Beirut’s occupation in 1983 by U.S. Marines may provide a small-scale sample of what a prolonged U.S. occupation of Iraq could be like, should the Pollyannaish postwar scenarios of some members of the War Party fail to materialize.  Of course, the two situations are, in some ways, very different.  Beirut, for instance, is just a city, while Iraq is a country spanning 169,000 square miles with a population in excess of 20 million and, thus, will require many more than the roughly 1,300 men that the Reagan administration placed at Beirut International Airport.  And the Beirut occupation was but a blip on the political radar screen for the Reagan administration compared to the importance of Iraq to George W. Bush in 2003—and 2004.

A key similarity between the two counties is their multicultural diversity.  Lebanon was split between Christians and Muslims.  A power-sharing arrangement between the two groups dissolved when the Muslim population grew, in part because the country absorbed Palestinian refugees.  By the early 1980’s, Lebanon had been embroiled in civil war and chaos for seven years.  Iraq, on the other hand, is overwhelmingly Islamic, but a Sunni minority dominates the Shiite majority.  The situation is complicated by the presence of a large Kurdish minority (about 20 percent).

In June 1982, Israel invaded southern Lebanon in order to expel the Palestine Liberation Organization.  U.S. Marines first landed—with rifles unloaded—in August of that year, in order to cover the PLO’s retreat.  When the withdrawal was complete, the Marines returned to their ships in the Mediterranean.  But turmoil generated by two events brought the Marines back ashore as part of a multinational force along with French, Italian, and, later, British troops.  The first event was the assassination of Lebanese president-elect Bashir Gemayel; the second was a massacre carried out by Lebanese Christian gunmen, supported and armed by Israel, against Palestinian refugees in camps under Israeli control.

When the Marines returned, they were under orders to “establish a presence”—a rather passive-sounding command for America’s premier fighting force—at the BIA.  The early part of the occupation was relatively uneventful.  The tone of the mission was set by the constraining rules of engagement, which kept the weapons of the Marines unloaded and forced them to call in to request permission to return fire.  They were also not allowed to fire on anyone not currently firing on them.  Muslim militiamen could simply cease fire, sling their weapons, and walk right past the Marines, knowing that they would not be attacked.

Maj. Bob Jordan (USMC, retired), the public-affairs officer in Beirut from August to November 1983 and a former president of the Beirut Veterans of America (www.beirutveterans.com), wrote in Leather-neck in 1989 that a superior warned him not to allow his men to have their pistols loaded because of the “concern at the time that there was more danger from accidental shootings than from any attacker.”  (Ironically, the final Marine to die in Beirut perished in an accidental shooting.)

The first time a Marine returned fire was in April 1983.  The incident, which involved no injury, was quickly overshadowed by the suicide bombing of the American embassy in Beirut.  After the attack, which killed 63 people (most of them Lebanese), President Reagan stated that “this criminal act on a diplomatic establishment will not deter us from our goals of peace in the region . . . We will do what we know to be right.”  The New York Times reported that Reagan’s statement “generally seemed to match the mood on Capitol Hill, with most members of Congress who spoke on the issue saying that the explosion should not be allowed to set back American efforts.”  Sen. Barry Goldwater disagreed.  He called for the withdrawal of the Marines, prophetically saying, “I think we’re headed for trouble.”

The Marines of the 24th MAU (Marine Amphibious Unit), along with the Lebanese army, clashed with Shiite militiamen on Sunday, August 28, 1983.  The next day, the headline in the Chicago Tribune screamed, “U.S. Marines return fire in Beirut.”  The first American combat deaths—2nd Lt. George D.  Losey and Staff Sgt. Alexander M. Ortega—would come the next day.

The fighting that the Marines engaged in and the casualties that they sustained caused a stir in Washington.  The New York Times reported on September 1, 1983, that “the Reagan Administration reiterated today that there was no reason to say the marines in Lebanon were the targets of Moslem militia units or that they were engaged in hostilities.  It was the third such statement in as many days.”

The Reagan administration was concerned about triggering the War Powers Act.  An admission that the Marines were engaged in combat would allow the Congress to require a troop withdrawal in 90 days; thus, Secretary of State George Schultz told the world that the Marines “are involved in a situation where there is violence, a generalized pattern of violence.”

