"The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones." -- William Shakespeare, Mark Anthony's funeral oration in "Julius Caesar"
There were two parts to what Reagan did:
-- He reversed Jimmy Carter's executive order and formed an alliance with Saddam Hussein as a material ally during the Iran-Iraq War, then
-- Slaughtered Lebanese civilians using five ships of naval guns plus, later on, adding the battleship New Jersey. 1,500 murders with major blow back by invoking "just retaliation" in local law.
Add it all up and Reagan likely killed a couple thousand Lebanese on his personal orders. He gave critical assistance to Saddam that upped the death toll of Iranians by tens of thousands.
Yet Reagan is remembered with a Cult of Personality. Troops that entered Lebanon as United Nations Peacekeepers became part of an extraordinary naval gunnery exercise. But in the Ad Biz version of that reality, Reagan killed no one. He is a Perfect Man, close to being a "god."
Republicans tell everyone who will listen that they are the party of God. In America's Red States this is a revered declaration, a connection of God with conservative slogans. But over in Lebanon on the eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea there is another Party of God. Taken phonetically from the Arabic that is the Hizb Allah.
No question, the folks in Lebanon play by local rules. Their responses to rights and wrongs go back to a world a full millennium prior to America's revolution against England. Their name as we are used to seeing it printed is odd, at best: "Hezbollah." For Americans they are hard to understand.
We can do worse, here, than applying the lesson from Shakespeare. "The evil that men do lives after them." Reagan's murders and his alliance with Saddam Hussein quite directly produced the terrorist wing of the Hizb Allah.
The Hizb Allah was founded in 1985, a living response to the violent deaths of 20,000 Lebanese and Palestinians. In 1982, September 16-19, some 3,500 mostly unarmed people were slaughter at Beirut by Christian militia (with Israeli outside support) at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps. The men folk, PLO fighters, had been put on ships and moved out of Port of Beirut earlier on. Then American Marines had gone too, returning to their Navy ships.
By November of 1982 Reagan had sided with the same Christians who had carried out the refugee camp slaughters.
From late 1982 into mid-1984 President Reagan had full scale naval barrages fired from the main guns of offshore U.S. Navy warships. These fell on residential areas, killing 1,500 people.
American press covered the very least of it then. When bodies piled up in large scale slaughter, the ongoing civil war was cited. No American news organization reported what was happening under the United States naval barrages. When battleship New Jersey fired 288 16-inch shells in one day and then 290 rounds, America's news organizations reported none of it.
That enough for corporate media supporting evil for you ???
Photos from the refugee camps shocked the Arab world. Seeing children's bodies with their throats cut exceeded anything that came out later of Abu Ghraib in Iraq. Same for the mangled bodies and body parts from Reagan's slaughters using 5" and then 16" naval guns. Count these as 5,000 murders; the other 15,000 Arab dead from violence from that period can remain open cases.
These murders triggered "just retaliation" under Islamic law -- which was carried out first with truck bombs against the American embassy in Beirut (January 1983) and then Marine BLT Barracks and French paratroopers (October 1983) and finally Israelis down at Tyre (November 1983.)
Reagan gave up the fight. He spoke as though bravely, then turned tail and ran away out of Lebanon. He did keep ships offshore, adding the battleship New Jersey to the line, pounding away and killing Lebanese for another six months.
By July of 1985 the Lebanese and their Iranians allies (who had made the big truck bombings possible) were able to found their Party of God. After three years of brutality and mass murder, what else would you expect?
The Hizb Allah's raison d'etre is stated without equivocation:
We declare openly and loudly that we are a (people) which fears God only and is by no means ready to tolerate injustice, aggression and humiliation. America, its Atlantic Pact allies [and Israel]... invaded our country, destroyed our villages, slit the throats of our children, violated our sanctuaries and... committed the worst massacres against our (people).
They are not exaggerating about the massacres. They are not pushing hokum.
"Just retaliation" for such murders goes way back as a principle of law. This was a fundamental element in Torah for another millennium before the stories of Abraham were borrowed over to form the Koran. This is lex talionis: "an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a life for a life." Under the law of Islam, this becomes a religious obligation.
Hezbollah lives on today as a Shakespearean legacy from the great evils that were done against Lebanese Druze and Muslims. The bigger share of blame goes to President Reagan, loosely shared with others. The organization's covert action wing bloodies Lebanon with dozens of assassinations. They terrorize the Mediterranean. Recently their terror wing figured out that killing Israeli tourists is easier than killing Israeli high officials.
