Posted by: John Phoenix
How a 1983 bombing exposed the perils of empire…
42 years ago yesterday, on October 23, 1983, the early morning quiet at Beirut International Airport shattered when a Mercedes truck carrying 12,000 pounds of TNT crashed through flimsy barriers and detonated inside a U.S. Marine Corps barracks. The explosion killed 241 American service members, including 220 Marines, 18 sailors, and three soldiers, making it the deadliest single day for the Marine Corps since Iwo Jima in World War II.
Almost simultaneously, another suicide bomber struck French forces two miles away, leaving 58 paratroopers dead. The twin attacks temporarily altered American perceptions about Middle Eastern intervention, though the lessons learned that day have proven frustratingly impermanent.
The Islamic Jihad Organization, a precursor to the Shia Lebanese resistance organization Hezbollah, was alleged to have carried out the attack. But the story of how those young Marines came to be sleeping in a vulnerable barracks in Lebanon begins not with militant Shia organizations but with America’s entanglement in Lebanon’s brutal civil war and its unwavering support for Israeli military operations in the region.
Why American Forces Were in Lebanon
Understanding the Beirut bombing requires stepping back to June 1982, when Israel launched Operation Peace for Galilee and invaded Lebanon with approximately 60,000 troops. Defense Minister Ariel Sharon’s objectives were ambitious; destroying the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) infrastructure in Lebanon, driving out Syrian forces, installing a Christian-dominated government under President Bachir Gemayel, and securing a peace treaty. Israeli forces besieged Beirut for more than two months, subjecting the city to relentless bombardment that killed an estimated 19,000 people, including 5,500 civilians from West Beirut.
The Reagan administration tacitly approved Israel’s invasion and provided military support through arms and materiel, despite U.S. laws restricting American-supplied weapons to legitimate self-defense. Secretary of State Alexander Haig gave Israel what amounted to a green light for the invasion. CIA analyst Charles Cogan later revealed that Sharon had explained Israeli invasion plans to Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger in “great detail ” and Weinberger “just sat there and said nothing.”
The carnage in Beirut became so severe that on August 12, 1982, after eleven consecutive hours of Israeli bombing killed at least 300 people, President Reagan placed an angry phone call to Prime Minister Menachem Begin. Reagan’s exact words were surprisingly choice: “Menachem, this is a holocaust.” The president later wrote in his diary, “I was angry. I told him it had to stop or our entire future relationship was endangered. I used the word holocaust deliberately and said the symbol of war was becoming a picture of a seven-month-old baby with its arms blown off.” Begin ordered the bombing halted within 20 minutes.
Into this maelstrom came American Marines. The first contingent of 800 Marines arrived on August 21, 1982, as part of a multinational peacekeeping force to oversee the departure of approximately 14,000 PLO fighters, including Chairman Yasser Arafat. By September 10, the PLO evacuation was complete, and the Marines departed, their mission seemingly accomplished.
But just four days later, on September 14, 1982, Lebanon’s president ‘elect’ ? Bachir Gemayel was assassinated when a bomb exploded during a party meeting, killing him and 23 others. The following day, Israeli forces occupied West Beirut. Between September 16 and 18, Israeli-backed Lebanese Christian militias entered the Sabra neighborhood and the adjacent Shatila refugee camp and massacred between 1,300 and 3,500 Palestinian and Lebanese Shia Muslim civilians. The Israeli Defense Forces surrounded the camps and provided illumination flares throughout the night, allowing the massacre to continue for approximately 40 hours. The United Nations General Assembly condemned it as an act of genocide.
The Marines returned to Lebanon on September 29, 1982, as part of a reconstituted Multinational Force intended to help restore order and stability. What began as an ostensibly neutral peacekeeping mission rapidly became partisan. The United States aligned itself with the Christian-dominated Lebanese government of Amin Gemayel, Bachir’s brother, against Muslim and Druze factions. By October 1983, American forces were no longer perceived as neutral peacekeepers but as belligerents aligned with their rivals in Lebanon’s sectarian conflict. For the Shia militants, the conclusion was inescapable: only by striking U.S. military assets could they assert their grievances and compel a withdrawal—hence the assault on the Marine barracks.