The situation faced by the troops, however, was much different.  A Chicago Tribune report on the August 28 fighting described a 90-minute battle, which is hardly consistent with the notion of a “generalized pattern of violence.”  Eric Hammel’s history of the occupation, The Root, describes the fighting on August 29 occurring over several hours as the Marines took fire against their positions in the vicinity of the Beirut International Airport.

The Marines would continue to sustain casualties from the fighting, including two more deaths in the month of September, while the Reagan administration maintained that the Marines were not engaged in hostilities.  The commandant of the Marine Corps, Gen. P.X. Kelly, told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee—amid calls for Congress to invoke the War Powers Act—that “imminent hostilities, as it exists in my professional view, is not the case, so far as we the Marines are concerned.  We have no firm evidence, no firm indication, that any of the rockets, mortar, or artillery rounds that have impacted within our perimeter have been specifically designed against Marines.”

In early September, Robert McFarlane, the special envoy to the Middle East, requested that the 24th MAU’s commanding officer, Col. Tim Geraghty, order naval gunfire in support of the Lebanese army.  Geraghty eventually complied, but not before prophetically telling a McFarlane associate that “we’ll get slaughtered down here.”

The Marines would soon suffer an assault that no reasonable person could deny was aimed at them.  In the early morning hours of Sunday, October 23, 1983, a suicide bomber in a yellow Mercedes truck drove up to the headquarters building, through a barrier of concertina wire and past several sentries on duty, and detonated his explosives.  The blast destroyed the four-story structure, lifting it off of the ground and leaving a pile of rubble, body parts, and some survivors trapped in the debris.  The explosion killed 220 Marines, 18 sailors and 3 soldiers.

Before the attack, Colonel Geraghty had been concerned about the dangers his Marines faced, but he was constrained from taking necessary measures to protect them.  Hammel writes that Geraghty “made guarded entreaties through the chain of command in hope of being allowed to dig in deeper, but each request was rebuffed with a warning that Beirut International Airport (BIA) could not be fortified.”  Major Jordan, who arrived in Beirut just as things were heating up, described for me some of the errors that made the Marines vulnerable: “The first mistake was to force the Multinational Forces into static positions.  The second was to place too many troops on the ground as a ‘presence’ while denying the commander enough forces to be a viable deterrent.”

Jordan stated that the Shiite militiamen were (correctly, as it happens) convinced that America’s political leadership would lose its will if they could inflict large-scale (200 to 500) casualties on the Marines.  When the suicide bomber struck, the Shiites succeeded: The United States withdrew in February 1984.

In the aftermath of the bombing, President Reagan called on the country to continue the mission in Beirut and to “be more determined than ever that they cannot take over that vital and strategic area of the earth.”  But concerns about the ill-defined nature of the mission and analogies to Vietnam kept coming up.  Sen. Robert Byrd stated that “at present our people are just sitting ducks where they don’t even know who is attacking them.”

A special commission headed by a retired admiral criticized Colonel Geraghty and his chain of command.  A House subcommittee also laid some of the blame on Marine Commandant Kelley.  But it is hard to dispute the words of Cleta Wells, a Beirut widow, who told Newsweek, “It was not the Marine Corps that kept saying it was a peacekeeping mission . . . It was not Col. Geraghty who told them not to fire back . . . My husband was a Marine for 17 years and he was a good Marine . . . And no group of men in white shirts and ties are going to sit and blame the Marine Corps for his death.”

The occupation and small war that the Marines participated in 20 years ago in Beirut is largely forgotten today.  A total of 266 U.S. servicemen—most of them Marines—died there.  (Compare that to the 305 American lives lost in the first Gulf War.)  The details of the Beirut occupation may seem more relevant now that U.S. troops are attempting to keep Iraq from coming apart at the seams.  Pres-ident Reagan removed the Marines at minimal political cost and with no harm to our national security (though he may have emboldened later terrorists).  I fear that, 42 Americans having been killed since “major combat” ended, Iraqis who want Americans out of their country have decided that what worked in Beruit will work for them as well.