Seven Events That Made America America

by Larry Schweikart

  One particular cleric, the Shia Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, had opposed the 1963 reforms that broke up large landed estates (including those of the mosques and religious foundations), granted women the right to vote, and allowed non-Muslims to hold political offices. Following riots and confrontations with Khomeini’s forces, the SAVAK placed him under house arrest, then, in 1964, exiled him. From 1964 to 1979, Khomeini fomented a new ideology of Islamic revolution, based on the principle that the West was a plague to be stamped out. 64 Jihad and martyrdom, he preached, were essential parts of Islam. As for most of his fellow clerics, the martyrdom part never seemed to reach Khomeini. He promulgated the concept of Velayat-e Faqih (guardianship of the [Islamic] jurists) to enforce sharia law. Some Iranians rejected Khomeini, including constitutionalists and leftists, but both groups would ultimately be crushed under revolutionary Islam.

  When the oil boom brought large numbers of rural, uneducated, and traditionalist Muslims to the cities, they drifted into the revolutionary circles. Inflation ate away their wages. Rumors of SAVAK killing or kidnapping political opponents took on a life of their own. With every new demonstration or protest, the shah’s government seemed to violate still more religious traditions, adding to the ranks of the dissenters. At the same time, actions by the shah to crack down and restore order resulted in a new scolding by Jimmy Carter, which emboldened the revolutionaries even further. At any rate, the shah was finished after Black Friday (September 8), when security forces (many of them ethnic Kurds) shot into crowds, killing dozens whom the clerics insisted were “massacred by Zionist troops.”65 The remaining government, suffering from strikes, sought to negotiate with Khomeini, who quickly returned to the country, arriving to chants of “Islam, Islam, Khomeini We Will Follow You!” After naming a competing prime minister and benefiting from the defection of large numbers of soldiers, Khomeini took over permanently when rebels won the streets. By April 1979, the first “Islamic Republic”—formed with a theocratic constitution—came into being.

  Without question, the Carter administration was caught unaware, and had “no clear policy” on Iran.66 Only six months before the shah fled, the CIA assured Carter that it “is not in a revolutionary or even a pre-revolutionary situation.”67 The CIA’s association with the shah’s regime made matters even worse. Yet Carter’s national security advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, assured the shah that he had the full support of the United States. A year later, the ailing shah was admitted to an American hospital for cancer treatments, causing a new wave of protests in Iran. Khomeini demanded that the shah be shipped back home to face execution, and Carter refused. On November 4, 1979, mobs labeling themselves the “Muslim Student Followers of the Imam’s Line” crashed into the compound of the U.S. embassy in Tehran and took fifty-two of the diplomats and staff as prisoners. A half-dozen diplomats escaped and held out at the Canadian and Swiss embassies. Carter dallied, both unsure as to how to proceed and temperamentally unsuited to dramatic military action; his inaction only convinced the fundamentalists of his weakness and lack of resolve. Underscoring Carter’s seeming ineptitude, he later launched a complicated rescue mission that failed abysmally, and Americans were subjected to film of Iranians picking over the charred bodies of American soldiers and airmen.

  Iran, naturally, played a part in Carter’s defeat in the 1980 election. Later, leftists would assert that Reagan had planned an “October surprise” that would allow a successful resolution of the hostage crisis in time to benefit himself. In fact, a congressional task force found no evidence whatsoever to support such nonsense, but there was discussion among some of Reagan’s advisers of working with the republicans inside Iran, where Sadegh Ghotbzadeh urged a deal with Reagan, should he win. Abolhassan Banisadr, Ghotbzadeh’s rival, also claimed that he’d had discussions in Spain with representatives sent from Reagan (and later disavowed those comments).68 Banisadr went so far as to warn the ayatollah that Reagan’s election “would signify a change in the American mentality [to] a shift to the concept of intervention in the affairs of others.”69 Khomeini snorted, “So what if Reagan wins? . . . He and Carter are both enemies of Islam.”70

  Indeed, negotiations that had moved along briskly suddenly stalled at Iran’s end, mostly out of a hatred for Carter. But privately even Khomeini feared Reagan’s “cowboy” reputation.71 In the October 27 debates, Reagan reiterated his “no-negotiations-with-terrorists” mantra, termed the whole episode a national humiliation, and called for a congressional investigation into Carter’s handling of it. (Ironically, the hostages were released and arrived on U.S. soil only minutes after Reagan was sworn in as president on January 20, 1981.)

