Barracks bombing still haunts America

20 years have passed since 241 soldiers killed in Lebanon

? It was America’s first encounter with the suicide bomb — initially its embassy, then its Marine barracks, blasted to shreds by a truckload of explosives that killed 241 servicemen and launched a new era in the Middle East. The reverberations are still being felt.

Today the 19-year-old soldier on duty at Beirut airport’s Parking C lot shrugs indifferently when told that this was where the doomed barracks stood. He wasn’t even born when the bomb went off on Oct. 23, 1983. For many like him, it’s a distant memory, one of scores of atrocities committed during Lebanon’s 1975-1990 civil war.

But for Washington it was a watershed. It ultimately drove the U.S. military out of Lebanon. A decade later American forces pulled out of Somalia, their mission again wrecked by violence. Today, as U.S. casualties mount in Iraq, some are asking whether the United States will walk away again.

No way, insists President Bush. “The terrorists have cited the examples of Beirut and Somalia, claiming that if you inflict harm on Americans we will run from a challenge,” he said recently. “In this they are mistaken.”

No responsibility claimed

Nobody professes to know for sure just who was behind the bombings of 1983.

They were claimed by Islamic Jihad, a shadowy group believed made up of Shiites loyal to Iran’s late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. It was generally thought to be the military arm of Hezbollah. Hezbollah leaders deny it.

Imad Mughniyeh, Hezbollah’s security chief at the time, is on an FBI wanted list with a $25 million bounty on his head, but for a different attack: the June 1985 hijacking of a TWA airliner at a Beirut airport in which a U.S. Navy diver was killed and the passengers were held for 17 days.

American intelligence officials describe Mughniyeh as Hezbollah’s operations chief. One official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said counterterrorism authorities don’t have a fix on his location but acknowledged reports he had been sighted in Lebanon, Iran and Syria.

Rescue workers sift through the rubble of the U.S. Marine base in Beirut in this Oct. 23, 1983, file photo. The massive bomb blast 20 years ago today destroyed the base and killed 241 U.S. servicemen.

U.S. authorities believe he remains active in plotting terrorist attacks but provided little detail on his recent activities.

Hezbollah won’t talk about Mughniyeh, and a Lebanese official said no one has managed to provide any proof he was involved in the barracks bombing.

In May of this year, a federal judge in Washington blamed Iran for the 1983 barracks bombing and said Tehran would have to pay damages to survivors and relatives. The judge, ruling in a lawsuit filed by 153 families, said Hezbollah carried out the attack with the approval and funding of senior Iranian officials.

Peacekeeping mission

The Marines came as peacekeepers to a country reeling from an Israeli invasion and occupation, and the massacre at the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Chatilla perpetrated by Israel’s Christian Lebanese allies.

But the Americans got drawn into the conflict on the side of the Christian-led government, while Iran, then in full anti-American cry, supported Hezbollah, the Shiite guerrilla group fighting the Israelis.

The Americans had already suffered a sharp terrorist blow in April 1983 when a Shiite Muslim suicide bomber rammed an explosives-packed van into the seaside U.S. Embassy in Beirut, killing 63 people, including 17 Americans.

The U.S. soldiers who came six months later with a multinational force weren’t the only victims of the bombing offensive. On the day the Marines were attacked, a separate and simultaneous blast killed 58 French paratroopers.

The multinational force came to oversee the removal of Israeli, Syrian and Palestinian forces from Beirut. But in Lebanon, as in Iraq today, the Americans encountered populations with deep ethnic or religious differences and neighboring governments intent on influencing events.

Many Lebanese distrusted U.S. motives, believing the Reagan administration had given Israel an OK to invade Lebanon in June 1982 and occupy Beirut.

“There was a feeling that the Americans came to wipe out the traces of Israel’s crimes in Lebanon rather than for peaceful purposes,” said Talal Salman, publisher of the leftist As-Safir daily.

“That’s why the U.S. forces were not treated as friendly forces,” Salman added. “They didn’t come as Red Cross workers or Protestant preachers. They were regarded as Israel’s partners.”