Washington’s Latest Big Lie: Iran’s 47-Year War on America, Part 3

If you don’t think the Big Lie about “Iran’s 47-Year War on America” has salience, just consider the words this AM of the Donald himself. In the most unhinged and belligerent public utterance of any POTUS in our lifetime, if ever, Trumpy informed the world that he’s getting his rocks off killing Iranians as punishment for their five decades of alleged terror:

“Watch what happens to these deranged scumbags today. They’ve been killing innocent people for 47 years, and now I, as the 47th President of the United States of America, am killing them. What a great honor it is to do so!“

There you have it—the very words of a madman going to town on the Big Lie. Moreover, it’s a tissue of falsehoods, spin and fabrications that have been spoon-fed to the Donald by Bibi Netanyahu and his fifth column ensconced in the Washington Swamp from end to end, including his own son-in-law, Jared Kushner.

So again, we needs return to the founding myths of the alleged Iranian war on America. The latter turns heavily on Iran’s alleged role in the bombing of the US Marines barracks in October 1983, which caused the death of 241 Americans. But what actually happened there was a terrible misadventure of Empire gone awry, not an unprovoked Iranian declaration of war on America and the freedoms of its people.

As we showed in Part 2, as of 1982-1983 the new Iranian regime was being brutally attacked by Saddam Hussein, who was armed with the best modern weapons available from the US and France. At the same time, Iran was saddled with an inherited US-equipped military that had been disabled by Washington’s embargo blocking its acquisition of spare parts, and was therefore desperately sending untrained teenagers into battle as cannon fodder in “human waves”.

Under those circumstances, it might be well and truly said that the regime in Tehran believed that it faced an“existential threat” because, in fact, it did.

It should therefore also not come as a surprise that imperiled in this manner, Iran might also have sought to lash out with whatever means remained at its disposal. And we mean especially against that same US intruder in its geographic neighborhood that had also stationed several hundred Marines in the middle of a Lebanese civil war, which was none of Washington’s business.

That is to say, the attack on the US Marines barracks in October 1983 didn’t flow preemptively from Iran’s hatred of America’s freedoms way over here; it was in direct retaliation for Washington’s help to Saddam Hussein’s slaughtering of their barely armed teenage conscripts way over there in their own backyard.

In recent weeks, of course, the armchair warriors of MAGA have been strenuously waving the FAFO (“fuck around and find out”) banner, suggesting the Donald is finally giving the Iranians a taste of their own medicine.

In fact, however, the Marine barracks bombing was actually a case of FAFO on Washington’s account. As we amplify below, Washington was essentially fucking around in the region for absolutely no reason of America’s Homeland security. The US forces deployed in the Lebanese war zone or even more especially in support of Saddam Hussein’s unprovoked assault on his neighbor should have never, ever been there.

And, yes, Washington’s utterly gratuitous 1980s alliance was with the very one and same Saddam Hussein, who met his doom swinging from the end of an American rope 20 years later. Of course, by then he too was deemed to be an inconvenience by the neocons—Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney and George Dubya Bush—who were then ruling the national security roost in Washington.

So context and history do make a difference. The truth is, the MAGA propagandists who always open their “Iran’s 47-Years War on America” Big Lie by citing the 1983 Marine Barracks bombing have no clue about how, why and when it happened.

We do. We were there as a member of the NSC (national security council) and saw it all up close and personal. Needless to say, our take-away was akin to that of the proverbial visit to the sausage factory: That is, it was unappetizing in the extreme.

As it happened, the errors that led to the stationing of the Marines in Beirut and the tragic deaths of 241 Americans in October 1983 stemmed from the same old, same old. That is, the imperatives of Empire and the utterly mistaken notion that America needed allies in the Middle East and had to engage in active policing of the region in the name of national security.

