THE BARRACKS’ BOMBING—FORTY YEARS LATER
“The force of the explosion initially lifted the entire four-story structure, shearing the bases of the concrete support columns, each measuring fifteen feet in circumference and reinforced by numerous one-and-three quarter-inch steel rods. The airborne building then fell in upon itself. A massive shock wave and ball of flaming gas was hurled in all directions.”
Eric Hammel[1]
“Pray for the peace of Jerusalem.”
Psalms 122:6
Almost hidden among the many memorials and grave markers at Arlington National Cemetery—the military blood sacrifice site of our country—stands a solitary Lebanese cedar tree. The tree was planted, many years ago, near a special cluster of graves containing the bodies of U.S. Marine Corps’ victims. The young men buried there represent one of our nation’s greatest military disasters, the October 23, 1983, terrorist bombing attack on a peacekeeping barracks in Beirut, Lebanon. A plaque partially buried in front of the tree reads: “Let peace take root: This cedar of Lebanon tree grows in living memory of the Americans killed in the Beirut terrorist attack and all victims of terrorism around the world.”[2]
The bombing incident in Beirut resulted in the largest single-day death toll for the U.S. Marine Corps since the Battle of Iwo Jima in World War II and the deadliest single-day death toll for the U.S. military since the Tet Offensive during the Vietnam War. On that fateful day 40 years ago, 220 marines from the 1st Battalion 8th Marines (Battalion Landing Team) of the 2nd Marine Division died, along with 18 sailors and three soldiers, when a suicide bomber detonated a truck bomb in the lobby of the barracks building. The marines were participating as part of a multinational force in Lebanon,[3] a country wracked at the time by the violence and chaos of a protracted civil war, following the withdrawal of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), caused in turn, by an Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982.[4]
At 06:22, on a Sunday morning, a 19-ton yellow Mercedes-Benz stake-bed truck, which originally appeared to be an ordinary water tanker, crashed through a 5 feet-high barrier of concertina wire, past sentry posts and smashed into the lobby of the barracks building. The kamikaze-suicide truck contained as much as 12,000 pounds (5,400 kg) of explosives, contained in a gas enhanced device consisting of compressed butane in canisters employed with pentaerythritol tetranitrate (PETN) to create a fuel-air explosive. Subsequent camera footing showed the truck driver—an Iranian national named Ismail Ascari—smiling seconds before the bomb went off.
“Sigh.”
In 2004, it was reported that an Iranian group calling itself the “Committee for the Commemoration of Martyrs of the Global Islamic Campaign” erected a monument, at the Behesht-e-Zahra cemetery in Tehran, to commemorate the 1983 bombings and its “martyrs.”[5]
“Sigh.”
One system glorifies life and the other death.
That dichotomy remains today.
This week, we commemorated the 40th anniversary of the Beirut bombing event. But most of you probably didn’t hear about it, with the news headlines consumed these days with Israeli-Hamas tensions, the GOP problems in electing a House leader, Trump’s trial, pro-Palestinian protests on the streets of major urban areas and university campuses, and Biden’s latest escapades.
That’s a shame.
The 40th anniversary should have received much more coverage. Indeed, many of the seeds for what is happening in the Middle East today, especially U.S. foreign policy tendencies in the region, can be traced back to that event.
Following the event, for example, there were many in the U.S. military and intelligence communities that pointed their fingers at Iran. But no “smoking gun” evidence linking Tehran with militant leaders could be found.
Sound familiar?
So, the U.S. simply left—cut-and-run—with then-President Ronald Reagan bemoaning the loss of life and the complexity of the situation in the Middle East.
Sound familiar?
Iran—then as now—was not held officially responsible for the murders and the terrorist act itself.
Sound familiar?
Many years ago, as I was enrolled in a particular off-site intelligence community training course, I was given a car ride to the site by a fellow class member. I soon learned that he was a former marine, and a survivor of the Beirut barracks blast. As I recall, he was one of the 180 marines wounded at the blast site. I have forgotten his name after all these years although I can still see his face in my minds-eye. He has made cameo, fleeting appearances, from time to time, in my dreams over the years. I most remember our conversations about the bombing and his vivid details of the events, as well as his subsequent laments about the lack of U.S. staying power in the region. And, of course, the memories of those brothers-in-arms he left behind in body bags.
