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Twin Town High (vol. 8) |
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Donald Rumsfeld’s Lessons from Beirut
Wednesday 03 December @ 14:44:33 |
 by DAVID RUBENSTEIN
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld chose the 20th anniversary of the Beirut massacre to present the latest version of the administration’s argument for the war in Iraq. The Star Tribune ran it as an op-ed piece under the headline “Lessons About Terror We Learned in Beirut.”
Rumsfeld’s willingness to enlist this tragedy for a history lesson is testimony to the Bush administration’s faith in the power of historical amnesia. The Beirut attack, by strictly military standards, was one of the most shameful defeats in U.S. history. Nonetheless the Reagan administration, with the acquiescence of most of the media, managed to spin it to its advantage. They spun it so well, it’s still spinning today.
What happened in Beirut is that a man, later referred to in press accounts as a smiling Muslim, drove a truck loaded with explosives into the marine barracks at the city’s airport, killing 241 people. The lesson, according to Rumsfeld, is that terrorism can’t be countered by hunkering down. You can’t really defend against terrorism at all. You have to confront it, he says, quoting a phrase speech writers contrived for George Bush, “not on the fringes of its influence, but at the heart of its power.”
 For starters, the Beirut massacre was not a terrorist attack. The attacker was a combatant, and all the casualties were military personnel. Nor was the compound indefensible. It just wasn’t defended. Under the rules of engagement in effect at the time, the marines were under orders to keep their guns unloaded-or, as an investigating military commission later said more precisely, to keep them “on safe, with no rounds in the chamber.” The attacker had good reason to smile: There weren’t even any cement barricades around the building. He literally drove his truck into the lobby.
The rules of engagement and barriers or lack of them at the compound were military matters. But it’s easy to see them as a reflection of U.S. foreign policy at the time. The Reagan administration failed in the Middle East because it viewed the region as it did the rest of the world, through the prism of the on-going Cold War. Like previous U.S. administrations, it saw the hand of Soviet communism everywhere, from the Martin Luther King’s organization and the civil rights movement to the anti-Apartheid movement in South Africa, to the ACLU. But under Reagan the obsession reached a fever pitch.
Meanwhile mainstream Jews in the United States and their lobbying groups, going back at least to the 1967 Israel-Arab war, felt obliged to back with all their considerable clout a U.S. policy tilted in favor of the Israeli right, as if they were doing Israel a big favor. Anti-communism and reactionary Jewish nationalism: It was a marriage made in hell. No wonder U.S. policy makers never saw what was gathering in the aggrieved world of Islam.
After the Beirut disaster the “Teflon president” made the obligatory theatrical gesture, taking full responsibility. But the unloaded guns part of the story didn’t really penetrate the media. The administration spinmeisters saw to that. The United States immediately invaded the tiny island of Granada, on the grounds it was about to become a Communist threat. Needless to say the operation went well. In the blink of an eye, we went from criminal negligence to anti-communist photo-op.
You could say that Rumsfeld speaks truly, and that he and the other Bush retreads from the Reagan administration did learn a lesson in Beirut. Not “go after terrorists and root them out.” Rather, when you suffer a disastrous and highly public military setback, change the subject.
The Reagan administration failed in Beirut and redeemed itself by shooting a one-take movie in Granada. The Bush administration failed to comprehend the threat of militant Islam-a world-wide phenomenon that the United States nurtured in the name of anti-communism and whose base, if it can be said to have a base, is in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Saudi Arabia-and when that movement struck the inevitable blow, it responded by attacking possibly the most secularized country in the Muslim middle east.
The only problem was that Iraq was not Grenada and the movie did not go according to script. There were some good scenes-the Commander-in-Chief landing on the aircraft carrier, the statute toppling, the rescue of Jessica Lynch, etc. But the producers lost control of the plot.
As for Rumsfeld, he ought to know about what happened in Beirut. Shortly after the marine bombing, he was named as Reagan’s Special Presidential Envoy to the Middle East, in which capacity one of his tasks was to cultivate relations with the man later known as “the Butcher of Baghdad.” An old photograph of Rumsfeld shaking hands with Saddam appeared about a year ago in the Washington Post (December 30, 2002), as part of an article pointing out that the Reagan and Bush (senior) administrations “authorized the sale to Iraq of numerous items that had both military and civilian applications, including poisonous chemicals and deadly biological viruses, such as anthrax and bubonic plague.”
But the United States dabbling with the Baathists in Iraq was an anomaly. The bigger picture is we nurtured Islamic fundamentalism and virtually created al-Qaida, in the name of anti-communism. Israel helped the Islamists as well, particularly in Gaza, as a counterweight to Arafat and Palestinian nationalism.
Now we have a big problem, one being exploited by U.S. conservatives to push through the most reactionary political agenda since Herbert Hoover. While the Reagan administration stretched the definition of terrorism to include a successful military strike on a marine base, the Bush administration has gone much farther. Today’s “war on terrorism” is a conceptual blank check that the administration has proven it will shamelessly fill out according to its political needs.
The Republican National Committee tipped us off on what to expect next, in the 2004 presidential campaign, with the ad it recently ran in Iowa. “It would take one vial, one canister, one crate slipped into this country to bring a day of horror like none we have ever known,” the ad says. Then it praises George Bush for “attacking the terrorists.”
The Bush administration hasn’t attacked the terrorists. It has done the military equivalent of firing a pistol into a hornet’s nest. Nonetheless the Republican message will be hard to counter in 2004, in part because so much of the left is in denial about the immediate threat posed by militant Islam. Here’s one message that might have some traction: If it’s true that a vial of germs is a threat, then why should anyone conclude that making your country the most despised in the world is a defense?
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