In 2003, U.S. District Judge Royce C. Lamberth ruled that Iran, its president, its Ministry of Information Security, and Hezbollah—Iran’s proxy in Lebanon—were responsible for the bombing. “These actions arise from the most deadly state-sponsored terrorist attack made against American citizens prior to September 11, 2001,” Lamberth wrote in a memorandum opinion. The ruling stems back to the well-intended but ill-fated 1982–4 U.S. involvement in the Beirut peacekeeping mission where a United Nations-sanctioned multi-national peacekeeping force was formed at the request of the Lebanese government to help quell fighting in Lebanon’s civil war. The 1983 incident was not just an attack against America, but the entire peacekeeping effort in Beirut. In addition to American casualties, French peacekeepers were bombed at the same time, killing 58 paratroopers.
As a result of the attacks Western governments buckled, pulling all forces out within four months of the bombings. Terrorist groups and their supporting governments saw that this tactic worked. In his 2009 book Peacekeepers at War: Beirut 1983—The Marine Commander Tells His Story, Marine Colonel Timothy J. Geraghty, the commanding officer of troops ashore at the time of the bombing, wrote “Osama bin Laden drew inspiration from Hezbollah’s dual suicide attacks.”
A question burns in the hearts and minds of people who know details of the 1983 bombing: If America and its allies had stood their ground in Beirut after the bombing, could the carnage on 9/11 have been avoided? “Somehow, we had lost our sense of justice by refusing to retaliate against Islamic extremists who committed acts of war and murdered U.S. citizens,” Geraghty wrote. “It is no mystery that America’s reluctance emboldened them to bring their bloodshed to the American shores.” As the world watches the pressure cooker that is the Middle East, still embroiled in civil wars and factional rivalry, it begs another question: Was the sacrifice in Beirut worth the cost?
The attack was a seminal event that defined the baseline for the ongoing war on terrorism, and those loved ones left behind have vowed to never let the world forget the sacrifice these men made in the name of peace. Since 1984, the City of Jacksonville, North Carolina, with support from Marine Corps Base Camp Lejeune, has sponsored a remembrance event at the Beirut Memorial, which is engraved with names of the 270 service men who died in action during this mission. On 23 October of this year, family members, friends, and fellow service members will read aloud each name on the wall; for that brief moment those departed men will live again. The men killed in action in Beirut are considered by some to be the first of the many casualties in the war on terrorism. Geraghty sums it up: “We are engaged in a generational battle today whose beginning we are closer to than its end.”