they absorbed a lot of the shock wave. My first thought was that a rocket or artillery round must have hit close by, so I went outside expecting to see a smoldering hole outside the tent. What I did see is something I’ll never forget.

Over in the direction of the barracks, where I’d been headed 20 minutes earlier, I saw a mushroom cloud rising several hundred feet in the air. I took off running toward it, and I remember that as I rounded a corner of a building I saw that all the leaves had been stripped from every tree and bush in sight. I saw the cover of an ammo can embedded in the trunk of one tree.

Then, when I reached a spot where normally I would have seen the barracks, I saw the control tower of the Beirut International Airport, which was next to our camp. I stopped dead in my tracks — this simply wasn’t what I was supposed to be seeing. Then things went into slow motion for a while. A heavy gray dust was drifting down, covering everything like a thick blanket. As my brain started engaging again, I focused and began to see things, human things that snapped me back to reality because, without going into gruesome detail, it was obvious many men had died.

I ran back to the combat operations center to report what I’d seen and get help. I saw my boss, Maj. Bob Jordan, our public affairs officer, covered with dust and looking dazed because he’d been blown out of his rack too. I said — or probably yelled, I don’t recall — “The barracks is gone!”

Now, those words in Beirut in 1983 were as impossible to comprehend as the words “the twin towers are gone” were before 9/11. The barracks was a fortress with two-foot-thick reinforced concrete walls. It had served as a headquarters for Israeli troops; it had withstood artillery and heavy naval gunfire with barely a scratch. Yet it was gone. And with it, some 220 marines, 18 sailors and 3 soldiers died. Hundreds more were injured.

•

Five years ago, at the 20th anniversary remembrance of the bombing at the Beirut Memorial in Jacksonville, N.C., I met one of the many American children who were left fatherless that day. She had been a baby when the terrorists had killed her father, a Marine captain. She had come to find out about her father from the men who had served with him. Her father had written her many letters from Beirut; she had one with her and let me read it.

He had written it in September 1983. In it, he told her that people back home would question why the United States was involved in Beirut and why it was important to let the people there gain their freedom. He told her that it was far better to confront the terrorist enemy there where they lived rather than have to fight them 20 years later in the United States.

It turns out he was right about everything but the time frame — it took only 18 years for the war to come to America.

Had we stood our ground 25 years ago instead of pulling out after the bombing, it is possible that 9/11 would not have happened. Likewise, anyone who thinks we can pull back into a shell now and hope terrorism will go away simply isn’t looking at the lessons history offers.

People ask if we are accomplishing anything in Iraq and Afghanistan. I say yes. Terrorists no longer have a safe haven in Afghanistan. If we pull out of Iraq before the time is right, guess who moves in: Iran. The same Iran that trained the Hezbollah bombers who killed 241 of my comrades on that October morning in Beirut. Do we want to look back 25 years from now and regret not having stayed the course again?

Randy Gaddo is the director of Parks, Recreation and Library Services for Peachtree City, Ga.

Ellie

[thedrifter]

From the Beirut Bombing to 9/11
Liberal assaults on the executive branch have made us vulnerable.
By ROBERT F. TURNER


Twenty-five years ago today a terrorist truck bomb in Beirut, Lebanon, killed 241 Marines, sailors and soldiers, and wounded more than 100 others. Had it not been for crass political partisanship, and efforts by Sen. Joe Biden and other congressional liberals to usurp the constitutional powers of the president, the loss of life in Beirut may have been avoided.

In part because it did, Osama bin Laden concluded that America could not accept casualties and ordered the 9/11 attacks. Similar congressional usurpation of presidential power over foreign intelligence played an important role in guaranteeing the success of those attacks.

This story goes back at least to November 1973, when congressional liberals pushed through the War Powers Resolution -- which claimed congressional control over all use of military force abroad -- overriding a presidential veto. (All seven American presidents since then have shared the view that that statute is unconstitutional.)

President Reagan sent the Marines to Beirut as part of a multinational peacekeeping operation that included forces from Great Britain, Italy and France. The purpose was to help maintain peace while the feuding factions tried to negotiate an end to years of strife. Nevertheless, Democrats -- particularly in the Senate -- decided to turn the deployment into a partisan issue in preparation for the 1984 elections. They demanded under the War Powers Resolution to know exactly when the troops would return home.

Gen. P.X. Kelley, the commandant of the Marine Corps, respectfully cautioned the Foreign Relations Committee that a partisan debate about placing time limits on the deployment would encourage hostile forces inimical to the "life and limb of the Marines." Senior Democrats denounced this warning as a "ludicrous argument" designed to "intimidate the Congress and to frighten the American people."

Referring to the assertion that the Senate debate would encourage attacks on Marines, Sen. Biden said, "My response to that is that may be true . . . but until we . . . invoke the War Powers Act," we are always going to be "beaten over the head by every administration that says 60 days is not enough time." In the end, only two Senate Democrats voted on Sept. 29, 1983, to "authorize" the continued deployment.

Syrian Foreign Minister Abdel Halim Khaddam announced during the congressional debate that America was "short of breath." And as reported in U.S. News & World Report, American intelligence intercepted a message between two radical Muslim militia groups that read: "If we kill 15 Marines, the rest will leave." At sunrise on the morning of Oct. 23, 1983, a terrorist truck bomb crashed into the Marine Headquarters in Beirut and exploded. Early the following year, the surviving Marines were withdrawn.

During a 1998 interview with an ABC News reporter in Afghanistan, Osama bin Laden declared that this withdrawal proved Americans can't accept casualties. It was obviously a consideration in his decision to order the 9/11 terrorist attacks. But the conventional wisdom, that those deadly attacks resulted from "an intelligence failure," doesn't tell the full story.

A major reason we failed to detect the 9/11 attacks in advance was because, beginning in the 1970s, Congress launched a major public attack on the intelligence community. Mr. Biden, for example, was one of 17 senators to vote on Oct. 2, 1974, to make all covert operations (even espionage in some cases) unlawful. In 1986, he bragged in a New Republic interview that he'd personally blocked planned covert operations during the Reagan administration simply by threatening to leak them. (That statement calls to mind John Jay's observation, in Federalist No. 64, that because Congress could not be trusted to keep secrets, the Constitution left the president "able to manage the business of intelligence as prudence might suggest.")

In 1978, Congress continued its intrusion into presidential powers by enacting the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), making it a felony for intelligence professionals to monitor communications between foreign terrorists abroad and individuals within the U.S. without first getting a special warrant. But in a unanimous opinion, the appellate court established by FISA observed that every court to decide the issue had held the president has "inherent authority" under the Constitution "to conduct warrantless searches to obtain foreign intelligence information," adding: "We take for granted that the President does have that authority . . ."

Congress failed to anticipate in FISA the dangers posed by a terrorist like Zacarias Moussaoui -- which is why FBI agents were unable to examine the contents of Moussaoui's laptop computer and perhaps prevent the 9/11 attacks. Michael Hayden, then Director of the National Security Agency (NSA), later expressed his "professional judgment" that had these legal constraints (FISA) not existed "we would have detected some of the 9/11 al Qaeda operatives in the United States" prior to the attacks, and "we would have identified them as such."

As we pause today to honor the memory of the 241 brave young Marines who lost their lives in 1983, Americans should vow that political partisanship should never again be permitted to endanger our country and its armed forces.

Mr. Turner is a constitutional scholar who served as acting assistant secretary of state for legislative affairs in 1984-85.

Ellie