U.S. Marines in Beirut in 1982
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1982 was not the first year that the Marines were deployed to Lebanon, nor was Ronald Reagan the first American president to feel the need to send them there. President Eisenhower also deployed the Marines to Lebanon in 1958, with equally unclear motives and troubling results. The intent in the following pages is to look at the reintroduction of the Marines to Beirut under the conditions of the time and try to understand what went wrong and what might have better served U.S. interests. That re-deployment, which began in 1982, was marked by the bombing of the Marine barracks in October of 1983 which represented the largest single day's loss of American servicemen since World War II. After that time, much of the U.S. effort was reduced to damage control until the Marines were re-deployed to the Sixth Fleet on February 21, 1984. It was not a successful project for the U.S.Modern Lebanon does not have a long history as a nation state, with its beginning in 1920. However, among Middle Eastern states it was, for a time, the most successful in terms of political and economic stability. It was a popular tourist destination, as well as a country that was the center for much trade and economic exchange. That it was so successful depended upon a series of compromises that gradually broke down under the pressure of the constant tension and war throughout the Middle East. The result was a civil war that began in 1975 and ext
. . .
he sovereignty of the Lebanese government.
Condition of American Armed Forces
The problem in Beirut does not seem to have been the condition of American armed forces, but the hamstringing of those forces by policy directives that were unclear and vague. The Marines were not sent in on a fundamentally military mission, but on a political mission to support American interests symbolically, rather than with the use of force.
Essentially, the Marines in Beirut had been charged by the Reagan administration to stand up for American interests simply by maintaining a presence in the country. They were not to shoot first, and they were actually disarmed in certain instances. They were involved in a vague peace keeping mission that indicated lack of clarity on the part of the Reagan administration regarding the actual situation in Lebanon and the role that the U.S. should play there (Parker, 1994).
Nonetheless, as Korbani (1991) noted, there were some real problems within the armed forces themselves. While the services were generally well prepared to fight the kind of battle that World War II represented, they were still not accustomed to the kinds of conflicts that became prevalent after World War II. Those conflicts, like the on
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Approximate Word count = 3694
Approximate Pages = 15 (250 words per page)
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