Alas, that was barking tommyrot then and in the hindsight of history is even more risible today. After all, 1983 marked the fading hours of the Soviet Empire. The latter was collapsing from the sheer dead-weight of communism internally—not any external pressures emanating from the far-flung cold war Empire which Washington had concocted to “contain” the Soviet Union via NATO in Europe or other alliances and bases in the middle east and anywhere else around the planet.

Indeed, world communism was on the march alright—straight into the dustbin of history, to use one of Karl Marx’s more felicitous phrases.

On the other hand, by the early 1980s Washington had become the seat of a veritable Warfare State. Armed to the teeth and in possession of military bases, Naval armadas and globally dispatchable air and land forces, the Warfare State on the Potomac hosted literally hundreds of thousands of bureaucrats at DOD, State, USAID, Radio Free Europe and its clones who drew their paychecks and self-importance from manning the Empire.

Likewise, there were also armies of their counterparts on Congressional committees and in the K-street corridors chock-a-bloc full of military-industrial complex lobbyists and money-bag dispensers of campaign cash. And all of these bureaucrats, apparatchiks, politicians and grifters functioned on the premise that the American Empire was the natural order of things and the indispensable lynch-pin of America’s Homeland Security.

Alas, that presumption was a utterly untrue then and its persistence four decades later is its hideous legacy—the fetid fruit of which gave rise to Trump’s insane war on Iran, and thereby on the Persian Gulf at large and the vital arteries of global commerce which are fueled from it.

So we need to dissect further the actual facts pertaining to the Marine Barracks Bombing, which almost as much as the 444-day Embassy Hostage ordeal, gave rise to Evil Iran narrative that undergirds the current disaster.

Needless to say, at the time in 1982-1983 when this all got underway we were too busy fighting for budget cuts and resisting the Big Spenders on Capitol Hill—along with their allies who had finagled there way into the Reagan Administration Cabinet and agencies—to take close note of the unfolding crisis in Lebanon.

When we did catch up with the details, however, the NSC was already in the midst of negotiations led by the State Department designed to separate the warring factions in Lebanon. This effort especially included finding cover for the invading Israeli Army in south Lebanon and arranging safe passage for tens of thousands of PLO operatives from their camps there to Tunisia and other places removed from the Lebanese cauldron.

In short order, of course, the mainly US manned Multinational Peacekeeping Force (MNF) that had been dropped into Beiruit was caught up in the aftermath of a vicious genocidal attack on the Palastinain refugee camps at Sabra and Shatila, followed by the counterattack on the Marine Barracks which occurred a few weeks later.

But here’s the thing. In virtually all of the urgent NSC discussions which perforce transpired on nearly a daily basis it was never explained as to how America’s Homeland security would be enhanced by getting in the middle of this new Israeli spat with its neighbor to the north. Nor was there much understanding of the background in terms of Lebanon’s decades-old, bitterly fragmented polity along sectarian lines, the resulting Lebanese civil war after 1975 and the brutal Israeli invasion led by hardliner General Sharon in 1982.

As the crisis heated up, needless to say, we began to wonder about why we were there at all. So we took the trouble to get a series of private briefings from CIA analysts with regards to these matters. We recall these briefings quite vividly because they showed that it was well understood down in the bowels of the national security apparatus even then that the Reagan Administration was plunging into a veritable hornets nest of historically-rooted religious, political and ethnic animosities that were almost beyond comprehension.

Alas, the imperatives of Empire simply over-ruled any influence that these plain facts and common sense might have suggested. That is, the predicate was that America had no choice but to assist its ally, Israel, even as it attempted to stabilize the surrounding region, which was afire with conflicts utterly irrelevant to America’s Homeland security.

By contrast, had Washington followed the wise advice of the great Senator from Ohio, Robert Taft, at the outset of the Cold War in the late 1940s and 1950s and repaired to a Fortress America defense backed by an invincible nuclear deterrent, a far different scenario would have ensued. The administration of Ronald Reagan in 1982 simply would not have been in the business of aiding Saddam Hussein in his war on Iran or plunging American servicemen into a red hot cauldron of armed conflict in Beirut.

