Seven Events That Made America America (31 page)

Throughout September, Reagan made personal phone calls to the family of every American serviceman killed in Lebanon—“difficult, terrible calls,” as he described them.
⁷⁶
He consoled himself with the thought that “our efforts seemed to be working, giving time to the Lebanese, the Syrians, and the Israelis to work out a solution to their problems.”
⁷⁷
In fact, any “solution” that did not deal directly with the nature, funding, and operation of Islamic jihad in the region had no hope. And then, at a critical point, Reagan’s most trusted aide, Californian William Clark, who had served as the national security advisor, asked to be relieved of his duties. Clark was worn out, and wanted a slower-paced job at Interior, to which he was transferred. Clark’s departure may not have changed any of Reagan’s policies in the Middle East, but of all Reagan’s advisers, Clark seemed particularly attuned to the necessity for reasoned, hard-line measures.

One other Reagan adviser, Jeane Kirkpatrick, the ambassador to the United Nations, seemed to have a prickly, no-holds-barred attitude. She also had, according to Reagan, “bad chemistry” with Shultz. Kirkpatrick had a deep sense of Israel’s isolation, and made the case for fairness at the UN forcefully. Because of her tensions with Shultz, however, Reagan hesitated to name her as Clark’s replacement, instead turning to Bud McFarlane. The only other truly outspoken “hawk” among Reagan’s closest advisers, Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger, was outspoken in his reluctance to displease the Muslim states on the grounds that the United States needed oil.

As Reagan noted in his autobiography, Lebanon was still on his mind when he went to Georgia on October 21 for a golf outing. Overnight, his focus shifted from the Middle East to a tiny island in the Caribbean when the Organization of Eastern Caribbean States appealed for help. Grenada, an island about ninety miles north of Venezuela, had undergone a bloody coup led by the Marxist Castro wannabe Maurice Bishop, who invited Cubans in to build a massive airfield. Neighboring islands, including Jamaica, Bermuda, and Barbados, were concerned about Bishop even before the Cubans arrived. Now, certain that they would be the next targets, they pleaded with Reagan to intervene. The United States did have a direct interest in protecting the eight hundred Americans at the medical school on the island, and Reagan had already ordered the U.S. Navy to station a flotilla close by to keep tabs on Bishop. That night in Georgia, after consulting with the Joint Chiefs of Staff, he decided to move quickly before the Cubans could bring in reinforcements or take the students hostage. A little-reported event took place the next day while Reagan was on the golf course, when a gunman took over the pro shop and held seven hostages. He wanted to speak to the president, face to face. Quickly he was captured and the hostages were unharmed (he actually let one go to buy a six-pack of beer!).
⁷⁸

At 2:30 that morning, just hours after Reagan had escaped personal danger, the phone rang. Bud McFarlane, the new national security advisor, had stunning news. A Mercedes-Benz truck, loaded with explosives equivalent to twelve thousand pounds of TNT, had plowed through a barbed wire fence at the parking lot of the Beirut International Airport, where elements of the Second Marine Division were headquartered. It accelerated past two sentry posts—the sentries, constricted by rules of engagement, were slow to fire—and slammed into the building. Instantly, the four-story structure was lifted up by the force of the explosion, shattering its concrete supports, then it collapsed, crushing those inside, and killing 241 Marines. It was the bloodiest day in Marine history since Iwo Jima in 1945. Two minutes later, a similar truck bomb detonated at the barracks of the French First Parachute Regiment in the Ramlet al Baida area of West Beirut. There, the bomber took the truck down a ramp into the underground parking garage, killing 58 French soldiers, making it the worst military loss for France since Algeria.
⁷⁹
Sniper fire hindered the rescue attempts at both sites.

Having spent the previous night in the living room of his Georgia hotel monitoring the situation in Grenada, Reagan’s staff spent a second night listening to the reports roll in from Lebanon. As Reagan put it, “the news from Beirut became grimmer and grimmer.”
⁸⁰
It was, Reagan said, a “despicable act.” Weinberger, who opposed the deployment, still blamed himself. “The fact that I had been warning against this very thing didn’t give me any slight satisfaction,” he recalled eighteen years later. “It was terrible to be proven right under such horrible circumstances.”
⁸¹
Reagan returned to Washington, where he was briefed further, and shortly afterward the CIA confirmed that the attack emanated from the Hezbollah training camp in the Bekaa Valley, although Weinberger later stated, “we still do not have the actual knowledge of who did the bombing of the Marine barracks . . . and we certainly didn’t then.”
⁸²
Beirut, he said, was “an absolutely inevitable outcome of doing what we did, of putting troops in with no mission that could be carried out.” The United States, he continued, had put a referee in the middle of a “furious prize fight . . . in range of both fighters. . . .”
⁸³
The Joint Chiefs of Staff had grave concerns, but Weinberger admitted he never fully voiced their views: “none of us marched in and told the president that the U.S. is going to face disaster if the Marines didn’t withdraw.”
⁸⁴
Reagan never once attempted to shift blame. Referring to the deployment, he grimly admitted, “Part of it was my idea—a good part of it.”
⁸⁵