  Certainly with the Iranian revolution there was little doubt that Islamic radicalism had changed dramatically from the actions of a few to the voice of an entire nation. Jihadism had also now revealed itself to be a religious, not a political, movement with certain core influences which the West had yet to grasp. Central to those influences was the Islamic emphasis on honor and shame. Similar in many ways to World War II-era Japanese Bushido culture, many Muslim societies (though certainly not all) suffered from a heightened sense of shame. Japanese military culture demanded nothing less than gyokusai (“glorious self-annihilation”). Kamikaze attacks relied entirely on fanatical “honor deaths.”72 In the Middle East, these were not new concepts. T. E. Lawrence described the importance of sharraf, or honor, in his Seven Pillars of Wisdom. A modern authority on Arab psychology notes that Islamic society “worships strength and has no compassion for weakness”; John Laffin’s The Arab Mind Considered: A Need for Understanding (1975) recounted the Arab’s “sexual frustrations and obsessions, his paralysing [sic] sense of shame.”73 Similarly, Nonie Darwish related the experience of women in such shame-based cultures, where the slightest misstep would bring dishonor to an entire family, and the careful hiding of possessions, so that envious people would not give them the “evil eye.”74

  Ronald Reagan, stepping into the Middle East vipers’ nest, was therefore still guided by a worldview that reflected two basic interpretations of the region. First, he and his advisers blamed Soviet mischief in the region for some of the turmoil, which they determined could therefore be offset by U.S. power. This overlaid the tendency of Washington to view everything within the prism of traditional Western-style government boundaries.75 But the pot was boiling with or without the Soviets’ help. Second, the Reagan administration perpetuated the view that Islamic radicalism remained a minor, but growing, influence, and that more traditional motivations, such as territory, prosperity, and above all, peace, would be valued in reaching a long-term agreement between the Muslims and Jews.

  The last in a long line of events to challenge such a worldview occurred in April 1983, when Hezbollah, one of the newest terror groups, sent a suicide bomber driving a delivery van laden with two thousand pounds of explosives into the compound of the U.S. embassy in Beirut. Driving the stolen van through an outbuilding, the jihadist plowed the truck-bomb into the lobby and killed 63 troops and wounded another 120. Yet Reagan’s reaction—to send Habib to discuss both Israeli and Syrian troop withdrawals—indicated he hadn’t yet fully grasped the motivations of Hezbollah (occasionally operating under the name “Islamic Jihad”), which was funded and supported by Iran. Congress, as was typical, voted economic aid for Lebanon. The embassy itself was moved to a more secure location, but a week before the U.S. Marines arrived, another car bomb killed 20 Lebanese and two American soldiers at an embassy annex. (After the Marine barracks was bombed, there would be more car attacks on the U.S. and French embassies in Kuwait in December 1983.)

  Throughout September, Reagan made personal phone calls to the family of every American serviceman killed in Lebanon—“difficult, terrible calls,” as he described them.76 He consoled himself with the thought that “our efforts seemed to be working, giving time to the Lebanese, the Syrians, and the Israelis to work out a solution to their problems.”77 In fact, any “solution” that did not deal directly w
ith the nature, funding, and operation of Islamic jihad in the region had no hope. And then, at a critical point, Reagan’s most trusted aide, Californian William Clark, who had served as the national security advisor, asked to be relieved of his duties. Clark was worn out, and wanted a slower-paced job at Interior, to which he was transferred. Clark’s departure may not have changed any of Reagan’s policies in the Middle East, but of all Reagan’s advisers, Clark seemed particularly attuned to the necessity for reasoned, hard-line measures.

  One other Reagan adviser, Jeane Kirkpatrick, the ambassador to the United Nations, seemed to have a prickly, no-holds-barred attitude. She also had, according to Reagan, “bad chemistry” with Shultz. Kirkpatrick had a deep sense of Israel’s isolation, and made the case for fairness at the UN forcefully. Because of her tensions with Shultz, however, Reagan hesitated to name her as Clark’s replacement, instead turning to Bud McFarlane. The only other truly outspoken “hawk” among Reagan’s closest advisers, Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger, was outspoken in his reluctance to displease the Muslim states on the grounds that the United States needed oil.

