1983 Beirut barracks bombing - 30 Years Ago Today

[mahatmakanejeeves]

1983 Beirut barracks bombing
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1983_Beirut_barracks_bombing

[malaise]

1. Reagan's big flop

Bet they don't mention it

[SharonAnn]

15. That's when he did the "Cut and Run" thing.

[JustAnotherGen]

2. The day

My former Green Beret father became an arch pacifist.

[fitman]

3. The weekend my brother got married..

Remember watching it at the hotel..just like yesterday.

[LeftinOH]

4. And we retaliated two days later...by invading Grenada. n/t

[deutsey]

5. Yep...Grenada's mission was accomplished quite well

The mission of distracting the public's attention away from the Beruit bombing.

Smashing success, it was.

[leveymg]

8. Hollywood and Clint Eastwood even made an entertaining little movie about it.

[Octafish]

6. Criminal Derelection of Duty

From the Commander-in-Chief down.

The French embassy, followed by the United States embassy, were previously attacked by suicide truck bombers in Beirut.

Yet, the Marines and other service men and women were left virtually unprotected at the airport.

Reagan and the rest should have been impeached, yet the question was not raised by Corporate McPravda.

[leveymg]

7. Interesting comparison of the Beirut Bombing with how the GOP responded to Benghazi, here:

http://www.phillyburbs.com/entertainment/in-debacle-reagan-escaped-the-blame-game/article_0174fce9-b60c-5b6b-8934-915bd3c2bcf7.html

Realistically, (the Marines) had become “sitting ducks” from the moment they entered Beirut. And as a result of their absurd orders (to keep their weapons unloaded), when the explosives-laden truck sped toward their doomed barracks, the two unarmed guards had no way of stopping it.

According to Col. Timothy J. Geraghty, the commander of the Marines in Beirut: “It didn’t take a military expert to realize that our troops had been placed in an indefensible situation. Anyone following the situation in Lebanon in ordinary news reports could realize a tragedy was in the making.

“There was a growing feeling of frustration inside the Muslim and Druse community in Lebanon due to the United States’ direct backing of Israel in its 1982 invasion of Lebanon and other pro-Israel factions within Lebanon. These factions had been responsible for multiple attacks committed against the Muslim and Druse Lebanese population.”

While the blast led to the withdrawal of the international peacekeeping force from Lebanon, in retrospect, neither the invasion nor the Marine intervention should ever have occurred.

Israeli Defense Minister Ariel Sharon insisted the invasion was justified in retaliation for PLO attacks on Israelis. Yet there had only been one Israeli death from such attacks in the previous 12 months.

From the outset, the American embassy in Beirut had sent numerous cables warning Washington that the invasion would provoke terrorism and undermine America’s standing in the Mideast. But there was no response.

On April 18, 1983, a delivery van exploded at the front door of the U.S. embassy in Beirut, killing 46 people, including 16 Americans, and wounding more than 100 others.

Against the vigorous opposition of Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger, Reagan then ordered Marine commanders to call in air strikes and other attacks against the Muslims and initiated a two-week-long bombardment by American warships, including the battleship USS New Jersey.

In his autobiography, then Maj. Gen. Colin Powell observed: “Since (the Muslims) could not reach the battleship, they found a more vulnerable target — the exposed Marines at the airport.”

The Reagan administration immediately attempted to deflect blame for the attack with a deluge of false statements and misrepresentations. In a televised speech four days after the bombing, the president insisted the attack was unstoppable, erroneously declaring that the truck crashed through a series of barriers, including a chain-link fence and barbed-wire entanglements, and argued that the U.S. mission was succeeding.

Despite the fact that Reagan had dispatched the Marines into an impossible situation and then had issued orders that led to their inability to defend themselves, he suffered relatively little criticism from the press or partisan opponents, and after months of vigorous campaigning was overwhelmingly re-elected the following year.

Contrast this with the controversy over the recent attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya, where on Sept. 11, U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans were assassinated.

Within hours of that attack, and with no evidence as to how or why it had occurred or how it could have been prevented, presidential candidate Mitt Romney broke from what has long been traditional political protocol in situations of this type and attacked President Barack Obama, accusing him of sympathizing with anti-American interests in the Muslim world.

