Here Comes the Hard Part
The U.S. Embassy in Beirut was bombed 43 years ago this past week. Nothing like it had happened before. Plenty like it has happened since. Still, there is room for humility in how we counter terrorism
On April 18, 1983, a man drove a pickup truck into the U.S. Embassy in Beirut, Lebanon. In the bed of the truck was about 2,000 pounds of explosives.
If the building itself resembled a pair of outstretched arms, the resultant bomb struck the building’s chest, ravaging its left-side. The bla
st killed 63 people and wounded over a hundred others.
Among the dead was Robert Ames, the CIA’s most senior Middle East expert, and a number of his colleagues. The bombing marked the deadliest day in CIA history - and would hold that terrible record for 26 more years.
As Kai Bird notes in his book, The Good Spy: The Life and Death of Robert Ames, the attack marked “the first time a truck bomb was used against a high-profile target like an American embassy.”
It wouldn’t be the last.
Just six months later, a larger - and more widely known - attack targeted the U.S. Marine barracks at Beirut’s airport on October 22. This bombing killed 241 Marines. Once again, a suicide bomber drove a truck right into a building housing Americans and detonated thousands of pounds of explosives. When the driver sped past the guard, he did so with a smile on his face.
He did so with a smile on his face.
Think of that for just a minute. A man about to willingly blow himself up - and, with himself, hundreds of others - and doing so with a smile on his face. No doubt he thought his action would accelerate his passage from this world to the next, a world in which his handlers undoubtedly told him that he would experience unbound pleasure.
When we, in the States, think about these attacks, we often use words to describe the attackers as “barbaric,” “savage,” or even “animal.” Yet such language removes the human element. In so doing, we blind ourselves to the very human motivations that lead certain individuals to do what they did. It removes the human context in which these events took place, in which these motivations are shaped in the first place.
Of course, this doesn’t make such attacks okay. This does not justify them. Trying to understand does not mean trying to justify.
It’s just that an attack like that on the Marine barracks begs the question why U.S. troops were in Lebanon in the fall of 1983 in the first place. The attack on the U.S. Embassy six months prior begs the question why those Lebanese Shia militants - militants who would coagulate into Hezbollah - responsible for the attack sought to target the United States in the first place.
These attacks took place in the context of the 15-year Lebanese civil war, specifically in “the bloodiest year” of that civil war. They took place amidst an alphabet soup of armed factions vying for control in Lebanon, backed by a number of other states vying for influence. They took place amidst massive displacement and rampant disillusionment. They took place amidst an Israeli presence in southern Lebanon. They took place amidst an ongoing war over 500 miles away between Iran and Iraq, a war which had ramifications for Lebanon, for Syria, for Israel, for the United States, for Kuwait, and so many others.
These conditions are just a sampling of the environment in which these bombings were carried out in 1983 Beirut.
None of these factors - alone or taken together - justify the bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Beirut. Just as no sole or combination of factors justified the subsequent bombing of the Marine barracks, of a near-simultaneous bombing of a French military base on the other side of the Lebanese capital, of 9/11, or of any terrorist attack anywhere.
There is no “but” to this assertion.
It is for this reason that I so respect Jason Burke for sharing the following in the preface to his excellent book, The Revolutionists: The Story of the Extremists Who Hijacked the 1970s:
I use ‘terrorism’ to describe a tactic - the use of violence or the threat of violence against civilians to advance a political, religious, economic or similar agenda - and ‘terrorist’ as an adjective. I do not use ‘terrorist’ as a noun, not because I sympathise with anyone who uses terrorism or seek to belittle the suffering of their victims, but because I do not think reducing complex individuals to single-word descriptors is helpful. Some will say that seeking to understand ‘terrorists’ is wrong. I disagree. No one should base important decisions, moral or strategic, on ignorance. Know your enemy.
We can’t undo events that have been done. We can, however, in our own way, mitigate the potential for their recurrence by our efforts to understand what led to them in the first place.
If you’re anything like me, you may feel powerless to do so. How can I, an individual, possibly prevent a terrorist attack? After all, I’m not affecting policy on a daily basis, not in charge of rooting out terrorists around the world.
I am, however, in charge of how I show up in and for the world - in my family, in my town, in the interactions I have with people. I am responsible for the books I read. I am accountable to my community.
If I walk around with hate in my heart and preconceived notions filling my brain, that doesn’t leave much room for humility, which is required to learn something new about someone different from myself. Humility is the antidote to arrogance, curiosity the counterpoint to ignorance.
I’ll leave you with this piece from Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov (on page 375 of the translation by Michael R. Katz). I hope this teaching of Father Zosima brings you as much comfort as it does to me:
One stands puzzled by some thoughts, especially seeing men’s sins, and one asks: “Take them by force or use humble love?” Always decide: “Use humble love.” If you decide that once and for all, you will be able to win the whole world. Loving humility is a terrible force, the strongest of all, unlike anything else. Every day and every hour, every minute, walk about and watch yourself, so that your image is grand. For instance, you walked past a little child, you passed him feeling spiteful, with a nasty word, or an angry heart; perhaps you didn’t even notice that child, but he saw you, and your unattractive and disrespectful image may have remained in his defenseless little heart. You didn’t know this, but perhaps you may have sown a bad seed in him, and it may grow, and it was all because you were not careful before the child, because you did not nourish within you an active and benevolent heart. Brothers, love is a teacher, but one must know how to acquire it, because it is difficult to do; it costs a great deal and is acquired by long, hard work. We must love not only for a moment, but forever. Everyone can occasionally experience love, even the wicked.
Thank you for reading my latest installment of “25 Weeks to 25 Years,” a 25 week series leading up to the 25th anniversary of 9/11 later this year.
Prior installments include:
April 17: The Boston Marathon and the BPL
April 10: A Pilgrimage to Ground Zero
April 3: The Other Twin Towers
March 27: 47 Years On From the Egypt-Israel Peace Treaty
March 20: The Iraq War - 23 Years Later
March 17: 25 Weeks to 25 Years