  As Reagan noted in his autobiography, Lebanon was still on his mind when he went to Georgia on October 21 for a golf outing. Overnight, his focus shifted from the Middle East to a tiny island in the Caribbean when the Organization of Eastern Caribbean States appealed for help. Grenada, an island about ninety miles north of Venezuela, had undergone a bloody coup led by the Marxist Castro wannabe Maurice Bishop, who invited Cubans in to build a massive airfield. Neighboring islands, including Jamaica, Bermuda, and Barbados, were concerned about Bishop even before the Cubans arrived. Now, certain that they would be the next targets, they pleaded with Reagan to intervene. The United States did have a direct interest in protecting the eight hundred Americans at the medical school on the island, and Reagan had already ordered the U.S. Navy to station a flotilla close by to keep tabs on Bishop. That night in Georgia, after consulting with the Joint Chiefs of Staff, he decided to move quickly before the Cubans could bring in reinforcements or take the students hostage. A little-reported event took place the next day while Reagan was on the golf course, when a gunman took over the pro shop and held seven hostages. He wanted to speak to the president, face to face. Quickly he was captured and the hostages were unharmed (he actually let one go to buy a six-pack of beer!).78

  At 2:30 that morning, just hours after Reagan had escaped personal danger, the phone rang. Bud McFarlane, the new national security advisor, had stunning news. A Mercedes-Benz truck, loaded with explosives equivalent to twelve thousand pounds of TNT, had plowed through a barbed wire fence at the parking lot of the Beirut International Airport, where elements of the Second Marine Division were headquartered. It accelerated past two sentry posts—the sentries, constricted by rules of engagement, were slow to fire—and slammed into the building. Instantly, the four-story structure was lifted up by the force of the explosion, shattering its concrete supports, then it collapsed, crushing those inside, and killing 241 Marines. It was the bloodiest day in Marine history since Iwo Jima in 1945. Two minutes later, a similar truck bomb detonated at the barracks of the French First Parachute Regiment in the Ramlet al Baida area of West Beirut. There, the bomber took the truck down a ramp into the underground parking garage, killing 58 French soldiers, making it the worst military loss for France since Algeria.79 Sniper fire hindered the rescue attempts at both sites.

  Having spent the previous night in the living room of his Georgia hotel monitoring the situation in Grenada, Reagan’s staff spent a second night listening to the reports roll in from Lebanon. As Reagan put it, “the news from Beirut became grimmer and grimmer.”80 It was, Reagan said, a “despicable act.” Weinberger, who opposed the deployment, still blamed himself. “The fact that I had been warning against this very thing didn’t give me any slight satisfaction,” he recalled eighteen years later. “It was terrible to be proven right under such horrible circumstances.”81 Reagan returned to Washington, where he was briefed further, and shortly afterward the CIA confirmed that the attack emanated from the Hezbollah training camp in the Bekaa Valley, although Weinberger later stated, “we still do not have the actual knowledge of who did the bombing of the Marine barracks . . . and we certainly didn’t then.”82 Beirut, he said, was “an absolutely inevitable outcome of doing what we did, of putting troops in with no mission that could be carried out.” The United States, he continued, had put a referee in the middle of a “furious prize fight . . . in range of both fighters. . . .”83 The Joint Chiefs of Staff had grave concerns, but Weinberger admitted he never fully voiced their views: “none of us marched in and told the president that the U.S. is going to face disaster if the Marines didn’t withdraw.”84 Reagan never once attempted to shift blame. Referring to the deployment, he grimly admitted, “Part of it was my idea—a good part of it.”85

  Weinberger’s reluctance to get further involved came when the Gipper approved a joint French-American air assault on a staging camp, but at the last minute, Weinberger aborted the mission.86 In fact, the Muslim radicals expected an attack. Hamza al Hamieh, the Shiite military leader in the Beirut area, blustered to CNN, “None of us is afraid. God is with us . . . We want to see our God. We welcome the bombs of Reagan.”87 Few in the White House fully grasped the religious and apocalyptic overtones in the enemy’s boasts: cables from the U.S. embassy revealed that the Iranians expected to be attacked as a response to the bombing, and quoted Iranian radio as saying they desired the attack: “This is our hope because we seek martyrdom [emphasis added].”88 Comments such as those underscored the Islamic context of the battle, and it was noteworthy that the government-run radio in Beirut referred to the dead American and French troops as “martyrs”—the first time a multinational force casualty had been so categorized.89 By January of 1984, the CIA’s director of intelligence conducted a briefing called “The Terrorist Threat to US Personnel” in which he warned that “Shia extremists are increasingly willing to sacrifice their lives in attacks on the MNF. They are confident they are serving the will of Allah.”90