In any case the Hizb Allah has to be a major part of the legacy of Ronald Reagan. If he had not removed 800 American troops from Beirut after the PLO fighters were embarked and sent away, then no one in Lebanon -- literally, no one -- believes that the Christian militias would have dared slaughter the Palestinian camp dwellers. Those killings spread out over three days, September 16th through the 19th, so surely a modern army could have intervened. In addition, Reagan and Reagan alone was responsible for ordering the naval bombardments. Only a Commander in Chief can unleash naval guns and fire thousand of rounds, month after month, to level houses and small apartment buildings.
But Lebanon don't exist no more. It's out of the approved corporate geography.
The four American deaths in Libya, however, get story after iffy story. That "60 Minutes" piece from the liar is typical. Any lying, plagiarizing, Arab-damning talking head can get air time to rewrite history. At no point, ever, does our corporate press risk a comparison between Reagan in Lebanon and Obama in Libya.
The 268 dead Marines from Lebanon don't exist. (241 of them killed at the Barracks bombing.)
The Hizb Allah don't exist no more. Not in America. There's a mad man organization called "Hezbollah" and it's totally insane. Of course it is.
Sabra and Shatila didn't happen no more. Those slaughters never did happen in American media, so that one's easy.
Reagan is the Perfect Man. That could be seen as a hoax, of course. The Ad Biz guys who did PR for Reagan had it working by the middle of his first term in office. "Teflon Ronnie" was the joke. Almost everyone... not quite everyone got on board.
Clark Clifford described Ronald Reagan in 1980 as "an amiable dunce" after meeting him at a Georgetown dinner party. For domestic politics, Clifford could not have made a worse assessment. Reagan worked hard to trick his opponents and get them to underestimate him. Then when it mattered, he cunningly ruined them at the various games of electoral politics.
In Lebanon, at war, Reagan was out of his element. He was overwhelmed. Tactical issues were resolved inappropriately; out-of-control allies ignored his efforts at leadership. There was no exit strategy. Firing naval guns at civilians is not how you do "Peacekeeper." The Multinational Force motto "We come in peace" disappeared.
Instead of reaching out more widely to get help, Reagan delegated executive power to incompetents. He and his political cronies fell over to acting out slogans: "Teach them a lesson," "Peace through superior firepower," "A big enough explosion solves any military problem."
The "amiable" part went lost; "dunce" will remain arguable.
America made the Hezbollah list of prime targets. The Iranians were already on board after Reagan reversed policy from Jimmy Carter and started supplying Saddam Hussein for the ongoing Iran-Iraq War. Reagan's new BFF used conventional weapons and nerve gas to kill Iranian civilians. Just like Syria in 2013.
Reagan missed the core of what was happening in Lebanon. In a television speech four days after the Barracks bombing, Reagan misrepresented what he did know. No one corrected him.
No one at CIA was assigned to build a detailed cause-and-effect chain model for what was happening in Lebanon and Iran. Careerists defended what Ronnie said against all evidence.
The world did not have Wikileaks. There was no Internet. No GoPro. No one had the guts of a Manning or a Snowden or a means to put out the facts inside America if they had wanted to.
The naval gunnery killings went all but unreported in America. A handful of Arabic publications posted one-day casualty reports. Not one organization from the U.S. had reporting resources up in the hills -- plus the AP and UPI feeds were shut out.
Meanwhile, out in the Arab and Persian parts of the world, photos of victims' bodies and shattered blocks of houses made the rounds. Some of those images had been recorded by Iranian military photographers.
Collateral murders be damned.
Republicans -- arguably coextensive with "Reagan worshipers" -- respond today to written surveys with answers that indicate that they have no idea what Reagan did in Lebanon. Not that anyone in America knows much; the popular history that appears on television and in print media has erased these events. How long since we have heard of the Sabra and Shatila massacres ? Despite that these hands-on slaughters of unarmed civilians were body-for-body on a scale with the 9/11 suicide-hijacking attacks.
How many English speaking people anywhere connect Reagan's use of naval guns with the Iranian Revolutionary Guard-Lebanese team carrying out the destruction of the Marine BLT Barracks at Beirut Airport and a French paratroop barracks ??? The October 23rd, 1983, attacks.
