October 26, 2003	Sunday	Sha’aban 29, 1424

WASHINGTON: It’s been 20 years since suicide bombers drove a truckload of explosives into the US Marine barracks in Lebanon, killing 241 American soldiers in the Beirut compound.

The event was commemorated in small ceremonies around the country on Thursday, from Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, where the 8th Marine Regiment is headquartered, to the nation’s national military cemetery at Arlington, Virginia.

The attack on October 23, 1983, marked the first major suicide terrorist attack on a US facility. In a separate attack on the same day, 58 French soldiers were killed in their Beirut compound.

While the dead soldiers were remembered, some observers were prompted to draw parallels to the current US involvement in Iraq, where US soldiers occupying the country are once again under attack by angry Muslims.

“For anyone with a sense of history, the recent suicide bombings in Iraq carry with them haunting memories of the ... destruction of the US Marine barracks in Beirut,” Lawrence Pintak wrote in the Detroit Free Press.

“Americans like to say that on September 11, 2001, ‘everything changed’. In fact, the real turning point came 20 years ago.”

The United States, France and Italy had sent peacekeeping forces to Lebanon at the request of the government, which was struggling to contain the conflict between warring Muslim and Christian factions.

Robin Wright, a correspondent for the Los Angeles Times and one of the leading Mideast experts in the US, recalled in an interview with the Cable News Network (CNN) how she heard the explosion from just 10 kilometres away.

She said that US military officers had been bracing for such an attack after US warships had been ordered to open artillery on Muslim militias around the city. One officer “protested because the Americans had been deployed as peacekeepers, not to get engaged in what was then a raging civil war in Lebanon”, she said.

Within six months of the barracks bombing, US troops were pulled out of Lebanon. In an echo of that act more than a decade later, Washington pulled out its troops from another Muslim country, Somalia, after they came under attack.

Looking back, many Middle East experts say the withdrawals broadcast a spineless image of the United States as a superpower that wilts in the face of violent resistance, and encouraged further attacks like the bombings of the US embassies in Africa and the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington.

US President George Bush has referred to that image.

“The terrorists have cited the examples of Beirut and Somalia, claiming that if you inflict harm on Americans we will run from a challenge,” Bush has said. “In this, they are mistaken.”

The major suspect in the Beirut bombing, Imad Fayez Mugniyah, has never been caught, though he has been indicted for his role in planning and carrying out a 1985 airliner hijacking that ended with the murder of a US citizen.

Muginiyah was the reported head of the security apparatus for the terrorist organization, Lebanese Hezbollah, the FBI says. There is a 25-million-dollar reward for his capture.

Defence Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld was appointed as a special envoy to the Middle East by then-president Ronald Reagan after the Beirut attacks.

On Thursday, Rumsfeld described what he had learned much from the experience.

“The only way to defeat terrorists is to take the war to them,” he said, “to go after them where they are, where they live, where they plan, where they hide — go after their finances, go after the people who harbour and assist them.”—dpa