Known and Unknown_ A Memoir - Donald Rumsfeld [6]
I did not expect that Saddam’s regime would play such a prominent role in our country’s future—and in my life—in the years ahead. After a hiatus of seventeen years, U.S.-Iraq diplomatic relations were reestablished in 1984 shortly after my meeting. We had convergent interests: America could assist Iraq by discouraging other countries from selling arms to Iran, and Iraq could assist America by holding the line against an ascendant radical Islamist and terrorist-supporting regime in Iran. Ultimately, of course, the United States was unable to reorient our relations with Iraq, and my visit to Baghdad was something of a side event. America’s primary concern in the region at the time was not Iraq but the small, troubled nation of Lebanon, which was being ripped apart by terrorism and civil war. No experience better prepared me for the challenges I would face many years later, as secretary of defense in the George W. Bush administration, than the crisis in Lebanon. Many times, in fact, I looked back on the hopes and disappointments of that period, the consequences of which still reverberate.
CHAPTER 1
Smiling Death
On October 23, 1983, as dawn broke in the Middle East, a water delivery truck was headed for an American military facility at Beirut International Airport. The truck had been hijacked and loaded with explosives, the equivalent of some twelve thousand pounds of TNT.1 An eyewitness who caught a glimpse of the driver characterized him as “smiling death” for his chillingly cheerful expression as the truck headed toward his target—a four-story building that housed sixteen hundred men and women in uniform and flew the flag of the United States of America.2 After the truck barreled through the building’s entrance, it ignited an explosion so massive that it briefly lifted the entire structure into the air, until it collapsed upon itself. A second bomb, targeting French military personnel, had gone off almost simultaneously, killing fifty-eight.
By the time the rubble settled, 241 Americans were dead.* They had been part of a Marine contingent and multinational force deployed to Lebanon to serve as a check on the warring factions of that country. The Beirut airport bombing was the largest loss of Marines in a single incident since the Battle of Iwo Jima in World War II. And until September 11, 2001, it was the worst terrorist attack ever committed against American citizens.
At the time of the Beirut attack I was home in Chicago and serving as chief executive officer of G. D. Searle & Co., a pharmaceutical company. As I watched the pictures of the huge plume of smoke over the bomb site on television, I was stunned by the scale of the attack. So was President Reagan, who appeared grief-stricken as one after another flag-draped coffin containing murdered Americans returned home. The Marine barracks bombing, Reagan later said, was the saddest day of his presidency and maybe the saddest day of his life.3
Many groups immediately claimed credit for it, but eventually the attack was linked to a fledgling terrorist group backed by Iran and Syria. The group called itself Hezbollah, Arabic for “Party of God,” even as they committed this brazen act of mass murder. The bombing clearly had been intended to spark an American withdrawal from Lebanon so that Syria, Hezbollah’s sponsor, which already occupied a third of the country, could gain even more influence.*
In an effort to show America’s resolve, Vice President George H. W. Bush was dispatched to Beirut. “We’re not going to let a bunch of insidious terrorists, cowards, shape the foreign policy of the United States,” Bush vowed.4 As I watched the scene, I was uncomfortable with his word choice. I have never thought people willing to drive a truck bomb into a building and kill themselves were “cowards.” Rather, I saw them as dangerous fanatics willing to do anything for their cause. I did agree with him that