Now that some Republicans are predictably demanding that Joe Biden atone for the terrorist deaths of 13 U.S. military servicemen by resigning forthwith, it’s only appropriate that we turn back the clock to 1983. Just to give us some perspective.
I’m well aware that when it comes to foreign policy history, most Americans have the attention spans of gnats. But I was alive and attentive back in the day, so here goes:
Ronald Reagan, having declared that securing the Middle East was in our national interest, had dispatched troops to tumultuous Lebanon. But on Oct. 23, 1983, a suicide bomber drove a truck into a U.S. compound in Beirut. Within seconds, the truck detonated the largest non-nuclear explosion since World War II; in the words of a former U.S. Army attache in Beirut, the bombing was “the Pearl Harbor of the Middle East.”
The death toll was 241 U.S. Marines.
Two hundred and forty one. The single largest loss of U.S. military personnel since Iwo Jima.
In response, members of both parties on Capitol Hill – Democrats as well as Republicans – rallied around the Republican president. He was buttressed, just two days after the Beirut bombing, by his successful invasion of teeny tiny Grenada; press censorship on the ground in Grenada, and a compliant Washington press corps, helped sell the happy outcome to the American people (complete with a televised White House ceremony of Reagan greeting medical students who’d been “rescued” from Grenada) – thus diverting attention from the humiliation in Beirut.
Buoyed by the success in Grenada, Reagan vowed to hunt down the Beirut terrorists (“to find out who did it and go after them with everything we’ve got”). But no retaliatory attack ever took place.
These were simpler, more bipartisan times. Reagan took minimal heat for doing nothing. In fact, everyone was still rallying around Reagan when he vowed on February 4, 1984 to keep the Marines in Lebanon – because, in his words, a pullout would be tantamount to “surrender.” Yes, he said, it was dangerous to stay, “but that is no reason to turn our backs and to cut and run.”
Any readers remember what Reagan did next, on February 7?
He cut and ran. He pulled out all the Marines.
But still he suffered virtually no partisan backlash from the Dems, or from the pre-Internet press – even though he played word games in public, framing the pullout as a mere “redeployment.” Nobody in the loyal opposition demanded his resignation; nobody wrote an ’84 version of a hot take declaring that the deaths of 241 Marines in Beirut would hurt him politically and imperil his prospects in the ’84 re-election campaign.
Nine months after the pullout, after a campaign where Beirut was rarely mentioned and never exploited as a political issue (because voters didn’t know about it or forgot about it or didn’t care about it), Reagan won re-election with ease.
Surely you catch my drift.
—
Bonus history:
It’s a darn good thing that Winston Churchill didn’t have to contend with social media back in 1940, when he suffered 3,500 dead British soldiers and forfeited 76,000 tons of ammo to the Nazis during the mass evacuation from Dunkirk.