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Political Considerations Trumped Sound Military Judgment

When a Marxist government in the tiny Caribbean country of Grenada in 1983 invited Cuba to help it build a ten-thousand-foot runway and started to build up its indigenous military forces, neighboring island states grew uneasy. When Grenadian insurgents of the Revolutionary Military Council kidnapped and murdered the prime minister of the country and riots broke out, the Reagan administration hurriedly put together an invasion plan to take control of the situation-ostensibly to remove American medical students and foreign nationals. The six-day operation (October 25 to 31) succeeded in ousting the Marxist regime and rescuing the medical students. The 22nd Marine Amphibious Unit performed very well indeed, despite having some difficulties communicating with U.S. Army forces on the islands.

The major military mission of the Reagan years, and the most controversial, was in the Middle East-in Lebanon. The Marines, of course, had been there before. In 1982, Lebanon was once again highly unstable. It was exactly what a U.S. government report called it: "a country beset with virtually every unresolved dispute affecting the peoples of the Middle East." Syria was exerting pressure; Muslims and Christians were descending into civil war, and neighboring Israel was threatened. In September 1982, Marines came ashore, joining the Italians and the French in a multinational peacekeeping force. The fighting had turned bitter between various Christian and Muslim factions in Beirut. The Israeli army had invaded Lebanon on the grounds that it was a haven for Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) terrorists in June 1982. This first deployment tested Marine discipline in the extreme, as they were assigned port security duties and the evacuation of several thousand PLO troops, including Yasser Arafat.

A second and far more significant deployment followed, as Lou Cannon, author of President Reagan, points out, "in behalf of changing and ill defined goals and in defiance of the recommendations of [Reagan's] military advisors. The result was catastrophe." The Marines were ostensibly there to keep the peace, but they came to be seen as active combatants in support of the weak Christian government by the Syrians and indigenous Muslim militias. After months of enduring sporadic sniper and artillery fire, and more than four thousand recorded threats of car bombings, on October 23, 1983, a lone, young Muslim suicide bomber drove a yellow Mercedes truck full of explosives through a public parking lot, past the sentry posts guarding a three-story concrete building at Beirut International Airport-the headquarters of the 1st Battalion, 8th Marines-and blew the building to smithereens. The explosion had the force of twelve hundred pounds of TNT, and was at the time the largest nonnuclear explosion in history. As the official report put it, "the force of the explosion ripped the building from its foundations. The building then imploded upon itself. Almost all the occupants were crushed or trapped inside the wreckage."" Two hundred and forty- one Marines died in the blast. Not since Iwo Jima had so many Leather- necks perished in a single day.

This second Lebanon deployment had begun more than a year earlier. On September 29, 1982, the 32nd Marine Amphibious Unit landed in response to two events: the assassination by Muslim extremists of president-elect Bashir Gemayel on September 14 and the massacre two days later of Palestinian refugees in the camps at Sabra and Shatila in West Beirut by Christians, which had almost surely been carried out with Israeli complicity. It fell to U.S. special ambassador Philip Habib to sort out the mess. The mission of the Marines, as defined by the State Department, did not call for the completion of concrete military objectives. Rather, the Marine unit, under the command of Colonel James Mead, was to provide "a presence in Beirut that would establish the stability necessary for the Lebanese government to regain control of the capital." As the official Marine history points out, "The American mission of presence was repeatedly discussed and analyzed by Col. Mead and his staff. The concept of 'presence,' as such, was not taught in any of the military schools Marines have attended."

Marine infantry hunkered down in defensive positions around Beirut International Airport. Their mission was hopelessly naive. They sought to bring order and stability amid entrenched factionalism born of centuries of religious and cultural resentment. It was a classic no-win situation. It was necessary for Colonel Mead and his successors with the 22nd and 24th Marine Amphibious Units-in essence the same small air-ground task force that today is called a Marine expeditionary unit-to balance unit security and safety against visibility in a highly charged and dangerous atmosphere. Mead had to play a dual role, as warrior and diplomat. The Marine colonel had his normal duties of managing Marine motorized and foot patrols, seeing to it that defensive positions were well maintained, developing small-scale civic-action programs to benefit the distressed locals, and training the fledgling Lebanese army, while at the same time participating in daily negotiations with French and Italian units as well as the Israeli army, which was none too keen about being reined in by the multinational peacekeepers. In short, the commander of the MAU was pulled in different directions. He was responsible for the safety of his Marines, yet he was not permitted to secure the high ground to the east of the airport. His entire unit remained vulnerable to mortar, sniper, and artillery attacks that wounded and killed Marines on a regular basis.

Most ominously, the Marines had to work with a dearth of accurate human intelligence, and their position near a vital Israeli supply line gave the impression to many hostile Muslim militiamen that they were in Beirut to buttress the Israeli presence. This was decidedly not their purpose, but perception mattered far more than reality.

