I vividly recall the U.S. Marine barracks bombing of 1983. Dozens of college freshmen stared slack jawed at the carnage displayed on the sole television on our floor in the dormitory lounge. All of us were sickened by the sheer scale of the carnage, carried out with the equivalent of 12,000 pounds of TNT, which is thought to be the largest non-nuclear explosion ever detonated. 241 American servicemen died, along with 58 French soldiers.
I consider this moment to be the time when the reality of Islamic terrorism entered the collective American conscience. The Munich Olympics massacre in 1972, was obviously the first wake-up call, but no Americans were involved and the killings, while tragic for Israel, were small in scale.
The Secretary of Defense in 1983 was of course Caspar Weinberger. In a Frontline interview from late September of 2001, Weinberger lays out his thoughts on the confronting terrorism. It makes for very sobering reading nearly six years later.
"A buffer force is fine if you insert it between two warring factions that have agreed there should be a buffer force in there. If you have it between two warring factions that have not agreed, and there had not been an agreement, no matter how much people talked about it, for the forces to pull back so that the buffer force would be in very grave peril. It's worse because the buffer force is always lightly armed, has very vague rules of engagement, and it is not able, really, to defend itself. And so unless you have full agreement of all sides, you shouldn't do it."
"Very, very vividly. ... The loss of life [of] Marines was horrible to contemplate. The fact that I had been warning against this very thing didn't give me any slight satisfaction, I can assure of that. It was terrible to be proven right under such horrible circumstances. They should have been pulled out earlier. They were pulled out later. I suggested many times that, to answer these people that were worried about Marines cutting and running and all that nonsense, to put them on ships, their normal environment. These Marine amphibious brigades were on their own ship, to bring them back and pull them out of this dangerous bulls-eye and put them on our ships where they could be protected until they were really needed for something useful, rather than just sitting on an airport."
"Lessons learned is that if you're gong to do this, you're going to insert your troops, they have to have a mission. They have to have the arms and the equipment, and they have to have a goal that can be fulfilled. It led later to all the so-called Weinberger Doctrine, or whatever you want to call it, to the effect that: you have to have a mission; you have to know what you want to do; you have to use force as a last resort after everything else has failed; that when you use it, you have to use it at overwhelming strength, and win your objective and get out ... When you simply think the presence of American troops, no matter how wild the environment is or what's happening all around is going to have any effect, the only effect it's going to have is to risk the lives of the American troops. So I hope that was the lesson that was learned at Beirut. It was learned at terrible cost."
His prescience with respect to retaliating against those responsible for terrorist acts is stunning. With respect to the aftermath of the bombing of a Berlin disco in 1986:
"Well, the decision to do it had been made months ago. The question was when it was to be executed. And it was to be executed after we had identified with considerable certainty the targets and the country and the people who were responsible for the terrorist acts. People who had harbored them, people who had trained them, people who had paid for them, people who had supported them -- and that was all Libya. When that was established beyond any question, then we unleashed the attack. There was no debate as to whether or not we should attack. It was a question of when and how, and what should be the target, and there wasn't any debate about that. The target should be the training camps, the leadership, and the other targets associated with the Libyan support of terrorists."
That Saddam Hussein or any faction of the Iraqi military or intelligence apparatus was not responsible for 9/11 is beyond the debate of reasonable people. The theory that Saddam was planning to use weapons of mass destruction against us or our allies is also equally ludicrous. We of course looked the other way when he used them against his own people and Iran in the Iran-Iraq War when we were his most enthusiastic enabler.
I was no fan of Secretary Weinberger or President Reagan, but when you're right, you're right.