Reagan’s Response and the Strike That Never Happened
On the fateful morning of October 23, Reagan delivered remarks at the White House that combined grief with defiant rhetoric. “I know there are no words that can express our sorrow and grief over the loss of those splendid young men and the injury to so many others,” Reagan said. “Likewise, there are no words to properly express our outrage and, I think, the outrage of all Americans at the despicable act. But I think we should all recognize that these deeds make so evident the bestial nature of those who would assume power if they could have their way and drive us out of that area that we must be more determined than ever that they cannot take over that vital and strategic area of the Earth.”
Reagan characterized the bombing as hideous and insane, describing the perpetrators’ bestial nature and their ferocious, cowardly, and merciless behavior. In his October 27 address to the nation, he stated, “We have strong circumstantial evidence that the attack on the Marines was directed by terrorists who used the same method to destroy our Embassy in Beirut. Those who directed this atrocity must be dealt justice, and they will be. The obvious purpose behind the sniping and, now, this attack was to weaken American will and force the withdrawal of U.S. and French forces from Lebanon.”
But Reagan’s tough talk was not matched by action. On November 14, 1983, Reagan approved a joint U.S.-French air raid against the Sheik Abdullah barracks in Baalbek, Lebanon, where several hundred Iranian Revolutionary Guards and Lebanese Shia members were based. What happened next exposed deep divisions within the administration. Secretary of Defense Weinberger refused to give the authorization order to the U.S. commander of the Sixth Fleet permitting American aircraft to leave their flight decks. The French, unaware the United States had abandoned them until their planes were airborne, proceeded with the airstrike alone.
National Security Advisor Robert McFarlane claimed that Weinberger directly violated a presidential order. When briefed on what happened, Reagan reportedly responded, “That’s terrible. We should have blown the daylights out of them. I just don’t understand.” Weinberger later claimed he had “no memory” of the president authorizing a joint attack. Documentary evidence and NSC staff testimony support the claim that Weinberger blocked the operation, believing it was motivated by “blind rage” and would not accomplish anything in preventing future terrorism.
The United States’ harrowing experience in Lebanon profoundly affected Reagan’s subsequent approach to the Middle East. He never again sent ground troops into Lebanon or any other part of the Middle East. Years later, in his 1990 autobiography “An American Life,” Reagan admitted the Lebanon deployment was a mistake. He wrote:
“Perhaps we didn’t appreciate fully enough the depth of the hatred and the complexity of the problems that made the Middle East such a jungle. Perhaps the idea of a suicide car bomber committing mass murder to gain instant entry to paradise was so foreign to our values and consciousness that it did not create in us the concern for the Marines’ safety that it should have. In the weeks immediately after the bombing, I believed the last thing that we should do was turn tail and leave. Yet the irrationality of Middle East politics forced us to rethink our policy there.
If there would be some rethinking of policy before our men die, we would be a lot better off. If that policy had changed towards more of a neutral position and neutrality, those 241 marines would be alive today.”
Reagan called Lebanon “the source of my greatest regret and greatest sorrow,” and acknowledged it was the worst managerial mistake of his presidency.
Despite the devastating losses in Beirut and Reagan’s own subsequent acknowledgment that the deployment was a mistake, the pattern of American military intervention continued unabated. In December 1989, the United States invaded Panama to remove Manuel Noriega, resulting in hundreds of Panamanian civilian deaths. In 1991, the United States launched the Gulf War to expel Iraqi forces from Kuwait, deploying more than 500,000 troops to the region. In 2001, following the September 11 attacks, the United States invaded Afghanistan, beginning a 20-year occupation that became America’s longest war. In 2003, the United States invaded Iraq based on false claims about weapons of mass destruction, triggering sectarian violence that killed hundreds of thousands and created the conditions for the rise of ISIS.
