“To this date, no one can point to the true culprits with any great deal of certainty. Iran may have had an indirect role in the attacks, but in my opinion, the evidence is not conclusive. (…) In my opinion, the attacks were most likely the result of the anger of Lebanese Muslims, particularly that of Shiites, toward the United States and France. The poor neighborhoods of West Beirut and around the airport is where Muslims live, while most Shiites live in southern Lebanon, which had been occupied by Israel. The Lebanese Muslims viewed the U.S. and French forces not as peacekeepers in the Lebanese civil war, but just as a faction in the civil war supporting the Maronite Christians.”
Muhammad Sahimi : The Fog over the 1983 Beirut Attacks — Frontline (October 2009)
“On August 29, before the airport truck bombing, two Marines had been killed by Muslim mortar fire; on September 3, two more, and on October 16, two more. Against Weinberger’s protest, McFarlane, now in Beirut, persuaded the President to have the battleship U.S.S. New Jersey start hurling 16-inch shells into the mountains above Beirut, in World War II style, as if we were softening up the beaches on some Pacific atoll prior to an invasion. What we tend lo overlook in such situations is that other people will react much as we would. When the shells started falling on the Shiites, they assumed the American “referee” had taken sides against them. And since they could not reach the battleship, they found a more vulnerable target, the exposed Marines at the airport.”
General Colin Powell — Reaction to the Beirut Marine Barracks bombing
“We still do not have the actual knowledge of who did the bombing of the Marine barracks at the Beirut Airport, and we certainly didn’t then.”
Caspar Weinberger — Secretary of Defense in the Reagan administration from 1981 to 1987 (September 2001)
On October 23 2018, Secretary Mike Pompeo tweeted: “35 years ago, 241 Marines, Sailors & Soldiers were killed in Beirut, Lebanon, by an Iranian-trained Hizballah terrorist. We will never forget these heroes who came in peace and gave their lives that awful day.” Not everyone agrees with Pompeo’s message. Follow us on Twitter: @INTEL_TODAY Continue reading →
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