Party of God -- the Hizb Allah
We're talking a group that effectively controls 2,000,000 people.
The prestige that Iranian Republican Guard ("IRG") and their Shia allies earned with the "just retaliation" martyrdom bombings in 1983 made all the difference. That was the rallying point to consolidate Lebanon's Shia militias.
Their defining Open Letter includes specific commitments to Iran's Grand Ayatollah. IRG also got to move a cadre of 1,500 picked troops over to Lebanon to stay.
Americans out. Persians in. Still there.
Thank you, Ronald Reagan !
For details of the "Teach them a lesson" strategy, "Paper Tiger" Reagan, if you want to read more follow below the orange muffin.
What we're getting to is simple enough: Shakespeare explains the root causes for the Shia half of modern Islamic terrorism. Keep in mind that no one, ever, from the American side has apologized for the murders in Lebanon and for helping Saddam Hussein. Of course not, that would not be evil.
(Btw and before the jump: General Patton used artillery to flatten villages during WW II. The General took a serious dislike to German snipers. Anybody know whether Ronald Reagan pictured himself in a prop-department general's uniform? The better to perform his Commander in Chief role in-character as George Patton ?)
The latest installment of this Hoaxes 101 series took on corporate media: they ignored the 30th Anniversary of the bombing of Marine BLT Barracks from October 23rd, 1983. This MSM lie-of-omission supported both the ongoing Benghazi Hoax and Ronald Reagan's cult-of-personality hoax that has been built up over the years.
If an 81mm mortar in the back a pickup truck fired a shell at the Christian Maronist/Falangist area of Beirut -- then it was INCOMING !! from the big guns of Reagan's ships offshore. Reagan's idea of "Peacekeeping."
Bloody Lebanon 1982-1984
From Israel's invasion to Iran's ascendance.
A brief history of the military action picks up in 1982: Israel invaded Lebanon in June to go after the Palestinians' PLO and Fatah. IDF dashed up north into Lebanon as far as Beirut. Then a civil war lit up between local Christian Maronite/Felangists and Muslim militias.
President Reagan and our French, Italian and British allies responded sensibly at the start. They tried to head off mass murders and possible destruction of Beirut by coming in to Lebanon in August, 1982, as United Nations Peacekeepers. Eisenhower had participated in a similar action landing 14,000 troops in 1958. Ike maintained impartiality and got back out after three months. Reagan had never been a military guy, so he held back based on budgetary constraints and the absence of a solid plan from his generals.
Initially a U.S. unit of 800 men was deployed to monitor an evacuation of PLO fighters out of the port of Beirut. President Reagan announced, “in no case... would [the Marines] stay longer than 30 days.” These Marines were withdrawn on September 10th, 1982. The Israel Defense Force remained in control of the south side of Beirut.
Disaster followed. On September 16th of 1982, the Israeli army sealed off two sides of the Palestinians' Sabra and Shatila refugee camps. The residents of the two camps had been disarmed with the PLO departure. Then Christian militiamen went inside the camps and slaughtered as many as 3,500 Muslims. The killings were indiscriminate. Dead bodies included children with their throats cut. Murders went on to the 19th of September. The Christian attackers brought along a bulldozer to help them cover over the evidence.
IDF personnel admitted afterward that they had watched the slaughters through binoculars. IDF personnel did nothing.
Reagan waited 15 days and then sent 1,200 Marines back ashore. He maxxed out at 1,800 troops -- never enough troops to take and hold critical uphill artillery positions. No tanks were deployed.
“However long it takes we will work relentlessly for full accountability from those responsible for Sabra-Shatila.” That's from the Palestinians in 2013. There is a cemetery where 1100 massacre victims were buried on one day: September 20, 1982.
By winter of 1983, President Reagan was using the naval guns from US Navy ships offshore routinely. These big guns were available to Reagan, from early on, because he had ordered in a cruiser, USS Virginia, frigates USS Bowen, USS Pharris, and destroyers USS John Rodgers, and USS Arthur W. Radford. More than 4,000 rounds were fired from 5" guns in one prolonged suppression action.
Then on April 18th, 1983, the front of the American embassy on Rue de la Paris in Beirut was pancaked by a conventional truck bomb. 63 killed, more than 100 wounded. The rooms running up the front of the main building were sheared off, falling down as rubble. Americans had no idea that this was a "just retaliation" action.
