The 1983 Beirut Barracks Bombing, and the Current U.S. Retreat from Syria | The New Yorker - 0 views
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Two hundred and forty-one marines, most of them asleep because reveille was still eight minutes away, were killed. It was the largest loss of U.S. military life in a single incident since Iwo Jima.
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The attack—the deadliest of three suicide bombings against the military and two U.S. Embassies in Beirut over sixteen months—marked a turning point for American engagement in the region. Four months later, the United States opted to withdraw abruptly from Beirut. The collapse of that mission resonates, hauntingly, as U.S. Special Forces soldiers pull out of Syria now.
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In each case, the Administration—Trump’s today, and Reagan’s in the early eighties—made expedient political decisions, irrespective of the long-term repercussions. “I hear some of the same tones out of the Trump Administration that I heard from the Reagan Administration,” the retired colonel Timothy J. Geraghty, the Marine commander in Beirut in 1983, told me. “You try to learn lessons, but here you are back in the same situation with the same players.”
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In both cases, the U.S. intervened with the initial prospect, perhaps naïvely, of restoring stability after a flashpoint—the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, in 1982, or the rise of ISIS, in Syria and Iraq, in 2014—and of then building on it in broader efforts toward peace. When the going got tough, however, the U.S. retreated from both countries. And chaos erupted.
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During the past week, Trump has scornfully dismissed the Middle East—a region with “a lot of sand”—for its endless wars. “They’ve been fighting for a thousand years. Let them fight their own wars,” he said in a joint press conference with the Italian President last week. “That’s the way it is.”
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The twin retreats have also included feelings of betrayal—both the betrayal by the Commander-in-Chief of his own military on the ground and the betrayal by those forces of the people they had been deployed to help.
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In both cases, the winners were the same—Russia, Iran, Syria, and extremist movements, Geraghty said.
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Both U.S. withdrawals also enhanced prospects for jihadism generally. After the U.S. pullout in Lebanon, Hezbollah gained ever wider ground, launching attacks from Israel to Kuwait. It has since become the most powerful militia in the region, with tentacles in Iraq, Yemen, and Syria, where its forces have fought alongside the Assad regime for the past eight years. With the U.S. withdrawal from Syria, the Kurds have lost their partners in the five-year war against ISIS. They alone don’t have the bandwidth to deal with the aftermath, with twenty thousand to thirty thousand ISIS fighters still waging an insurgency across Syria and Iraq.