Stated differently, even the NSC of Ronald Reagan was blinded by the imperatives of Empire. Accordingly, in the aftermath of the barracks bombing the NSC deliberations reached a low point of nearly comic absurdity, which is a reminder of why a global empire should not be run from the banks of the Potomac.

To wit, the hawks on the NSC wanted to retaliate for the bombing, but had only vague intel that the perpetrators had fled to the Chouf Mountains that surrounded Beirut. These warhawks, of course, wanted to send in a huge increase in US forces to hunt down the perpetrators and kill them all.

As it happened, however, Ronald Reagan had not forgotten the lessons of LBJ’s disastrous escalation of the Vietnam War in 1965 after an equivalent setback, and insisted that there must be another way and that less risky options be considered.

And at that point, a Keystone Cops moment actually ensued, when it was suggested during a NSC meeting in the Cabinet Room that perhaps the perpetrators who were presumed to be hiding out in the Chouf Mountains could be hit by the big guns on the battleship New Jersey, which was stationed near the Beirut harbor. In that context, of course, the question immediately arose as to the range of the big guns on the the battleship.

A military aide sitting in the row of chairs along the wall of the Cabinet Room quickly supplied an answer: “40 kilometers plus or minus”.

At that, a huge map of the Beirut region was rolled out on the Cabinet table, where America’s Secretary of State sitting next to President Reagan already had one finger on the map at the location of the Beirut harbor and another on the Chouf mountains. Holding his fingers up in the air to mark the coordinates, he then pronounced after testing his fingers’ span against the map’s scale of distance that it was his conclusion that the bad guys could be hit by the big guns on the New Jersey. Accordingly, no boots on the ground would be necessary to extract revenge for the bombing!

As it happened, some heavy duty shelling occurred for a limited period of time, but in his wisdom Ronald Reagan decided to “reposition” the remaining US Marines to a safer location in the deep Mediterranean in early 1984. So at least that incipient “Forever War” was avoided.

But it was a close call that never should have even been on the agenda for an emergency NSC meeting. In the first place, the “bad guys” in the Chouf mountains were mainly Druze who had nothing to do with the bombing. But given that they were fierce historic opponents of the Maronite Christians and Israel’s ally in their occupation of Lebanon, they were considered fair game for the 16 inch shells from the New Jersey.

Even more importantly, America’s Homeland security was not engaged in any way whatsoever in either Beirut or on Saddam’s side on the battlefields on the Iranian deserts and mountains. So as summarized below, this opening chapter of the Iran’s alleged “47-Year War on America” was illicit from the get-go.

To understand this, we needs go back to the reasons for the presence of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in southern Lebanon during the 1970s and early 1980s. That’s because the PLO’s internationally supervised expulsion from Lebanon in August 1982 was the actual reason for the US troops presence in Beirut.

As it happened, the PLO’s decades long presence in southern Lebanon had been the pivotal factor in the escalating tensions that ultimately drew Washington into mediations. The resulting deployment of an international peacekeeping force including the US Marines, in turn, set the stage for Iranian retaliation amid the broader Iran-Iraq War.

As it had happened, the PLO’s establishment in Lebanon transformed the region into a volatile front line. Following the 1967 Six-Day War, where Israel decisively defeated Arab coalitions and occupied the West Bank, Gaza, and other territories, the Palestinian resistance surged. Founded in 1964 and under Yasser Arafat’s leadership from 1969 onwards, the PLO became the umbrella organization for various Palestinian factions seeking to liberate Palestine through armed struggle.

However, internal Arab politics complicated their operations. The PLO originally operated out of Jordan, but its growing military presence led to Black September in 1970. During the ensuing civil war, King Hussein’s forces expelled PLO fighters, killing thousands and forcing survivors to flee.

Many relocated to Lebanon, where huge existing Palestinian refugee camps—established after the 1948 Arab-Israeli War—provided a ready base. Lebanon, however, with its fragile sectarian balance codified in the 1943 National Pact, was ill-equipped to handle this influx, to put it mildly.

Illustrative of the long-arm of history, the 1943 pact had allocated power based on a 1932 census: Maronite Christians held the presidency, Sunni Muslims the premiership, and Shia Muslims the speakership of parliament.

By the 1970s, however, demographic shifts favored Muslims, particularly Shias which populated the south of the country, thereby straining the confessional system. But it was the PLO’s arrival that exacerbated the underlying sectarian tensions to the breaking point, especially after it established a “state within a state” in southern Lebanon, known as “Fatahland”.

This designation was reference to Arafat’s Fatah faction. At length, refugee camps like Rashidieh and Sabra became militarized hubs, housing not just civilians but PLO training facilities, arms depots, and launch sites for cross-border attacks into Israel.

From these camps, PLO fedayeen (guerrillas) conducted raids, rocket attacks and infiltrations targeting Israeli civilians and military outposts. These actions, in turn, provoked Israeli retaliations and often indiscriminate airstrikes and artillery bombardments on Lebanese villages and camps. The resulting large-scale civilian casualties, in turn, naturally fueled resentment among locals, particularly Shias who as the dominant population of southern Lebanon bore the brunt of the Israeli retaliations.

The PLO’s presence also intertwined with Lebanon’s internal sectarian divisions. In 1969, the Cairo Agreement brokered by Egypt’s Nasser granted PLO autonomy in 16 refugee camps, allowing them to bear arms and conduct operations against Israel, provided they respected Lebanese sovereignty.

However, the PLO frequently violated these rules, clashing with Lebanese forces and Christian militias like the Phalange, founded by Pierre Gemayel in 1936 as a Maronite Christian paramilitary.

Not surprisingly, Christians viewed the PLO as a threat to their dominance, while leftist Muslim and Druze factions allied with the PLO against the confessional status quo. So by the mid-1970s, southern Lebanon was a veritable powder keg.

Moreover, the PLO’s Katyusha rocket barrages into northern Israel (Galilee) increasingly disrupted life there, prompting evacuations and risen economic hardships in impacted Israeli communities. So Israel responded with operations like the 1973 Verdun raid in Beirut, killing large numbers of PLO leaders.

This cycle of violence continued to intensify as the decade unfolded, contributing to the outbreak of the Lebanese Civil War in 1975. In April of that year Phalangists ambushed a bus in Ain al-Rummaneh, killing 27 Palestinians, sparking widespread fighting. The PLO sided with the leftist National Movement in retaliation against these Christian attackers, further entrenching its role in Lebanon’s progressive disintegration as a functioning state.

By 1978, Israel launched Operation Litani, invading southern Lebanon up to the Litani River to create a buffer zone, displacing 100,000–250,000 mostly Shia Lebanese and killing hundreds in the process. In response, the PLO withdrew temporarily but returned and rebuilt its fortifications. By 1982 these camps hosted up to 10,000 fighters, launching attacks that killed dozens in Israel annually.

In turn, this set the stage for Israel’s massive 1982 invasion aimed at eradicating the PLO threat once and for all. The Israeli invasion was code-named Operation Peace for Galilee and was a direct response to the PLO’s entrenched presence in the south, but it evolved into a broader campaign under Defense Minister Ariel Sharon’s scorched-earth war plan.

Launched in June 1982, the Sharon-led invasion was aimed to entirely eliminate the PLO infrastructure, expel all Syrian forces and install a pro-Israeli government. This amounted to the fulfillment of a plan long advocated by the militantly hawkish general turned politician to crush the PLO and reshape the region.

In fact, Sharon envisioned an entirely new governance arrangement or “new order” where Bashir Gemayel, the Christian Phalange leader, would become Lebanon’s president and would sign a peace treaty with Israel and sharply curtail Syrian influence.

The Sharon attack began with airstrikes on PLO targets in Beirut and southern Lebanon, followed by a ground invasion involving three divisions: one along the coast to Sidon and Beirut, another through central Lebanon to the Beirut-Damascus highway, and a third engaging Syrians in the Bekaa Valley.

Officially, the goal was a 40-km buffer zone to push PLO rockets out of range of northern Israel, but Sharon expanded it without full cabinet approval, advancing all the way to Beirut by June 1982.

As it unfolded, the Israeli invasion overwhelmed PLO defenses. In southern camps like Rashidieh and Tyre, fedayeen resisted fiercely but were outgunned. Israel captured vast PLO arms caches, including tanks and artillery, thereby attempting to liquidate the “state within a state”.

Civilian casualties were necessarily high given the dense urban environments in which these battles were conducted. Estimates at the time suggested 10,000–20,000 Lebanese and Palestinians died, many in bombings of densely populated areas. The Israeli siege of Beirut, from June to August 1982, involved relentless shelling and the cutting off water and electricity, leading to thousands more deaths.

Crucially, Sharon’s strategy included allying with Christian militias, particularly the Phalange, to avoid urban combat in Beirut. This alliance was rooted in shared anti-PLO sentiments. Israel also clashed with Syrian forces, destroying 82–86 Syrian aircraft in the Bekaa air battles and advancing against Syrian troops.

By mid-June 1982, Israel controlled southern Lebanon and besieged West Beirut, where 6,000–9,000 PLO fighters were trapped. Internationally, of course, the invasion drew widespread condemnation. So while US policy under President Reagan initially reflexively supported Israel, the White House grew increasingly concerned as the civilian death toll mounted into the tens of thousands. At length, President Reagan even halted F-16 deliveries and pushed hard on Israel for a ceasefire.

The ensuing UN resolutions demanded Israeli withdrawal, but the latter ignored them as usual. In this context, the predominantly US manned peacekeeping force had been deployed to oversee the simultaneous PLO evacuation to Tunisia and other North African countries.

Accordingly, from August 21 to September 1, 1982 upwards of 14,400 PLO fighters and officials had been evacuated by sea and land to Tunisia, Yemen, Sudan, and Syria. Arafat departed for Greece, then Tunisia, marking the end of PLO’s Lebanese “state within a state.”

The MNF, which included 800 U.S. Marines from the 32nd Marine Amphibious Unit, had landed August 25 to secure the port and ensure safe PLO passage. With its mission complete by September 10, the MNF then withdrew.

In a narrow sense, the Israeli invasion achieved it short-term goal of expelling the PLO from its border area. However, it failed in any reasonable longer-term sense: There was no peace treaty with Lebanon and the subsequent widespread death and destruction spurred Hezbollah’s rise among Shias resentful of the Israeli occupation.

Moreover, the war deepened Lebanon’s divisions, setting up the conditions for even more traumatic violence immediately after the PLO withdrawal. We are referring to the massacres by the Christian Phalange at the Sabra and Shatila refugees camps, which occurred during September 16 to 18, which was barely a week after the US Marines and international peacekeeping force had left Beirut upon the completion of the PLO withdrawal.

Needless to say, these travesties were among the darkest chapters of the Lebanon War, perpetrated by Christian Phalange militiamen with Israeli complicity.

These events involved the killing of 1,500–3,500 civilians (mostly Palestinians and Lebanese Shias) and were ostensibly what prompted the return of the multinational forces, including U.S. Marines, to stabilize Beirut. Again, however, in all the deliberations at the NSC there was never any showing that what essentially amounted to pulling Israels irons out of the fire of international condemnation had any bearing whatsoever on the America’s Homeland security from sea-to-shinning-sea.

In any event, following the PLO’s evacuation, Israel occupied West Beirut on September 15, violating agreements with both the US and Lebanese government. This move came after the assassination of President-elect Bashir Gemayel on September 14 by a Syrian agent—a further reminder of why the US should not have been involved in this regional hornets nest.