Weinberger’s reluctance to get further involved came when the Gipper approved a joint French-American air assault on a staging camp, but at the last minute, Weinberger aborted the mission.
⁸⁶
In fact, the Muslim radicals expected an attack. Hamza al Hamieh, the Shiite military leader in the Beirut area, blustered to CNN, “None of us is afraid. God is with us . . . We want to see our God. We welcome the bombs of Reagan.”
⁸⁷
Few in the White House fully grasped the religious and apocalyptic overtones in the enemy’s boasts: cables from the U.S. embassy revealed that the
Iranians
expected to be attacked as a response to the bombing, and quoted Iranian radio as saying they desired the attack: “This is our hope because we seek
martyrdom
[emphasis added].”
⁸⁸
Comments such as those underscored the
Islamic
context of the battle, and it was noteworthy that the government-run radio in Beirut referred to the dead American and French troops as “martyrs”—the first time a multinational force casualty had been so categorized.
⁸⁹
By January of 1984, the CIA’s director of intelligence conducted a briefing called “The Terrorist Threat to US Personnel” in which he warned that “Shia extremists are increasingly willing to sacrifice their lives in attacks on the MNF. They are confident they are serving the will of Allah.”
⁹⁰

While not yet perceiving the struggle as one against a shame-honor culture, Reagan nevertheless applied (with some precision) a Cold War response to terrorism: if Americans “cut and run . . . we’ll be sending one signal to terrorists everywhere. They can gain by waging war against innocent people.”
⁹¹
Internal memos confirm that many in the administration shared this view. Cable files record “the stakes in Lebanon, if we are driven out . . . the radicals, the rejectionists . . . will have won.” Yet this was still interpreted within the U.S.-Soviet conflict: “The message will be sent that relying on the Soviet Union pays off.”
⁹²
Historian Paul Kengor noted that Reagan was troubled and concerned by the possibility of Islamic terror attacks inside the United States—it was one reason he quit attending church, especially after the assassination attempt by John Hinckley, Jr., as he was afraid an entire congregation would become a target.
⁹³
Repeatedly he cited the actions of a “Middle East madman” in his defense of the Strategic Defense Initiative, and argued that even if the Soviets had no nuclear missiles, such a shield was necessary.

In the wake of the bombing, Congress launched an investigation, and concluded there were “inadequate security measures” at the compound, and that the commander made “serious errors in judgement [and] bears principle responsibility.” Worse, Congress claimed, information provided by the Marines afterward was “often inaccurate, erroneous, and misleading.”
⁹⁴
No one was fired, although ultimately Navy Secretary Lehman issued nonpunitive “letters of instruction” to the two commanding officers, a step Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger found sufficient.
⁹⁵

Reagan paid a high political price for Lebanon. While at first, Grenada and Lebanon were linked in the public mind—and indeed Reagan’s speech-writers tied them together as part of the anti-Soviet effort—in reality the high public approval of Grenada made Reagan’s much lower numbers on Lebanon, noted by White House pollsters, even out.
⁹⁶
And after the bombing, Reagan benefited from strong public sympathy. Support came from such groups as Al-Mojaddedi of the Islamic Unity for Afghan Freedom Fighters and the Federation of [the] Islamic Association of U.S. and Canada, as well as the National Federation of Syrian-Lebanese American Clubs, and even the National Council of Churches, which supported both Grenada and Lebanon.
⁹⁷
The National Association of Arab Americans had originally opposed the deployment, but after the Sabra and Shatila massacres reluctantly fell in behind Reagan.