America’s Enduring Global Military Footprint
Four decades after those 241 service members died in Beirut, the United States maintains the most extensive overseas military presence in world history. As of June 2025, approximately 170,000 to 177,000 active-duty military personnel are stationed overseas. The United States operates an estimated 750 to 800 military base sites in approximately 80 foreign countries and colonies, with a military presence spanning 178 countries worldwide. This represents roughly 70 to 85% of the world’s foreign military bases. By comparison, all other countries combined operate far fewer overseas bases.
The geographic distribution reflects strategic priorities unchanged since the Cold War. Japan hosts approximately 52,793 U.S. troops, Germany hosts 34,547, and South Korea hosts 22,844. In the Middle East, between 40,000 and 50,000 troops are deployed across at least 19 sites, including major installations in Bahrain, Qatar, and other Gulf states per a report by Al Jazeera. Maintaining this global military presence requires substantial resources, with estimates suggesting $65 billion per year to build and maintain overseas bases and total spending on bases and personnel abroad exceeding $94 billion annually.
David Vine, author of “Base Nation,” notes that the 750 U.S. bases in some 80 countries and colonies around the world are more bases than any nation, empire, or people in world history. This network expanded dramatically during World War II and the Cold War. While troop levels declined after the Soviet Union’s 1991 dissolution, recent geopolitical tensions, particularly Russia’s military intervention in Ukraine and increasing competition with China, have reversed the trend, with U.S. troop levels abroad rising in recent years.
The danger of this sprawling presence is that it creates precisely the conditions that led to the Beirut bombing. American forces deployed abroad become symbols of U.S. policy and targets for those who oppose that policy. This is especially true in the Middle East, where U.S. support for Israel continues to drive animosity toward America. The U.S. military presence in the region is inextricably linked to protecting Israeli interests, much to the detriment of American interests and the safety of American personnel.
When Empire Met Reality: The 1983 Beirut Wake-Up Call
Walking back through the history of the Beirut barracks bombing on this 42nd anniversary is more than an exercise in remembrance. It is a necessary confrontation with lessons we claim to have learned but consistently ignore. Ronald Reagan, the conservative hero, ultimately concluded that deploying Marines to Lebanon was a mistake born of not fully appreciating the depth of hatred and complexity of Middle Eastern politics.
The bombing demonstrated the vulnerability of American forces to asymmetric warfare and suicide terrorism decades before September 11 made those concepts part of the foreign policy consciousness. It showed how quickly a supposedly neutral peacekeeping mission can become partisan, how easily American forces can be drawn into taking sides in civil conflicts they do not understand, and how slavishly following a pro-Israel foreign policy can be a dangerous proposition.
Yet here we are, 42 years later, with 170,000 troops deployed overseas, 800 bases spanning 80 countries, and an annual price tag approaching close to $100 billion to maintain this empire of bases. The foreign policy establishment continues to insist that this vast military footprint makes America safer, even as it creates resentment, provides targets for those who wish us harm, and drains resources that could address pressing needs at home.
Those 241 Marines, sailors, and soldiers who died in Beirut on October 23, 1983, were not there to defend American soil or protect clearly defined national interests. They were there because American foreign policy had become entangled in a complex regional conflict driven largely by the desire to help Israel achieve its strategic objectives in the region. Their deaths should have prompted a fundamental rethinking of America’s role in the world. Instead, the pattern continued through Panama, Iraq, Afghanistan, and beyond.
The virtue of foreign policy restraint that Reagan was compelled to embrace after the Beirut attacks remains as relevant today as it was 42 years ago.
Perhaps we don’t understand the irrationality of Middle Eastern politics, as Reagan concluded. Perhaps the solution is not more bases, more troops, and deeper entanglements, but the wisdom to recognize the limits of military power and the courage to pursue a foreign policy that prioritizes the safety and well-being of American service members over expansive strategic ambitions that serve the interests of international Jewry rather than our own.