Reagan doubled down on his slogans and increased the intensity of U.S. firepower. After the embassy blast Reagan upped available U.S. firepower by ordering battleship New Jersey and its 16" naval guns to Lebanon from Long Beach, California.
By summer of 1983 Reagan had the naval guns and unlimited quantities of ammunition firing on uphill Lebanese residential areas to the east of central Beirut. That firing pattern moved around to the southeast as the weeks dragged on.
The United Nations mission statement was long forgotten. Lebanese houses and apartment buildings were flattened in wide swaths. Barrage after barrage followed on. Hundreds of thousands of Lebanese people were driven from their homes, depopulating whole areas into mid-1984. Estimates for the number of civilian deaths from direct hits range to 1,500 and up. Tens of thousands were wounded.
-- The incoming rounds: typically a couple dozen 81mm mortar rounds aimed at Christian militia positions or the airport security center. The tubes were mounted on pickup trucks.
-- Outgoing rounds: "fire at will" with 127mm artillery shells coming out from the ships' 5" gun turrets. Then later the New Jersey "flying Volkswagen" monster rounds.
Life in the Sand Box
Ronald Reagan was Commander in Chief. For Lebanon he insisted on choosing weapons and deciding what tactics to use. He had U.S. Navy ships moved in. He ordered use of their guns against targets ashore.
Consider the problem as a war game scenario. Put a stopwatch on the actions and reactions of the opposing military assets. Does Reagan's approach make sense ???
We did Monte Carlo simulations to match what really happened in Lebanon in 1983. The elements are straightforward: we have ships with modern naval guns and fire control systems trying to fire at temporary-location pickup truck sites 12 miles away.
It took the same type of naval gun systems about 1,000 rounds to hit one incoming attack aircraft in combat. Let's see how they do against Whac-A-Mole pickup trucks at long range.
Start a firing cycle. A Lebanese Arab pickup truck with mortars mounted in its rear bed puts the mortars down, puts a cover over them, and relocates to a new firing site. The new site is behind a wall. The truck is aligned to preset marks, jacks are put underneath for stability, the mortars are leveled and aimed to predetermined coordinates. The truck remains hidden.
Action begins with the first barrage. Truck crew gets off a half-dozen barrages, then drops tubes and moves off to its next prepared location. Firing takes the crew about a minute and then it takes about five seconds to head back out on road. They drive right off the jacks.
Aboard the Navy ship, playing this scenario, the situation is more complicated. Even with multiple spotter sites ashore. Even if decoys fail to disguise the real pickup truck. Even if artillery radar had been connected to computers for rapid calculations.... The ship still has to enter the target coordinates into the 5" gun system -- likely a Mark 86 GCFS -- turn the turret, set elevation, and fire.
The ship could get off a dozen barrages within a couple of minutes. Getting off the first barrage in time to hit the pickup truck is the problem.
That Mark 86 GCFS would compensate automatically for ship movements. One major problem, going in, was that the Mk 86 was built for radar-controlled air defense. In that role the incoming "bogey" enemy aircraft are identified as far a 30 miles out and aiming is done with no human action. Adapting the Mk 86 to hit surface targets worked fine, but there was no way to make those guns work fast.
Acquiring that first-time, one-time target ashore took several minutes. The ship has a choice between using shells that produce shrapnel or shells that maximize blast. But time is the problem.
Departing carefully at 30 m.p.h. the pickup truck in our wargame scenario gets a half-mile separation from the firing site in the first minute after its sixth barrage. (They drive right off the bottle jacks.) At that point two minutes have passed since the truck crew fired its first barrage.
Monte Carlo simulations do not work out well for the ship. The pickup truck has to break down to get hit. According to one gaming degradation table, even a flat front tire doesn't slow them down enough to matter. Ships can fire 500 rounds and the truck skates. Firing more than 500 rounds makes no difference at all.
The 5" shells come to earth with a distribution that flattens every structure a quarter-mile wide and a half-mile deep. Civilians are toast. Firing 100 rounds gets that effect.
It's the "Collateral Murder" setup from the East Baghdad video using the 5" guns instead of helicopters with machine guns. Imagine that CM attack site off Wikileaks, the Reuters office. But knock down the whole block at Reuters and half the buildings in the blocks around it. Kill 150 people with the one barrage.
That is what happened in 1983/84 when the ships responded with 5" artillery to a pickup truck firing its mortars.