Over time, though, opposition coalesced, and not just from the Left. Conservatives such as Richard Viguerie urged the president to pull the troops out. Democrats in Congress, seeing an opportunity to weaken Reagan, began to revisit the War Powers Act (Congressman Mickey Edwards of Oklahoma called the vote to authorize the Lebanon action “misleading”). And while never close to a majority, a growing minority of letters to the White House expressed concerns about whether the United States was “involved in another no win situation where our troops . . . are not allowed to exert . . . enough force to be victorious.”
⁹⁸
One state senator reasoned, “I am sure that a 16-inch salvo from the [battleship USS]
New Jersey
assures the peace more than a Marine contingent. . . . Strategically they are sitting ducks.”
⁹⁹
A handful of writers favored Grenada, but not Lebanon. Overwhelmingly, those opposed to the Lebanon mission did not disapprove because of the use of military force, but rather because they feared the American troops would not be able to use
sufficient
force. “Americans are tired of losing,” said one telegram.
¹⁰⁰

Lebanon slowly moved Reagan away from the notion that the Middle East was just like any other region in terms of its geopolitics’ susceptibility to reasoned diplomacy. In December 1983, the administration developed the term “state-sponsored terrorism” to describe, specifically, Iranian-supported terrorist activities. This was a step short towards identifying an entire wing of a religion as dangerous. Shortly after the bombing, Reagan wrote. “I still believed that it was essential to continue working with moderate Arabs to find a solution to the Middle East’s problems, and that we should make selective sales of American weapons to the moderate Arabs as proof of our friendship.” But “at the same time, I was beginning to have doubts whether the Arab world, with its ancient tribal rivalries, centuries of internecine strife, and almost pathological hatred of Israel, was as serious about supporting our peace efforts in the Middle East as King Fahd of Saudi Arabia and King Hussein of Jordan said they were.”
¹⁰¹
Another step was taken early in 1984, when the administration issued NSDD-138, which approved preemptive attacks on persons involved in, or planning, terrorist attacks.
¹⁰²

These all constituted significant movement toward a more realistic understanding of what was unfolding in the world, and certainly were light years away from the perceptions of Jimmy Carter. Yet Reagan still believed he could work with individual Muslim regimes to effect larger policy outcomes, most notably through his support of the mujahideen to evict the Soviets from Afghanistan. In 1986, the president sent Clark to Baghdad to meet with Saddam Hussein to persuade him to cease supporting the terrorist training cells inside Iraq. Reagan continued to see Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, King Hussein of Jordan, and the Saudi leaders as reasonable men, and he shaped much of his strategy around them. The reality that, often, even those leaders were not in control of their own countries, or that there was a powerful new radical jihadist view gaining ground across the Islamic world, had not yet become clear anywhere in Washington.

Another factor blurring the perceptions of a militant Islam was “Charlie Wilson’s War”—the effort to arm the mujahideen with antiaircraft weapons to aid them in their battle against the Soviets.
¹⁰³
At the time, as Wilson himself pointed out, the Afghans were the only ones killing Russians. But by separating the anti-Soviet aspects of the mujahideen aid from the prospects that those same “freedom fighters” might soon be governed by the Taliban, the administration once again demonstrated that it did not yet have a fully developed view of the Islamic militant threat. Little evidence has surfaced that the United States ever faced any of its own weapons (directly or indirectly supplied), either in Afghanistan or, subsequently, Iraq. Far more important than the materials of war that the enemy received during this time was the message of weakness that began to emanate from Washington under Carter and continued under Reagan—a message really only perceived by the Muslim radicals, for certainly the Soviets saw no such weakness.

During his second term, Reagan’s compassion for American hostages led him to approve an arms-for-hostages deal with the ayatollahs in Tehran. Both George Washington and John Adams had exchanged money and/or weapons for captives in the late 1700s (it was, in part, the demand of a fully outfitted U.S. frigate that finally drove Thomas Jefferson to launch a war on the Tripolitan states). John F. Kennedy authorized the delivery of $53 million in material and another $2.9 million in cash to Fidel Castro to secure the release of the Bay of Pigs prisoners in December 1962. So while the rule of American policy was “don’t negotiate with terrorists,” leaders had broken it for generations. Under the Reagan plan, Israel would sell TOW (for
t
ube-launched,
o
ptically tracked,
w
ire-guided) antitank missiles to Iran for the war against Iraq in return for Iran’s role in securing the release of seven American hostages. What Reagan did not know was that Col. Oliver North (and perhaps his superior, Adm. John Poindexter) had gotten more money for the TOWs than was reported and diverted it into a secret fund to arm the Contra rebels in Nicaragua in violation of legislation of the U.S. Congress. Defenders of Reagan have cited the congressional hearings that followed as evidence that Reagan was unaware of these exchanges, and North, having received immunity, stunned Congress and the media by shouldering the entire blame himself. Reagan emerged tarred by the scandal, but could not be connected officially in any way. Iran-Contra proved a blemish on his second term, and was virtually the only foreign policy stain in the eyes of the public, which had not blamed him for Beirut.