At dawn 25 years ago today, a lumbering, yellow Mercedes truck smashed into US Marine headquarters near Beirut airport, detonating a gargantuan bomb that killed 241 peace-keepers. It was the Marines' biggest single-battle death toll since Iwo Jima.
A short while later, a car-bomb killed 74 French peace-keepers not far away.
Imagine this anniversary being celebrated by Iran's Supreme "spiritual" leader, Ayatollah Ali Khameni, in the company of Revolutionary Guard commandant Mohammad Ali Jafari and intelligence chief Gholam-Hussein Mohseni-Ejei. Khameni might make a toast - non-alcoholic - to the memory of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini; Jafari might boast that their predecessors pulled off the killings in secrecy. Mohseni-Ejei, in all his vainglory, might remark that the entire operation was accomplished when the regime was but six years old.
Today will surely also not go unmarked by Hizbullah, founded by Iran in summer 1982 to propagate Khomeini's ideas among Lebanon's Arab Shi'ites.
Sheikh Mohammad Hussein Fadlallah, now in his 70s, is said to have blessed the truck and car bombers. Will he get an anniversary call from Hassan Nasrallah? Will they recall Abbas Musawi, Nasrallah's immediate predecessor as Hizbullah chief, who supervised the attacks? He was liquidated by the IDF in 1992.
There would also have to be warm thoughts for Imad Mughniyeh, once Fadlallah's bodyguard, later Nasrallah's operations chief. Mughniyeh, who was secretly indicted for the Marine bombing and also plotted the 1996 Khobar Towers atrocity in Saudi Arabia, was himself mysteriously removed from the scene in a February 2008 Damascus car-bombing.
One need not be predisposed to gloominess to raise the concern of Iran-Hizbullah selecting today as an auspicious occasion to attack an Israeli or Jewish target.
Extra vigilance is called for.
THE MARINES were sent to Lebanon as part of a multinational peace-keeping force after the IDF expelled the PLO leadership from Lebanon on August 30, 1982, and Christian militias massacred scores of Palestinians at the Sabra and Shatilla refugee camps on September 17.
President Ronald Reagan ordered the Marines not to engage in combat; they were to be a stabilizing influence.
Iran and Hizbullah, however, wanted to promote anarchy, not stability. They carried out scores of attacks on IDF forces in 1982 - two of them particularly horrendous, killing 36 in Sidon on November 4, and 75 in Tyre, November 11.
Local Shi'ites first welcomed Israel's bid to rid Lebanon of the PLO. Then, egged on by Iran, they violently opposed the newly-created IDF security zone in the South.
Next it was America's turn. On April 18, 1983, Iran ordered Hizbullah to car-bomb the US embassy in Beirut: 61 lives were lost. "Shadowy" Muslim extremists were blamed. Reagan declared that America would not be deterred.
Then came the simultaneous attacks this day 25 years ago. Reagan again declared that the US would not cut and run. Four months later, he pulled US forces out.
And still, Iran and Hizbullah, working as the "Islamic Jihad" or the "Revolutionary Justice Organization," kept up the pressure. The US embassy annex in Beirut was bombed on September 9, 1984. Next, TWA Flight 847 was hijacked; Western clergymen, academics and journalists were kidnaped. The world waited to see what America would do.
On October 5, 1984, The New York Times reported that the administration had decided: "A retaliatory strike against the Party of God or Iran would only produce an escalation in terrorist attacks against the United States."
IN THE intervening quarter-century, America, and especially Europe, have sought to avoid an unpleasant, even painful confrontation with Iran. And anyway, there was business to be done. There was, moreover, the delusion that the mullahs, once "engaged," could be cajoled into being good world citizens.
Consequently, both Iran and Hizbullah have grown ever more assertive. One works to build nuclear weapons; the other dominates Lebanon's polity.
Offstage, meanwhile, a little-known Sunni fanatic, Osama bin Laden, watched America's feeble response to Iranian and Hizbullah aggression. In a telling interview three years before September 11, 2001, he observed that, clearly, America had lost the will to fight.
It has since costs thousands of American lives to disabuse him of this notion. Would it not have been better to do so from the start?