No one told Reagan that firing naval guns was going to knock out pickup trucks. The Commander in Chief came up with that one all by himself. Or maybe he didn't care about the trucks. Could have been that Reagan used the naval guns to punish people in the ethnic group that was firing at his Christians.
That's called revenge. Joe McCarthy and the Dulles brothers -- John Foster and Allen -- loved that kind of thinking. Either you were good Christians and businessmen or you were worthless.
------------------
Paper Tiger
Ronald Reagan described the events of October 23rd, 1983, as follows:
This past Sunday, at 22 minutes after 6 Beirut time, with dawn just breaking, a truck, looking like a lot of other vehicles in the city, approached the airport on a busy, main road. There was nothing in its appearance to suggest it was any different than the trucks or cars that were normally seen on and around the airport. But this one was different. At the wheel was a young man on a suicide mission.
The truck carried some 2,000 pounds of explosives, but there was no way our marine guards could know this. Their first warning that something was wrong came when the truck crashed through a series of barriers, including a chain-link fence and barbed wire entanglements. The guards opened fire, but it was too late. The truck smashed through the doors of the headquarters building in which our marines were sleeping and instantly exploded. The four-story concrete building collapsed in a pile of rubble.
More than 200 of the sleeping men were killed in that one hideous, insane attack. Many others suffered injury and are hospitalized here or in Europe.
This was not the end of the horror. At almost the same instant, another
vehicle on a suicide and murder mission crashed into the headquarters of the French peacekeeping force, an eight-story building, destroying it and killing more than 50 French soldiers.
Prior to this day of horror, there had been several tragedies for our men in the multinational force. Attacks by snipers and mortar fire had taken their toll.
Reagan got the bomb wrong. He had no idea that Iranians and Lebanese had done this for pay-back. "Hideous, insane" is different from "They got revenge."
The FBI didn't do any better. Nobody knew squat about Islam.
Reagan did get it right that the guards opened up on the truck with their M16A2 automatic rifles. Thing is, this weapon fired a 5.56mm round that was fairly easy to defeat with steel armor. Heavy hub caps and solid tires sufficed to keep the truck rolling.
1st Battalion 8th Marines had .50 caliber machine guns where armor piercing rounds would likely have stopped that armored truck. If nothing else, defenders could have shot apart the truck's wheels. Four of these guns were mounted uphill that October to protect the new embassy complex. Zero of these .50 cal guns were mounted at BLT Barracks.
The 1/8 and the 3/8 also had "Dragon" shoulder-launch anti-tank missiles. Sleeping in boxes.
The 1/8 took protection of the new embassy area seriously. Everything was in place. A security architecture was implemented with barriers capable of stopping a Syrian light tank. For their own barracks, not so much.
-----------------
The Hizb Allah has mirrored its origins with a will. The terrorist side of it, anyway. Murder begets murder.
Before the Hizb Allah there was Hope. Well, Amal. This was founded by Imam Musa Sadr. He organized the Lebanese Shia and largely avoided violent confrontations. Then in what looked to be a Sunni assassination, Sadr was "disappeared" while visiting Libya in 1978.
On a wider stage, Lebanon became a critical factor for the Iranians. They were fighting Saddam Hussein. They were also up against other Sunni states, particularly the the Gulf Cooperation Council. They needed desperately to have Shia support in Lebanon for an offset.
Ayatollah Khomeini established a well-supported presence in Lebanon. But the first wave of assassinations led everyone to question where he had gone, seeking deals. What there was of a Shia Left was annihilated: Hassan Bazzuni of the Political Action Organization; historian Hassan Hamdan; and a communist, Hussein Mrouei.
What ??? Who was out there, paranoid about a handful of Lefties? These were Islamic, Shia Lefties apart from the communist. Who would trade anything worth the candle for killing three no-power Lefties?
After the Hizb Allah went public in 1985 they rapidly replaced the older National Resistance Front. Then more assassinations: Sunni Sheikh Subhi as-Salih and Sheikh Hassan Khalid in the late 1980s. Another Sunni, Rafiq Hariri, went by a bombing in 2005. The total body count might have reached 100 for all the people they eliminated.
The big war in Lebanon is still Shia versus Sunni. That has been the big war in the Middle East for centuries. And now the Hizb Allah is not a normal political party -- it remains a party that relies on military force and assassinations to achieve its goals.
Thank you, Ronald Reagan !