British soldiers give assist with rescue operations at the bomb-wrecked U.S. Marine command center near Beirut airport on Oct. 23, 1983. Imad Mughniyeh, the militant accused of attacks that left hundreds of Americans and Israelis dead, has been killed, Hezbollah said Feb. 13. The attack on the Marine base in Lebanon killed more than 260 Americans. Bill Foley / The Associated Press War By Other Names -- City Journal
Twenty-six years after the Beirut bombing, the struggle against militant Islam continues.
In Beirut, 26 years ago today, the era of mass terror for Americans began with a big bang—and a smile. The bang came from 19 tons of explosives in a suicide truck bomb that demolished a four-story compound housing the U.S. Multinational Peacekeeping Force, a contingent of Marines who had been trying to keep a nonexistent peace in Lebanon for nearly a year. Two minutes later, a second truck bomb struck the French paratroopers across town, killing 58. By the time I arrived in Beirut from Cairo the following day, rescue workers from several countries were still struggling to free our wounded and dying soldiers from the debris. That night, I interviewed a Marine who had been guarding the entry post and who remembered only one thing about the driver of the Mercedes that had rammed through the compound’s concrete barriers: the young man with a beard, who turned out to be a 24-year-old Shiite Muslim, was smiling.
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My Comment: 26 years later, and we are still waiting for justice ....