  While not yet perceiving the struggle as one against a shame-honor culture, Reagan nevertheless applied (with some precision) a Cold War response to terrorism: if Americans “cut and run . . . we’ll be sending one signal to terrorists everywhere. They can gain by waging war against innocent people.”91 Internal memos confirm that many in the administration shared this view. Cable files record “the stakes in Lebanon, if we are driven out . . . the radicals, the rejectionists . . . will have won.” Yet this was still interpreted within the U.S.-Soviet conflict: “The message will be sent that relying on the Soviet Union pays off.”92 Historian Paul Kengor noted that Reagan was troubled and concerned by the possibility of Islamic terror attacks inside the United States—it was one reason he quit attending church, especially after the assassination attempt by John Hinckley, Jr., as he was afraid an entire congregation would become a target. 93 Repeatedly he cited the actions of a “Middle East madman” in his defense of the Strategic Defense Initiative, and argued that even if the Soviets had no nuclear missiles, such a shield was necessary.

  In the wake of the bombing, Congress launched an investigation, and concluded there were “inadequate security measures” at the compound, and that the commander made “serious errors in judgement [and] bears principle responsibility.” Worse, Congress claimed, information provided by the Marines afterward was “often inaccurate, erroneous, and misleading.”94 No one was fired, although ultimately Navy Secretary Lehman issued nonpunitive “letters of instruction” to the two commanding officers, a step Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger found sufficient.95

  Reagan paid a high political price for Lebanon. While at first, Grenada and Lebanon were linked in the public mind—and indeed Reagan’s speech-writers tied them together as part of the anti-Soviet effort—in reality the high public approval of Grenada made Reagan’s much lower numbers on Lebanon, noted by White House pollsters, even out.96 And after the bombing
, Reagan benefited from strong public sympathy. Support came from such groups as Al-Mojaddedi of the Islamic Unity for Afghan Freedom Fighters and the Federation of [the] Islamic Association of U.S. and Canada, as well as the National Federation of Syrian-Lebanese American Clubs, and even the National Council of Churches, which supported both Grenada and Lebanon.97 The National Association of Arab Americans had originally opposed the deployment, but after the Sabra and Shatila massacres reluctantly fell in behind Reagan.

  Over time, though, opposition coalesced, and not just from the Left. Conservatives such as Richard Viguerie urged the president to pull the troops out. Democrats in Congress, seeing an opportunity to weaken Reagan, began to revisit the War Powers Act (Congressman Mickey Edwards of Oklahoma called the vote to authorize the Lebanon action “misleading”). And while never close to a majority, a growing minority of letters to the White House expressed concerns about whether the United States was “involved in another no win situation where our troops . . . are not allowed to exert . . . enough force to be victorious.”98 One state senator reasoned, “I am sure that a 16-inch salvo from the [battleship USS] New Jersey assures the peace more than a Marine contingent. . . . Strategically they are sitting ducks.”99 A handful of writers favored Grenada, but not Lebanon. Overwhelmingly, those opposed to the Lebanon mission did not disapprove because of the use of military force, but rather because they feared the American troops would not be able to use sufficient force. “Americans are tired of losing,” said one telegram.100

  Lebanon slowly moved Reagan away from the notion that the Middle East was just like any other region in terms of its geopolitics’ susceptibility to reasoned diplomacy. In December 1983, the administration developed the term “state-sponsored terrorism” to describe, specifically, Iranian-supported terrorist activities. This was a step short towards identifying an entire wing of a religion as dangerous. Shortly after the bombing, Reagan wrote. “I still believed that it was essential to continue working with moderate Arabs to find a solution to the Middle East’s problems, and that we should make selective sales of American weapons to the moderate Arabs as proof of our friendship.” But “at the same time, I was beginning to have doubts whether the Arab world, with its ancient tribal rivalries, centuries of internecine strife, and almost pathological hatred of Israel, was as serious about supporting our peace efforts in the Middle East as King Fahd of Saudi Arabia and King Hussein of Jordan said they were.”101 Another step was taken early in 1984, when the administration issued NSDD-138, which approved preemptive attacks on persons involved in, or planning, terrorist attacks.102