The Beginning of the Beginning

Future historians of the present war, whether they write in English or in Arabic, will very likely begin their first chapters on October 23, 1984, when Hezbollah, the “Army of God”, destroyed a U.S. Marine base in Beirut, killing 241 Americans. President Reagan and his advisors, seeing only an isolated incident, decided that the best response was to take our men out of harm’s way. Without precognition, retreat seemed like a prudent course, a withdrawal from a secondary conflict at a time when the Cold War was far from won. I recall very few objections at the time. Not one person in a hundred, even among “experts” on the Middle East, had heard of Hezbollah or foresaw that its retrograde strain of Islam would ever be a palpable threat to anyone but its own self-benighted adherents.

But to the budding Islamofascists, Beirut was no sideshow; it was the main event, from which they took away two lessons: first, that relatively low-technology attacks can inflict immense destruction and, second, that the most powerful Western nation will flee from bloodshed. Taken together, those discoveries formed the basis of a strategy for driving back the long dominant infidels and restoring Islam to the position that it held 500 years ago. It must have seemed that the promise made by the Koran, that Allah would cast terror into the unbelievers’ hearts, had been dramatically confirmed.

By 2001, the evidence of Western weakness in the face of terror had accumulated to the point where even the most cautious mufsidun could not doubt it. Thence followed 9/11, which Osama bin-Laden evidently expected would smash Western morale at a single blow. He was wrong about that – for a while. Unfortunately, it takes a long time to unlearn “truths” that make one’s cause seem invincible. There was a chance that the American hammer blows in Afghanistan and Iraq would jump start the unlearning process, but then a large segment of our political class started acting the way it was supposed to: seeking and finding excuses for inaction, blaming the victims of terror, ignoring or even justifying acts of war against us, promoting paranoid fantasies about neoconservative conspiracies, and otherwise treating defense against self-avowed enemies as a greater threat than the enemies themselves.

The sane view of the War on Terror can be encapsulated in one question: Given what we know now, should the United States have withdrawn from Lebanon 24 years ago? If not, what is the justification for shrinking from confrontation with Islamofascism today?

Comments

[Jeff]

You should take a look at the Wounded Warriors Project. It raises awareness for severely wounded combat U.S. combat veterans in Iraq and Afghanistan. It really puts a face on the cost of this war. Here's a link:

http://www.woundedwarriorproject.org/aarwebshow

Jeff