So, who was responsible?
As I discussed on several occasions during my Terrorism courses for the Criminal Justice Department at the College of the Ozarks, there is the daunting problem of attribution, that is, ascribing blame for who is actually responsible, for significant terrorist events such as the Beirut bombing. There is a huge difference between suspecting individuals, groups, or nation states, based on their track records and ideologies, and who are potentially responsible for terroristic acts; and acquiring the type of physical and forensic evidence which can verifiably prove such involvement. This was just as true in 1983 as it is today, especially when state-sponsors use several technological layers to hide their involvement.
This attribution problem not only poses a significant obstacle for military and intelligence investigators and analysts, but also in the legal realm where loved ones of the victims seek legal redress against state sponsors.[6]
What do we know? (Or think we know)?
At the time of the bombing an obscure group called “Islamic Jihad” claimed responsibility for the attack. But after years of investigation, the U.S. government came to believe that two autonomous Lebanon-based terrorist groups—which later formed Hezbollah (literally “Party of Allah”)—backed by Iran and Syria, used the name Islamic Jihad to remain anonymous and hide outside involvement. The operation itself was allegedly planned in meetings at the Iranian embassy in Damascus, Syria, and directed by two Lebanese Shia individuals: Imad Mughniyah (1962-2008) and Mustafa Badreddine (Badr Al Din) (1961-2016).[7]
I know more about Mughniyah than Badr Al Din. Many years after the aforementioned training, I became involved with an intelligence community effort to target Hezbollah (among others). During my background training on the group, I learned that Imad Mughniyah had a Che Guevara-type reputation in the ranks of the group. As a result, I learned a lot about Mughniyah in those years. In my mind, Mughniyah was a skilled terrorist operative and military tactician, whose conscience was completely seared by his hatred—which enabled him to depersonalize—potential victims whether they be Israeli Jews, Americans, or Sunni Muslims. More recently, I attempted to portray Mughniyah in my sequel novel to the Prawnocuos Trilogy which I have tentatively titled The Last Algorithm. In the novel, I view him through the eyes of a fictional young Hamas militant (Kabbani below)—several months prior to the October 7, 2023, horrific attacks on Israel—who is ordered to go for planning sessions in the Hezbollah controlled sector of Beirut:
“Kabbani eventually made his way to a darkened alleyway, buried deep within the southern suburbs, and to a quaint, ordinary building where a small wooden sign, embossed with elaborate Shi’ite cursive script, spelled out the name “Intiqaam Hotel.” Glancing quickly over both shoulders, Kabbani walked into the hotel’s modest lobby.
He did not see any other guests.
A young, pimple-faced teenager, standing behind the front desk, ignored him as he approached. He cleared his throat to get the boy’s attention. The boy, who was totally absorbed in watching a television mounted on the opposite wall, finally greeted him with a traditional Arabic welcome.
Standing at the desk, Kabbani noticed three overhead camera monitors.
He pretended to sign the guest roster. He whispered the pass code just loud enough for the boy to hear.
The boy snapped his fingers and out of a darkened recess another teenager, who looked like his twin brother, picked up his bag. “Please follow him,” the boy behind the desk said. “Take him to Room 312,” he instructed the other teenager.
Kabbani followed the second boy to the elevator. No words were exchanged between them. On the third level, they walked to the end room down the long corridor. The boy pulled a key out of his pocket, unlocked the door, pushed it open, and handed the key to Kabbani.
“You must be someone special,” the boy said in a hushed tone, “this is one of our best rooms. We call it the ‘Martyr’s Suite.’”
“Why is that?”
“You’ll see,” the boy called out as he walked toward the elevator. “Enjoy your stay!”
Kabbani turned on the light and closed the door behind him. At first glance inside the room, he instantly understood what the boy was talking about. On the wall opposite the ordinary bedspread and metal bedframe, were two large black-and-white photographs of heroes of the resistance.
The first photograph, bordered with a simple wooden frame, was the familiar bearded face of Imad Fayez Mughniyeh, founding member of Lebanon’s Islamic Jihad Organization, and number two in Hezbollah’s leadership. His dad—who knew him by his nom de guerre Al-Hajj Radwan—used to entertain young Kabbani with stories about Mughniyeh’s military prowess in planning the Beirut barracks bombing and attacks on the U.S. embassy. His dad regarded him as a true hero of the cause. Mughniyeh successfully smuggled Iranian weapons into secretive Hezbollah locations in Lebanon and earned the epitaph the “untraceable ghost” for his ability to elude Israeli surveillance efforts.
