Oct. 23 is the 40th anniversary of the Marine Barracks Bombing in Beirut, Lebanon, which killed 241 U.S. Marines and sailors, 58 French paratroopers, and several civilians.
The attack — conducted in the name of Islamic Jihad and perpetrated by the Iranian-led, IRGC-trained forces that would come to be called Hezbollah — consisted of two sequential suicide bombers. U.S. troops were unprepared for the assault, having orders not to chamber rounds into their weapons.
The Beirut bombing is particularly important to remember at this moment when the Biden administration has moved U.S. Naval and Marine assets into the region once again, this time as Hamas and Hezbollah terrorists prosecute a war against Israel.
In 1983, Israel was prosecuting a defensive war against the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), which had taken over large swathes of Lebanon and launched a campaign of firing Soviet-provided Katyusha rockets into Northern Israel. The Soviets were targeting Israel as part of their anti-Western, anti-colonial campaign, and the KGB helped create the PLO in 1964 to aid in that effort and flip the narrative from Israel as an underdog surrounded by hostile Arab nations to the “oppressor” of an “indigenous struggle for national liberation.” After the Iranian Revolution in 1989, the Soviets used the PLO to leverage Iran as an asset.
The CIA initially believed they could win the PLO away from the Soviets, and in 1969, began courting Arafat through the head of the PLO’s elite Force 17, Ali Hassan Salameh. Salameh was initially contacted by the