[4Q2u2]

9. They always skip this narrative of Ronnie the War hero.

The position of the Embassy was also forced on the Marines. They did not want this location for numerous defense reasons. It was located in the low ground that was shelled daily. It was located too closely to a populated area. Negating a defensive set back. Their position was located direcly in between warring factions. The rules of engagement were too restrictive. All this was dictated to them by Wahington. It was also the same people and dictates in Washington that cost thousands of lives in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Cheney/Wolfowitz/Rumsfeld just to name a few.

Our withdrawal without response was also directly quoted by Osama bin Laden that we were "Paper Tigers" and emboldened terrorist enemies throught the world.

One of the worst out comes was that a flying typewriter was 6 inches to the right. That is how close it came to Rumseld head in January of 1984 after a shell hit the building next door to him and blew the wall out.

[1-Old-Man]

10. Here we have the first "Bengazi", the one Republicans prefer to forget.

[sarisataka]

11. I had a platoon sergeant

who was a corporal in Beirut. He would have been in the barracks but went to play cards that night and stayed in a bunker on the perimeter instead. 80% of his platoon was killed in the bombing.

The whole mission was a Charlie Fox from the word go...

[hack89]

12. I was there

left quite an impression on this (at the time) 23 year old Navy Officer

[leveymg]

13. How did you survive the blast?

Or, were you billeted elsewhere?

[hack89]

14. I was not in the barracks - I was involved in the rescue efforts.

I was serving on one of the ships offshore. We saw the smoke from the blast - we put together a rescue and recovery party and were ashore within 90 minutes.

[CDR516]

16. I was aboard the USS Independence at the time of the Attack on the Marine barracks October 23rd 1983

I was aboard the USS Independence at the time of the attack/bombing of the Marine barracks October 23rd 1983. We were 2 days from arriving off the coast of Grenada, heading south from Norfolk Virginia. I was part of Attack Squadron 87 (A-7E Corsair II's).

We had left port approx. a week earlier, and our destination was the Mediterranean Sea....what was know as bagel station. Most of the smarter sailors who understand basic navigation noticed after a few days the ship was heading more south than east. About 4-5 days into our journey south, the Captain Announce and confirmed we were heading south, and that orders from President Regan Had changed, and that we were to prepare the aircraft to support our troops invading Grenada. He told us the weather was expected to be very rough, and that we were using a tropical storm for cover, and would arrive the next morning.

The purpose was to secure an airfield, that was being used to fly guns into South America ( see Iran–Contra affair for more). During the strong storm, one of our hanger bay doors was damaged so bad that we could not get it opened, and had to maneuver the planes around the flight deck and hanger bay, which got frustrating at times.

We heard through the scuttle-butt network on the ship, about the Barracks Bombing the day we began bombing the Grenada Air field. For the most part, Grenada attack was more like bombing practice, then anything else. For the most part, it seemed routine until those planes came back with only wires hanging off the bomb racks. Then realization hit...we are at war!!! I believe the entire Island had one anti-aircraft gun, and it was never used. In less then a week, we were finish with Grenada, and for the next 2 weeks, we were steaming in an easterly direction. Some of the older sailors, who had experienced Vietnam, were drawing cartoons on some of the bombs, as they were being loaded.

A few days before we reached "The Rock of Gibraltar", to enter the Mediterranean Sea, we took on more supplies. Because we had diverted to Grenada, we had missed our underway replenishment, and had used much of what we had in bombs during the week in Grenada, this was necessary before arriving in the Mediterranean Sea. Once our Carrier (CV-62) had passed through Gibraltar, we were given our mission, "Prepare for Alpha Strike".

For the next 24 hours, any aircraft capable of flying, was configured with multiple bomb racks,. Every aircraft was loaded with maximum bomb loads, and light on the fuel. The idea was to get them off the flight deck with as much ordinance capable, without going over gross, and then refuel them in the air.

We launched before the sun was up, and recovering the aircraft got interesting. Some didn't make it back to our ship. Our aircraft made it back, some with bullet holes, giving you an instant weird feeling of fright. There was one aircraft that a Surface to Air Missile took off the tail cone. The poor pilot had to be the last aircraft we recovered on the flight deck, because we didn't know the integrity of the tail hook structure. We set up the arresting gear barrier, and watch the pilot catch a hook, and plow into a barrier stopping him, as if it was a textbook carrier landing.

The retaliation lasted one day. Not much of one at that. VP George Bush arrived at the barracks 3 days after the blast. This was VP George Bush's first political hand in middle east dealings, and surely had a lot to do with United States policy with Iran, Iraq, and Syria.