News of the surprise attack and the loss of life had a shattering effect when it reached the Pentagon.
“It was the worst day of my life. It was almost like Pearl Harbor,” recalled Larry Korb, then the US assistant defense secretary and now a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, a Washington thinktank.
The date was 23 October 1983 and a suicide bomber from the Lebanese Shia militia Hezbollah had attacked a US military barracks in Beirut, killing 241 service personnel, mostly marines. A near-simultaneous separate assault on a French military base in the city killed paratroopers.
It was a devastating blow to a force that had entered the war-stricken Lebanese capital the year before as peacekeepers, rather than belligerents, and were not even protected by armed guards at the gates of their compound.
US embassy officials in Beirut this week marked the episode’s 40th anniversary knowing that it had suddenly taken on a poignant contemporary resonance.
With the Middle East in turmoil once more following this month’s deadly attack on Israel by Hamas, the Biden administration has dispatched 2,000 marines to the region along with two aircraft carrier groups. Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (Thaad) and Patriot air defense systems have also been sent in what Pentagon officials have bluntly stated is a show of force meant to deter attacks on American interests and allies.
Implicit in the commitment is the understanding that – with an Israeli ground invasion of Gaza seemingly set to follow its ongoing bombardment – Middle East stability is a dead letter and the dangers of a wider conflict are real and present.
It is in contrast with the mood of US officials 40 years ago, who – complacent in the thought that the marines had protected status as part of an international peacekeeping force – foresaw no such perils, meaning the assault came out of the blue.
“We were, like, ‘Holy smoke, this is unbelievable,’” said Korb. “Those people were there so Israel [which had invaded Lebanon the previous year with the goal of expelling Palestinian fighters] could withdraw and were meant to bring regional stability. It wasn’t as if they went into an attack on Hezbollah or anything. Nobody had envisioned such a thing. There was no plan B.”
In the aftermath, hawks in then president Ronald Reagan’s administration pressed for a retaliatory attack on Iran, Hezbollah’s patron. But Reagan – belying his own hawkish credentials – demurred and chose a different course, sending the remaining marines back to their ships in what was termed a “strategic redeployment”.
For Korb, it was one of the Republican president’s “finest hours”. “He governed very responsibly. If we’d attacked Iran, who knows what the hell would have happened,” he said.
While Reagan was able to avoid the dreaded trap of mission creep – the gradual, incremental expansion of a limited intervention beyond its original limited goals – it may be a harder trick for President Joe Biden to pull off in what seems an even more complicated and volatile scenario than the marines entered in 1982.
Topping the administration’s list of fears is an outbreak of hostilities between Hezbollah and Israel on the Lebanese border, effectively opening up a two-front war that could bring in Iran.
Further complicating the American calculus is the presence of 2,500 US troops in Iraq and another 900 in eastern Syria, both on missions against the Islamic State, and which have already been subject to recent drone attacks. With militias loyal to Iran at large in both countries, these forces are liable to come under further attack if the US becomes active in a war against Hezbollah.
The stated US goal is deterrence against a wider war. Yet its force was called into action last week when the USS Carney, a guided missile destroyer, shot down three cruise missiles and several drones launched by Iranian-backed Houthi rebel forces in Yemen on the grounds that they were potentially heading for targets in Israel.
“This military deployment is a double-edged sword,” said Joe Cirincione, a Washington national security analyst and former staff member of the congressional armed services committee. “The administration needs it to deter others from joining the attacks on Israel. But if they are indeed used, they could become part of the very escalation of the conflict that the United States fears.”
The Biden administration, having pledged redoubled loyalty and military support to Israel following the Hamas attacks, now faces the danger of being caught in a “commitment trap”, according to Cirincione, a potential scenario he likens to the run-up to the first world war.
“If Israel continues the bombardment of Gaza and then launches a ground invasion that kills thousands of Palestinians, it’s difficult to see how Hezbollah, or forces operating in Syria, stay out of the conflict,” he added.
“If the US carries out its implied threat, you could have Israel bombing Lebanese and Palestinian populations around Israel’s borders. Strategically and politically, the US couldn’t stand by if Hezbollah launched a major attack on Israel, and that’s fraught with potentially disastrous outcomes.
“Under those circumstances, Iran may feel it has no choice but to enter into the conflict directly – and then you are stuck in the commitment trap. You commit to the defense of your ally hoping to deter a war. It fails to deter the war but now you are sucked into it in a way you never desired.”
Although Iran, despite its bellicose rhetoric, is unlikely to want a war with Israel, Cirincione concludes, “this is now a world war one scenario, where countries are pledging to other countries and belligerents drag them into a war they don’t seek”.
That alarming prospect has fueled a frantic round of diplomacy by Antony Blinken, the US secretary of state, who has urged Israel to call a “humanitarian pause” to its onslaught on Gaza. Behind the scenes, American military officials are reportedly urging Israel to refrain from a full-scale ground assault on the territory that could result in mounting Palestinian civilian casualties and inflame regional tensions.
To win over Israeli leaders thirsting for revenge and wanting to make good on their pledge to destroy Hamas once and for all, they are warning against the repetition of errors made by US forces in Iraq, when they made incursions into crowded population centers. The approach is a variation of the theme touched on by Biden in his visit to Israel last week when he warned against repeating what he described as an American mistake in being “consumed by rage” after the 9/11 attacks.
Whether American involvement deepens depends on the depth and length of Israel’s Gaza offensive, said Nader Hashemi, director of the Alwaleed Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding at Washington’s Georgetown University, with US military deployments unlikely to deter the country’s regional enemies.
“If the images being seen from Gaza continue to shock people’s conscience in the region, and if there’s an attempt at population transfer … then there’s certainly going to be attacks on American targets,” he said.