In Beirut, political considerations trumped sound military judgment whenever the two converged. Colonel Tim Geraghty, commander of the 24th MAU and the doomed 1st Battalion, 8th Marines, was from the outset deeply troubled by the "permissive" quality of his unit's disposition. More than thirty commercial flights came in and out of the airport each day. He had no real control over his perimeter. Repeated requests to "button up" his defensive positions were systematically turned down either by higher elements of a Byzantine chain of command, or even by Reagan's foreign-policy team in the White House. It was utterly bizarre, as historian Eric Hammel makes clear in his riveting account of the Marines ill-fated deployment, The Root: "Frankly, everyone in authority-both military and political-appears to have known precisely what was going on, and everyone was kept abreast of what might happen. But political considerations-some domestic, some foreign-prevented the MAU commander from taking many prudent steps that might have saved American and Lebanese lives or, indeed, kept the lid on the Beirut International Airport and its immediate environs."

In March 1983, after a period of sporadic violence and Muslim militia shelling around the airport, and a lull in the diplomatic negotiations to bring peace, Colonel Mead reported up the chain of command that the terrorist threat to his unit "increases as the diplomatic situation stagnates."' New PLO units were known to be entering Beirut, and the Syrians, having recovered from earlier Israeli attacks, were being reinforced and rearmed with better weapons, thanks to the Soviets. Life was more and more dangerous for the MNF (multinational force). An Italian soldier was killed on March 15, and nine others were wounded in an ambush by the Syrians. The next day an assailant dropped a grenade out of an apartment window into a Marine foot patrol. In late March, amid rising tensions, the Marines finally began to patrol with loaded magazines. The rules of engagement hadn't up to that point permitted the grunts to load their rifles! Even then, rounds were not to be chambered for fear of an accidental discharge.

Patrolling the narrow streets of Beirut at this time tested the nerves of the saltiest Marines. Lebanese kids as young as eight teased the Americans and baited them, tossing soda cans and stones in their path. Some boys pointed toy guns at the Leathernecks, and yet Marine discipline was such that no shootings occurred.

The gravity of the situation was brought home to all Americans when a terrorist drove a van loaded with explosives past a sleeping Lebanese guard into the American embassy, killing sixty-three people, seventeen of whom were American. For weeks afterward, the Marines got little sleep as they helped in rescue and cleanup operations in addition to running a full load of patrols. Early May brought a new round of artillery duels between Christian and Muslim militias, and the odd shell would drop inside Marine lines.

On May 30, Colonel Tim Geraghty's 24th MAU relieved Mead's 22nd MAU, and things were relatively peaceful through the summer months, but in August came a pivotal development. The Israelis agreed to withdraw from the Chouf region near Beirut under a deal worked out in large measure by U.S. envoy Philip Habib. But the Israeli withdrawal was predicated on a simultaneous withdrawal from Muslim West Beirut by the PLO and Syrians. Neither of these parties had been part of the negotiations and neither had any intention of withdrawing. The Israeli army in the Chouf region had acted as a deterrent to violence between Muslims and Christians. With the Israeli Defense Force gone from this critical location, the Muslims stepped up attacks on the hapless Lebanese army, with a view to embarrassing the shaky Christian-led government forces. On August 28, after a number of days in which shells had fallen at odd intervals into the Marine lines, and Muslim militiamen had taunted Marines, pointing their fingers at the Leathernecks as if they were aiming a rifle and shouting, "Bang! bang!," a ninety-minute small-arms fight erupted. The next day, an artillery round killed two Marines and wounded twenty-eight, bringing the casualty figures to six killed and forty-two wounded since September 1982. By mid- September, the Marines found themselves in the midst of a true civil war in which they were more and more widely perceived as combatants and targets.

Democrats in Congress attempted to invoke the War Powers Act of 1973 in order to get Reagan to withdraw the Marines. Political cartoonists captured widespread sentiments. One cartoon by Vern Thompson in the Lawton (Virginia) Constitution depicted two Marines in a foxhole at night looking out wearily at exploding shells illuminating the sky. One of them says to the other, "Wonder how much longer we'll be [here] keepin the peace'?" Paul Conrad of the Los Angeles Times replaced the Eagle atop the Marines' famous emblem with a sitting duck. Syndicated cartoonist Steve Kelley drew two U.S. Marines in combat gear seen through the crosshairs of a sniper's rifle scope. The caption read, "How are U.S. Marines viewed in Lebanon?"

Meanwhile, the negotiations continued. An agreement seemed tantalizingly close in mid-October, but then came the horrific attack of October 23. In the months that followed, a congressional investigation would lay partial blame at the doorstep of many Marines, including Colonel Geraghty and Lieutenant Colonel Howard Gerlach. The committee found that inadequate security measures had been taken to protect the Marines from the full spectrum of threats. Geraghty was found to have made serious errors in judgment in failing to provide better protection for his troops. His immediate superior, Commodore Morgan France, U.S. Navy, was charged with the same errors. The investigation's findings, though, clearly took into account the Marine Corps' position that the entire security situation had been shaped and conditioned by political and diplomatic considerations. There were inherent security compromises in the Reagan administration's policy. High visibility inevitably meant greater-than-necessary security risks.

MacFarlane's insistence that the Marines call in naval gunfire against the wishes of Geraghty, had reinforced the perception that the MAU was not a peacekeeping unit but an active combatant operating in support of the pro-Christian government. The dead were shipped home. Finally, in February 1984, President Reagan pulled the Marines out of Beirut for the last time.

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