Kabbani never had the heart to tell his dad the sad truth about Mughniyeh’s end. The legendary figure, at the time only 45 years old, was visiting one of his girlfriends in an obscure Damascus neighborhood in 2008, when a joint Mossad-CIA operation caught up with him. He was assassinated in a car bombing. For Kabbani and his associates, Mughniyeh’s tragic death served two purposes: personal dalliances can lead to a tragic end for both the great and small, and the circumstances of his assassination was an object lesson in the necessity of maintaining operational security in personal movements.”[8]
But even someone like Mughniyah could not proceed on his own accord without spiritual covering. In the Shiite decisional world, such terrorist attacks need to have clerical approval by one’s “spiritual reference,” or marjas. In the case of the Beirut barracks bombing, it is believed that the clerical approval was provided by Sheik Mohammad Hussein Fadlallah (1935-2010), a Shiite cleric thought to be the spiritual leader of Hezbollah at the time. Fadlallah has always denied his role in the attack. Hezbollah’s enemies, however, apparently believed otherwise. On March 8, 1985, two years after the barracks were bombed, a 440-pound car bomb was placed along the short route between his apartment and the local mosque. 80 bystanders were killed. Grand Ayatollah Fadlallah, however, survived this and several other assassination attempts, dying in Beirut in early July 2010 at the ripe-old age of 75.[9]
Listening to today’s news from the Middle East, in many respects, is like turning the clock back in time. Hezbollah, the main organizational player in the barracks bombing, is reportedly armed with some 150,000 precision-guided missiles—all pointed at Israel—and remains poised on the northern border ready to attack when Israeli ground forces move into Gaza. Tehran’s mullahs continue to finance, plan and train regional Muslim activists in their stated efforts to push the Israelis into the sea. Moreover, Iranian-backed groups in Syria and Iraq launched drone attacks on U.S. military elements in the area prompting limited—surgical—airstrikes on their locations.
Sometimes, even if reluctantly, a superpower must act like a superpower.
For the last 40 years, since the barracks bombings, successive U.S. administrations have tried to extract our country from the Middle East quagmire. We are loathe to become involved. Yet we keep being pulled back into the various conflicts in the area, time after time, like a moth drawn to a spiritual flame.
The latest involvement was prompted earlier this month when untold numbers of Hamas militants broke through Gaza-Israeli border barriers, then murdered, butchered, and raped unarmed Israelis in border communities and a nearby music festival. The Hamas terrorists even filmed the atrocities to spread fear—a typical terroristic tactic—and returned with hundreds of hostages into the spiderlike web of tunnels underneath Gaza. Over 200 hostages, including Americans, remain. Israel has responded by pummeling militant locations from the air and has—at the time of this writing—gathered a large invasion force to go into Gaza.
U.S. media outlets, initially repulsed by the barbarity of the attacks, aired reports sympathetic to the Jewish state. That, however, didn’t last long. In recent days we have seen a swelling wave of pro-Palestinian supporters, a resurgence of anti-Semitic sentiment, and an administration that supports Israel in public but behind the scenes ties Israel’s hands behind its back.
It's enough to make you puke.
What I’m suggesting is that this is all part of a cycle, for us at least, going back decades. The underlying conflict—originally a feud between two brothers over who had a legitimate birthright claim to the land—began over 3700 years ago. We are newcomers to a brothers’ long-festering dispute.
What did America do in 1983 in response to the barracks bombings? In a word, nothing. For the militant Muslims it served a valuable lesson: make the Americans bleed enough, and spend enough, and they will leave with their tails between their legs. Our decades-long involvement in Lebanon, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, and various regional peacekeeping missions, has done very little to reverse that perception.
In my view, Biden’s hasty withdrawal from Afghanistan only reinforced that perception.
After the bombing in 1983, President Ronald Reagan appointed a military fact-finding committee to investigate the incident. The subsequent report found senior military officials responsible for security lapses and blamed the military chain of command for the disaster. The prevalent view among U.S. commanders was that there was a “direct link” between an earlier navy shelling of Muslims and the truck bomb attack.
