The seeds of today’s Middle East strife were planted in Beirut

As Israeli forces prepare for what officials characterize as a limited ground incursion into Lebanon, the world is bracing for the possibility that the conflict will expand into a larger regional war, a greater likelihood in the wake of Israel’s killing of Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah. 

The two sides have clashed for close to a year, dating back to Hamas’ terrorist attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. The skirmishes have led to hundreds of deaths along the border and the displacement of thousands more.

The violence reflects the damage that Iranian-backed militant groups, like Hamas and Hezbollah, have done in the Middle East for four decades. The roots of their capacity to inflict harm lie in the October 1983 suicide bombing of the U.S. Marine headquarters in Beirut, which was the largest non-nuclear blast the FBI ever investigated. 

Though the attack, which killed 241 soldiers, sailors, and Marines, horrified President Ronald Reagan, he never retaliated against the then-fledgling Hezbollah. 

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This decision to forego a military response, coupled with America’s withdrawal from Lebanon, sent a message that terrorism worked. Small and relatively inexpensive acts of extraordinary violence could effectively defeat major militaries and superpowers. This emboldened these groups, as well as their Iranian sponsors. The results have been catastrophic for the region and the cause of peace. 

By the early 1980s, Lebanon had been torn apart by years of civil war and sectarian violence that had resulted from a political tug-of-war between the nation’s Christians, Sunnis and Shiites. Adding to the bloodshed was the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), which had moved into Beirut after being driven out of Jordan in 1971. 

The PLO, upset over the loss of land during Israel’s 1967 war against its Arab neighbors, fought a guerrilla campaign against Israel in an effort to obtain a homeland for the Palestinian people. 

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In June 1982, Israel invaded, pummeling Beirut with artillery in an attempt to eradicate the PLO, which had been attacking it from Lebanese territory. The rain of Israeli fire devastated entire city blocks. "Even in Lebanon," wrote columnist Jack Anderson, "a land inured to catastrophe, the bombardment of West Beirut was a horror beyond endurance." 

Israel’s bloody war in Lebanon alarmed many, including Reagan, who worked to broker a deal to end the violence, remove the PLO, and send in U.S. Marines as peacekeepers to stabilize the region. 

But American troops were not the only foreign military force to arrive in Lebanon that year. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the Shiite religious leader who rose to power in Iran in 1979, saw an opportunity to capitalize on the chaos, to export and propagate his revolution. 

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With that goal in mind, Khomeini sent an army of 800 elite Revolutionary Guards into Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley, a lawless region near Syria. The Iranian soldiers fanned out through the impoverished Shiite communities in southern Lebanon, attending mosque, giving speeches, and recruiting disenfranchised young men to fight against American and Israeli forces. 

These efforts helped produce two homegrown Shiite terror organizations: Islamic Amal and the Islamic Jihad Organization. These two Iranian-backed groups would soon merge, however, and become known simply as Hezbollah or the Party of God, aided by Iranian money, training and weapons. 

Hezbollah’s first strike against the U.S. came on April 18, 1983, when a suicide car bomber crashed into the front of the American Embassy in Beirut. The blast collapsed the entire front of the building, killing 63 people including 17 Americans. 

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But that attack paled in comparison to the one that would follow 188 days later. 

At dawn on a Sunday morning in October 1983, a bomber in a Mercedes truck crashed through security and penetrated the lobby of the four-story Battalion Landing Team headquarters in Beirut, where some 350 American soldiers, sailors and Marines were asleep. 

The blast, which investigators later determined exceeded 12,000 pounds of TNT, collapsed the building into a pile of broken concrete and twisted rebar. "It was," as one survivor later recounted, "like every atom in the universe blew apart." 

The screams from buried victims prompted one of the greatest rescue efforts in modern memory, as troops attacked the rubble pile with shovels, Ka-Bar knives and their bare hands. 

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For those Marines trapped underground, it was hell. Among them was Chaplain Danny Wheeler, who spent five hours buried in a concrete crypt before rescuers finally found him. "The next thing I knew, I felt a hand on my hand," Wheeler recalled. "I held it." 

Wheeler was the last survivor rescued, and one of the lucky few. All told, the bombing killed 220 Marines, 18 sailors and three soldiers, wounding another 112.

The attack shocked Reagan, who initially resisted pressure from many in Congress and the public to pull American forces out of Lebanon. In a nationally televised speech on Oct. 27, the president instead recommitted America to stabilizing the area. 

"Brave young men have been taken away from us. Many others have been grievously wounded. Are we to tell them their sacrifice was wasted?" Reagan said. "We’re a nation with global responsibilities."

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But that resolve faded in early 1984, when the Lebanese national government and military ultimately collapsed. On Feb. 7, Reagan announced that he planned to send American troops back to their ships. 

In an effort to avoid drawing attention to America’s sudden reversal and withdrawal, he skipped the televised speech, instead releasing a written statement to reporters. On March 30, Reagan notified Congress that he planned to officially terminate America’s peacekeeping mission. 

This withdrawal created a vacuum that Hezbollah capitalized on to gain power and influence, eventually becoming the dominant political party in Lebanon. 

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Additionally, America’s abrupt departure coincided with the administration’s refusal to retaliate for the bombing of the U.S. Embassy or the Marine headquarters. In the wake of the October bombing, members of the National Security Council drew up a plan to target Iran’s terror camp in the Bekaa Valley. 

Reagan initially supported it, but Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger convinced the president to backtrack, arguing that retaliatory action demanded the type of conclusive proof of the identity of the attackers that is often elusive in terror attacks. "I’m not," Weinberger later said, "an eye for an eye man." 

Whatever the merits of Weinberger’s thinking, the results of Reagan’s decision were calamitous. For the small cost of a truck, some explosives and the single life of a terrorist, Iran successfully drove the U.S. from Lebanon and suffered no consequences.

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That was the critical lesson our enemies learned from this tragedy, a fact the CIA zeroed in on in a 1987 report. "Many Iranian leaders use this precedent as proof that terrorism can break U.S. resolve." 

The agency also concluded that Iranian leaders exploited the uncertainty that had troubled Weinberger. "Compared with overt military attacks, terrorism and sabotage also offer a degree of plausible deniability and present the United States with a less clear-cut justification for retaliation."

America’s failure to respond to the killing and wounding of hundreds of our diplomats and service members in Beirut served as a green light for Iran to continue and even escalate its proxy war of terrorism that menaces the region. 

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And it is a price America, Israel and our allies continue to pay four decades later. 

Col. Timothy Geraghty, who was the commander of the Marines in Lebanon in October 1983 and later worked for the CIA, understands that better than anyone. "Our timidity," he concluded, "whetted the jihadists’ appetite."

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James M. Scott is coauthor of "Targeted: Beirut: The 1983 Marine Barracks Bombing and the Untold Origin Story of the War On Terror," which is available now from Atria/Emily Bestler Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster.