"The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones." -- William Shakespeare, Mark Anthony's funeral oration in "Julius Caesar"There were two parts to what Reagan did:
-- He reversed Jimmy Carter's executive order and formed an alliance with Saddam Hussein as a material ally during the Iran-Iraq War, then
-- Slaughtered Lebanese civilians using five ships of naval guns plus, later on, adding the battleship New Jersey. 1,500 murders with major blow back by invoking "just retaliation" in local law.
Add it all up and Reagan likely killed a couple thousand Lebanese on his personal orders. He gave critical assistance to Saddam that upped the death toll of Iranians by tens of thousands.
Yet Reagan is remembered with a Cult of Personality. Troops that entered Lebanon as United Nations Peacekeepers became part of an extraordinary naval gunnery exercise. But in the Ad Biz version of that reality, Reagan killed no one. He is a Perfect Man, close to being a "god."
Republicans tell everyone who will listen that they are the party of God. In America's Red States this is a revered declaration, a connection of God with conservative slogans. But over in Lebanon on the eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea there is another Party of God. Taken phonetically from the Arabic that is the Hizb Allah.
No question, the folks in Lebanon play by local rules. Their responses to rights and wrongs go back to a world a full millennium prior to America's revolution against England. Their name as we are used to seeing it printed is odd, at best: "Hezbollah." For Americans they are hard to understand.
We can do worse, here, than applying the lesson from Shakespeare. "The evil that men do lives after them." Reagan's murders and his alliance with Saddam Hussein quite directly produced the terrorist wing of the Hizb Allah.
The Hizb Allah was founded in 1985, a living response to the violent deaths of 20,000 Lebanese and Palestinians. In 1982, September 16-19, some 3,500 mostly unarmed people were slaughter at Beirut by Christian militia (with Israeli outside support) at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps. The men folk, PLO fighters, had been put on ships and moved out of Port of Beirut earlier on. Then American Marines had gone too, returning to their Navy ships.
By November of 1982 Reagan had sided with the same Christians who had carried out the refugee camp slaughters.
From late 1982 into mid-1984 President Reagan had full scale naval barrages fired from the main guns of offshore U.S. Navy warships. These fell on residential areas, killing 1,500 people.
American press covered the very least of it then. When bodies piled up in large scale slaughter, the ongoing civil war was cited. No American news organization reported what was happening under the United States naval barrages. When battleship New Jersey fired 288 16-inch shells in one day and then 290 rounds, America's news organizations reported none of it.
That enough for corporate media supporting evil for you ???
Photos from the refugee camps shocked the Arab world. Seeing children's bodies with their throats cut exceeded anything that came out later of Abu Ghraib in Iraq. Same for the mangled bodies and body parts from Reagan's slaughters using 5" and then 16" naval guns. Count these as 5,000 murders; the other 15,000 Arab dead from violence from that period can remain open cases.
These murders triggered "just retaliation" under Islamic law -- which was carried out first with truck bombs against the American embassy in Beirut (January 1983) and then Marine BLT Barracks and French paratroopers (October 1983) and finally Israelis down at Tyre (November 1983.)
Reagan gave up the fight. He spoke as though bravely, then turned tail and ran away out of Lebanon. He did keep ships offshore, adding the battleship New Jersey to the line, pounding away and killing Lebanese for another six months.
By July of 1985 the Lebanese and their Iranians allies (who had made the big truck bombings possible) were able to found their Party of God. After three years of brutality and mass murder, what else would you expect?
The Hizb Allah's raison d'etre is stated without equivocation:
We declare openly and loudly that we are a (people) which fears God only and is by no means ready to tolerate injustice, aggression and humiliation. America, its Atlantic Pact allies [and Israel]... invaded our country, destroyed our villages, slit the throats of our children, violated our sanctuaries and... committed the worst massacres against our (people).They are not exaggerating about the massacres. They are not pushing hokum.
"Just retaliation" for such murders goes way back as a principle of law. This was a fundamental element in Torah for another millennium before the stories of Abraham were borrowed over to form the Koran. This is lex talionis:"an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a life for a life." Under the law of Islam, this becomes a religious obligation.
Hezbollah lives on today as a Shakespearean legacy from the great evils that were done against Lebanese Druze and Muslims. The bigger share of blame goes to President Reagan, loosely shared with others. The organization's covert action wing bloodies Lebanon with dozens of assassinations. They terrorize the Mediterranean. Recently their terror wing figured out that killing Israeli tourists is easier than killing Israeli high officials.
In any case the Hizb Allah has to be a major part of the legacy of Ronald Reagan. If he had not removed 800 American troops from Beirut after the PLO fighters were embarked and sent away, then no one in Lebanon -- literally, no one -- believes that the Christian militias would have dared slaughter the Palestinian camp dwellers. Those killings spread out over three days, September 16th through the 19th, so surely a modern army could have intervened. In addition, Reagan and Reagan alone was responsible for ordering the naval bombardments. Only a Commander in Chief can unleash naval guns and fire thousand of rounds, month after month, to level houses and small apartment buildings.
But Lebanon don't exist no more. It's out of the approved corporate geography.
The four American deaths in Libya, however, get story after iffy story. That "60 Minutes" piece from the liar is typical. Any lying, plagiarizing, Arab-damning talking head can get air time to rewrite history. At no point, ever, does our corporate press risk a comparison between Reagan in Lebanon and Obama in Libya.
The 268 dead Marines from Lebanon don't exist. (241 of them killed at the Barracks bombing.)
The Hizb Allah don't exist no more. Not in America. There's a mad man organization called "Hezbollah" and it's totally insane. Of course it is.
Sabra and Shatila didn't happen no more. Those slaughters never did happen in American media, so that one's easy.
Reagan is the Perfect Man. That could be seen as a hoax, of course. The Ad Biz guys who did PR for Reagan had it working by the middle of his first term in office. "Teflon Ronnie" was the joke. Almost everyone... not quite everyone got on board.
Clark Clifford described Ronald Reagan in 1980 as "an amiable dunce" after meeting him at a Georgetown dinner party. For domestic politics, Clifford could not have made a worse assessment. Reagan worked hard to trick his opponents and get them to underestimate him. Then when it mattered, he cunningly ruined them at the various games of electoral politics.
In Lebanon, at war, Reagan was out of his element. He was overwhelmed. Tactical issues were resolved inappropriately; out-of-control allies ignored his efforts at leadership. There was no exit strategy. Firing naval guns at civilians is not how you do "Peacekeeper." The Multinational Force motto "We come in peace" disappeared.
Instead of reaching out more widely to get help, Reagan delegated executive power to incompetents. He and his political cronies fell over to acting out slogans: "Teach them a lesson,""Peace through superior firepower,""A big enough explosion solves any military problem."
The "amiable" part went lost; "dunce" will remain arguable.
America made the Hezbollah list of prime targets. The Iranians were already on board after Reagan reversed policy from Jimmy Carter and started supplying Saddam Hussein for the ongoing Iran-Iraq War. Reagan's new BFF used conventional weapons and nerve gas to kill Iranian civilians. Just like Syria in 2013.
Reagan missed the core of what was happening in Lebanon. In a television speech four days after the Barracks bombing, Reagan misrepresented what he did know. No one corrected him.
No one at CIA was assigned to build a detailed cause-and-effect chain model for what was happening in Lebanon and Iran. Careerists defended what Ronnie said against all evidence.
The world did not have Wikileaks. There was no Internet. No GoPro. No one had the guts of a Manning or a Snowden or a means to put out the facts inside America if they had wanted to.
The naval gunnery killings went all but unreported in America. A handful of Arabic publications posted one-day casualty reports. Not one organization from the U.S. had reporting resources up in the hills -- plus the AP and UPI feeds were shut out.
Meanwhile, out in the Arab and Persian parts of the world, photos of victims' bodies and shattered blocks of houses made the rounds. Some of those images had been recorded by Iranian military photographers.
Collateral murders be damned.
Republicans -- arguably coextensive with "Reagan worshipers" -- respond today to written surveys with answers that indicate that they have no idea what Reagan did in Lebanon. Not that anyone in America knows much; the popular history that appears on television and in print media has erased these events. How long since we have heard of the Sabra and Shatila massacres ? Despite that these hands-on slaughters of unarmed civilians were body-for-body on a scale with the 9/11 suicide-hijacking attacks.
How many English speaking people anywhere connect Reagan's use of naval guns with the Iranian Revolutionary Guard-Lebanese team carrying out the destruction of the Marine BLT Barracks at Beirut Airport and a French paratroop barracks ??? The October 23rd, 1983, attacks.
Party of God -- the Hizb Allah
We're talking a group that effectively controls 2,000,000 people.
The prestige that Iranian Republican Guard ("IRG") and their Shia allies earned with the "just retaliation" martyrdom bombings in 1983 made all the difference. That was the rallying point to consolidate Lebanon's Shia militias.
Their defining Open Letter includes specific commitments to Iran's Grand Ayatollah. IRG also got to move a cadre of 1,500 picked troops over to Lebanon to stay.
Americans out. Persians in. Still there.
Thank you, Ronald Reagan !
For details of the "Teach them a lesson" strategy, "Paper Tiger" Reagan, if you want to read more follow below the orange muffin.
What we're getting to is simple enough: Shakespeare explains the root causes for the Shia half of modern Islamic terrorism. Keep in mind that no one, ever, from the American side has apologized for the murders in Lebanon and for helping Saddam Hussein. Of course not, that would not be evil.
(Btw and before the jump: General Patton used artillery to flatten villages during WW II. The General took a serious dislike to German snipers. Anybody know whether Ronald Reagan pictured himself in a prop-department general's uniform? The better to perform his Commander in Chief role in-character as George Patton ?)