President Gemayel was the hereditary Christian Phalange leader and Israeli ally. His death enraged Phalangists, who blamed Palestinians despite no direct PLO link.

So in retaliation, Sharon authorized Phalange entry into the Sabra neighborhood and Shatila camp to “mop up” remaining PLO fighters, estimated at 200. Israeli forces surrounded the area, illuminated it with flares, and prevented escapes. Phalangists then entered on September 16, unleashing a 36–48 hour rampage of rape, mutilation, and murder. Victims included women, children, and elderly. Bodies were bulldozed into mass graves.

The massacres purportedly avenged Gemayel’s death and earlier Phalange losses. But they were genocidal in intent and effect, targeting Palestinians as a group. Israeli officials knew of the killings by evening of the first day but delayed intervention until several days later. A subsequent Israeli investigation Commission found Sharon indirectly responsible, recommending his removal.

Needless to say, global outrage ensued, followed by UN condemnation and the aforementioned return of the peacekeeping forces which had been withdrawn barely a week earlier. The massacres highlighted the war’s brutality and provided the ostensible justification for the return on September 29th of the international peacekeepers.

Now, however, their mission shifted to stabilizing Beirut, supporting the Lebanese government, and training its army. Again, how this revised mission enhanced the homeland security of America by one iota was never stated.

Moreover, Israel’s continued occupation of southern Lebanon in violation of the UN agreement soon bred strong resistance from diverse Lebanese groups including Druze, Shias, Sunnis, and leftover Palestinians—-all of which united against foreign presence.

The Druze led by Walid Jumblatt’s Progressive Socialist Party (PSP) controlled the Chouf Mountains. Initially neutral, they clashed with Israelis and Christians post-1982, viewing occupation as a threat to Lebanon’s autonomy. Consequently, in 1983 Druze forces defeated Phalangists in the Chouf and took control of the region, displacing 250,000 Christians.

Shia Muslims were Lebanon’s largest sect by the 1980s, and had initially welcomed Israelis for ousting PLO. But they had soon turned hostile due to prolonged occupation and abuses. In this context, a Shia organization called Amal and led by Nabih Berri took the lead in fighting PLO remnants and the Israelis.

At length, however, radical Shia factions broke away from Amal and formed Hezbollah in 1982, and backed by Iran began conducting suicide bombings and guerrilla attacks.

These groups’ resistance prolonged the conflict during the course of 1983, even as the MNF became increasingly perceived to be pro-Israel.

In any event during the first nine months of 1983 about 1,200 US Marines were guarding the Beirut airport as part of a 5,000-strong multinational force. But by then, their mission has drastically shifted from evacuation to peacekeeping amid the civil war factions. Indeed, the MNF had lost neutrality by supporting the Lebanese Army against Druze and Shia militias, making it target for Iranian-backed operatives within the groups.

At this very fraught juncture, however, Washington had tiled toward Iraq to“prevent Iranian victory” in words of the NSC order. Moreover, as we also showed in Part 2, President Reagan had removed Iraq from terrorism list in 1982 and Washington had begun providing Saddam with satellite imagery for targeting Iranian forces on the battlefield, financial aid in the form of $2.5 billion of export credits, access to dual-use technology and authorization for US weapons purchases.

At the end of the day, of course, elements of the imperiled government in Tehran orchestrated the October 23, 1983 bombing of the Marine barracks via a Hezbollah precursor group called Islamic Jihad. But rarely has an exercise in FAFO ended in more tragic and insensible manner.

And yet and yet. Those marines should never have been there because their ever changing mission was always in service to the imperatives of Empire—never to the benefit of America’s Homeland security.

At the end of the day, the template for the untruth of the alleged 47-Years War on America was plainly established by the Beirut bombing. Time and time again, the provocation for conflict with the Iranian regime originated in Washington, not Tehran, as we will further amplify in Part 4.

https://davidstockman.substack.com/p/washingtons-latest-big-lie-irans-2e3