In other words, it was our own fault.
Sound familiar?
Today we are being told in some quarters that all the heinous crimes committed earlier this month—raping girls, murdering children in front of their parents (who were then shot), killing babies in wombs, cutting off the heads of young children, numerous incidents of torture, and the taking of hostages—is all somehow Israel’s fault.
Following the barracks attack in 1983, the presence of protective barriers (bollards) became common around U.S. military and diplomatic installations.
That was our response.
In a 2009 Foreign Policy article, the authors argued that the U.S. military intervention in the Lebanese Civil War “has been downplayed or ignored in popular history … and that lessons are ‘unlearned’ as the U.S. military intervenes elsewhere in the world.”[10]
Of the culpability of Iran and militant Muslim groups for the bombing, not a word …
Sound familiar?
Meanwhile, as missiles fly in the Holy Land, as airstrikes increase, as hostages huddle in underground tunnels, as Hamas threatens to shoot Gaza civilians wanting to flee; in Arlington, the cedar tree stands as a solitary sentinel guarding the brave young men buried underneath it.
Their sacrifice has been forgotten by an increasingly ungrateful nation.
As forgotten, apparently, as the lessons that should have been learned.
“Sigh.”
[1] Eric M. Hammel, The Root: The Marines in Beirut, August 1982-February 1984, San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1985. Hammel’s book is considered one of the best histories of the U.S. Marine landing force. [2] The Cedar Tree memorial is one of several in this country dedicated to the victims of the barracks bombing, see “List of memorials on Beirut Memorial website,” Wayback Machine, n.d. [3] It wasn’t only U.S. Marines that were targeted. Less than 10 minutes after the attack on the barracks, a similar attack was mounted against the barracks of the French 3rd Company of the 1st Parachute Chasseur Regiment located six kilometers away in the Ramlet al Baida area of West Beirut. As the suicide bomber drove his truck toward the building, French paratroopers opened fire, killing the driver, immobilizing the truck, which rolled to a stop 15 yards from the building. The truck exploded shortly afterward—probably detonated by remote control—bringing down the nine-story building and killing 58 French paratroopers. [4] On June 6, 1982, elements of the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) invaded southern Lebanon, following a series of border attacks by the PLO. The bulk of the military operation was launched after gunmen from Abu Nidal’s organization attempted to assassinate Shlomo Argov, Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations. [5] See, among others, Timothy Geraghty, Peacekeepers at War: Beirut 1983—The Marine Commander Tells His Story, Washington D.C.: Potomac Books, 2009. [6] The various legal attempts to hold Iran accountable for the deaths of U.S. Marines in the barracks bombing is an interesting study in the limits and power of law. Two years after the bombing, a U.S. grand jury secretly indicted Imad Mughniyah for the terrorist bombings but he died before any action could be brought. In late 2001, the families of the victims filed civil suits against the Islamic Republic of Iran and the Ministry of Information and Security in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, alleging a wide range of damages—compensatory and punitive—resulting from an act of state-sponsored terrorism. Iran denied any responsibility, of course, and in mid-December 2002, Judge Royce C. Lamberth entered defaults against the defendants. In early September 2007, Judge Lambert awarded over $2.5 billion to the plaintiffs. In July 2012, Judge Lamberth ordered Iran to pay more than $813 million in damages and interest to the families. In April 2016, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that frozen assets of Iran’s Central Bank held in the U.S. could be used to pay compensation. [7] Mustafa Badreddine was a Hezbollah military leader and both the cousin and brother-in-law of Imad Mughniyah. His nickname was Dhu al-Fiqar, referring to the legendary sword of Imam Ali. In mid-May 2016, he was killed by an explosion near the Damascus International Airport, the cause and timing of the event remains unknown. His corpse was taken to Beirut, where he was buried in Rawdat Shahidayn cemetery. See, among others, “Obituary: Hezbollah military commander Mustafa Badreddine,” BBC, May 13, 2013. [8] Jeemes Akers, The Last Algorithm, (forthcoming). [9] See Fadlallah’s obituary by Thanassis Cambanis, “Grand Ayatollah Fadlallah, Shiite Cleric, Dies at 75,” The New York Times, Jul 4, 2010. [10] Nir Rosen, “Lesson Unlearned,” Foreign Policy, Oct. 29, 2009.
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