Known and Unknown - Donald Rumsfeld [18]
The difficulty in coordinating the military and political elements of the U.S. government and the Congress also became apparent during the Lebanon crisis. It pointed out just how important it is for there to be a tight linkage between our country’s diplomatic and military capabilities if America is to successfully meet its national security objectives.
While some believed that a decade after Vietnam, America had finally shed the baggage of our involvement in Southeast Asia, it seemed the American body politic was still a prisoner of the Vietnam experience. The country was able to deal with short operations such as the evacuation of American citizens from Grenada, which had occurred almost simultaneously with the Marine barracks bombing. But it was not well prepared to address the more complex challenge we faced in Lebanon. Our government—the Department of Defense as well as the Congress—and the media were still focused on yesterday’s war, reacting to the Vietnam experience but not confronting the growing problem of international terrorism.
Perhaps the most important lesson was that our government had not yet developed a full appreciation of the devastating effectiveness of terrorism as an instrument of policy against us and, indeed, against any free nation. We were on defense when we needed to be on offense. After the Marine barracks truck bombing, the immediate reaction was to do everything possible to defend against a similar attack. Cement barriers were put on the grounds around buildings, so that trucks with explosives couldn’t easily run into our buildings as they had before. The terrorists started using rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs), lobbing them over the cement barricades. So to defend against RPG attacks, embassy buildings along the Corniche in Beirut were next draped with a metal mesh to keep them from hitting the building. Because the mesh worked reasonably well, it wasn’t long before terrorists began hitting the soft targets, namely Americans and other Westerners going to and from their work.
It should have been clear: The way to successfully deal with terrorists is not only to try to defend against them, but also to take the battle to them; to go after them where they live, where they plan, where they hide; to go after their finances and their networks; and even to go after nations that harbor and assist them. The best defense would be a good offense.
Beirut demonstrated to me the profound truth that weakness is provocative. Our withdrawal from Lebanon contributed again to an impression among our friends and enemies of a vulnerable and irresolute America. This, of course, was President Reagan’s concern all along.
One observer of our pullout from Lebanon was a young Saudi. The American response to the Beirut terrorist attack, Osama bin Laden observed, demonstrated “the decline of American power and the weakness of the American soldier, who is ready to wage cold wars but unprepared to fight long wars. This was proven in Beirut in 1983, when the Marines fled.”22 Osama bin Laden said he first conceived his attack on the World Trade Center during that period.
Referring to the destruction of the Marine barracks and the bombing of the U.S. embassy in Beirut, bin Laden later noted, “When I saw those destroyed towers in Lebanon, it sparked in my mind that the oppressors should be punished in the same way and that we should destroy towers in America—so they can taste what we tasted and so they stop killing our women and children.”23
We were already entering a new age of terrorism, although many didn’t fully appreciate it. In September 1984, after U.S. forces had withdrawn from Lebanon, the U.S. embassy annex was nearly destroyed by a bomb, the third major attack on Americans