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发帖数: 29846 | 1 At the end of a Washington Post op-ed criticizing John McCain for labeling
Republicans who oppose intervention in the Libyan war “isolationists,”
George Will writes (emphasis added):
Regarding Libya, McCain on Sunday said, “I wonder what Ronald Reagan
would be saying today.” Wondering is speculation; we know this:
When a terrorist attack that killed 241 Marines and other troops taught
Reagan the folly of deploying them at Beirut airport with a vague mission
and dangerous rules of engagement, he was strong enough to reverse this
intervention in a civil war. Would that he had heeded a freshman congressman
from Arizona who opposed the House resolution endorsing the intervention.
But, then, the McCain of 1983 was, by the standards of the McCain of 2011,
an isolationist.
Will may want to rethink his use of this historical analogy. The “terrorist
attack that killed 241 Marines” was the 1983 attack on the Marine barracks
. It was orchestrated by Iran and its chief terrorist proxy, Hezbollah. The
success of the attack, not just in terms of carnage but also in driving
American forces out of Lebanon, emboldened jihadists for decades to come.
Throughout the 1980s and early 1990s, Hezbollah launched a string of
hijackings, kidnappings, and attacks on American targets because the
terrorist group and its sponsors believed the U.S. was a “paper tiger.”
America never did anything to punish those leading the terrorist assault
against her citizens, so the terrorist assault grew worse. For example,
Hezbollah kidnapped and then tortured to death William Buckley, the CIA’s
station chief in Lebanon, in the mid-1980s. The 1996 attack on the Khobar
Towers in Saudi Arabia was undoubtedly launched with the conviction that it
would make America think twice about stationing troops in the Middle East.
That attack, like the 1983 Marine Barracks bombing, was also launched by
Hezbollah and Iran.
Watching the events of 1983 was a young Saudi citizen of Yemeni descent
named Osama bin Laden. While his jihad was then focused against the Soviets
in Afghanistan, bin Laden was emboldened by the swift retreat of American
forces. Twenty years later, in early 2003, bin Laden was still referencing
it in his messages to Muslims. Bin Laden argued on the eve of the Iraq war:
“I could also remind you of the defeat of the American forces in the year
1982 [sic], when the sons of Israel destroyed Lebanon, and the Lebanese
resisted. They sent a truck loaded with explosives into a U.S. marine base
in Beirut, sending more than 240 of them to Hell, the worst possible fate.”
Bin Laden’s argument was simple, but wrong: America will cut and run from
the Middle East just as she has in the past.
Bin Laden was so impressed with the 1983 Marine barracks bombing, which
coincided with a near simultaneous attack on French paratroopers, that he
turned to Iran and Hezbollah for help in replicating the attacks. Bin Laden
and al Qaeda were headquartered in Sudan at the time. Part of this story was
told by the 9/11 Commission in its final report.
“In late 1991 or 1992,” the Commission wrote, “discussions in Sudan
between al Qaeda and Iranian operatives led to an informal agreement to
cooperate in providing support – even if only training – for actions
carried out primarily against Israel and the United States.” The Commission
continued (emphasis added):
Not long afterward, senior al Qaeda operatives and trainers traveled to
Iran to receive training in explosives. In the fall of 1993, another such
delegation went to the Bekaa Valley in Lebanon for further training in
explosives as well as in intelligence and security. Bin Laden reportedly
showed particular interest in learning how to use truck bombs such as the
one that had killed 241 U.S. Marines in Lebanon in 1983. The relationship
between al Qaeda and Iran demonstrated that Sunni-Shia divisions did not
necessarily pose an insurmountable barrier to cooperation in terrorist
operations.
Later on in its report, the 9/11 Commission discussed the result of bin
Laden’s “interest” in the 1983 attack: al Qaeda’s 1998 embassy bombings
in Kenya and Tanzania. The Commission found:
Al Qaeda had begun developing the tactical expertise for such attacks [
note: the 1998 embassy bombings] months earlier, when some of its operatives
– top military committee members and several operatives who were involved
with the Kenya cell among them – were sent to Hezbollah training camps in
Lebanon.
During the embassy bombings trial in 2001, U.S. prosecutors introduced Jamal
al Fadl, an al Qaeda member, as a key witness. Al Fadl explained that
Hezbollah showed al Qaeda “how to explosives [sic] big buildings” during
the training.
“Big buildings” like the embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. Hundreds were
killed in 1998, just as hundreds were killed in 1983. The embassy bombings
were a mirror image of Hezbollah’s own twin suicide truck bombings – a
deadly innovation in terrorism. Al Qaeda adopted Hezbollah’s modus operandi
precisely because it exposed what the terrorists thought was America’s
inherent weakness.
Thus, Reagan’s retreat from Lebanon was not a “strong” decision, as Will
would have it. It not only emboldened Sunni and Shiite terrorists alike, it
helped Iran, Hezbollah, and Syria turn Lebanon into a cauldron of terror for
decades to come.
There is plenty of room for rational debate on the course ahead in Libya,
but citing one of the weakest moments in American foreign policy decision
making in the last thirty years does not help Will’s case.
Thomas Joscelyn is a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of
Democracies. |
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