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Where Do They Go From Here?
We Pulled Out of Beirut. We Can't Abandon Iraq
By Robert Baer
Sunday, August 24, 2003; Page B01
As soon as I heard about the truck bombing of U.N. headquarters in Baghdad on Tuesday, my first thought was, oh, no, here we go again, the nightmare of Beirut, 1983.
The U.N. bombing has all the markings of a professional terrorist attack, the same expertise we saw in Lebanon during the '80s. It even relied on the same delivery system that killed 241 U.S. servicemen in their Beirut barracks on Oct. 23, 1983 -- the bombing that brought U.S. policy in Lebanon to a halt and altered the course of Middle East politics.
Like the one in Beirut, the U.N. truck bomb was expertly placed. It wasn't just designed to do massive damage -- although it did. It hit the office of Sergio Vieira de Mello, the U.N. secretary general's special representative to Iraq, who was killed. Using a suicide bomber ensured that the bomb went exactly where it was supposed to go. The attack may even have been timed to coincide with a news conference underway inside the building so that the bomb would kill as many people as possible. At least 23 died in the blast, and more than 100 were injured.
The truck was packed with enough explosives (more than a thousand pounds of military munitions) to blast through a 12-foot wall. Although the FBI says the bomb itself wasn't particularly sophisticated, I know from experience how difficult it is to string explosives together and make all or most of them detonate at the same time. And remember: This was the second successful bombing in just 13 days. Combine this well-coordinated attack with the Aug. 7 car bombing of the Jordanian embassy, which killed 17, and it is starting to look as if we are up against a lot more than the "remnants" of Saddam Hussein's regime.
One bomb is an outrage. Two bombs are a campaign. Anybody who was dealing with the Middle East in the early '80s can tell you exactly when things began to change: April 18, 1983, the day a suicide bomber drove a beat-up GMC pickup truck through the front door of the U.S. Embassy in Beirut and detonated it. The blast killed 63, including 17 Americans.
I was working for the CIA in the Middle East at the time. As best we were able to figure out, the target of the attack was Ambassador Philip Habib, the president's special representative to the Middle East. Habib, who was trying to help negotiate a truce between Lebanon and Israel, was not in the embassy when the bomb went off. But the bombing had a larger goal than killing Habib: As we later realized, it was the opening shot in a well-coordinated and well-financed effort that eventually drove the United States out of Lebanon. After the second suicide bombing at the barracks, President Ronald Reagan ordered the Marines "re-deployed" off shore.
The United States had less of a commitment in Lebanon, and it pulled out quickly when things got ugly. But Iraq is a situation we have created, and for that reason -- and because of Iraq's central role in the Persian Gulf -- we must stay and see it through.
Those of us who lived through the Lebanon horror can't help wondering whether Beirut 1983 is a template for what's happening in Iraq. While Iraq isn't Lebanon, there are enough similarities that we should be worried. Starting with the obvious, unaccounted for weapons and explosives abound in Iraq, as they did in Lebanon. Secondly, neither Lebanon then nor Baghdad now has a functioning government. At the start of the Lebanese civil war in 1975, that country's government collapsed. By 1983, there was no army or police to protect our embassy, let alone an effective internal intelligence service to warn us of possible attacks.
Iraq today is probably worse off than Lebanon was in 1983. There is not even the skeleton of an army or a police force. Members of the U.S.-appointed Iraqi Governing Council now claim they warned us of a bombing, possibly aimed at the United Nations. But don't forget the council includes some of the same people who were telling us that Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction, deployed and ready for his orders. The only intelligence in Iraq that we can count on is our own.
Both Iraq and Lebanon are fractured societies, deeply divided by ethnic and religious differences. Foreigners have tended to get caught up in these conflicts, inevitably paying a price in blood. In 1983, Lebanon's Christian Maronites, who once ruled Lebanon, were fighting for their survival, while Lebanese Muslims were fighting to take their place. Because the Muslims thought the United States was propping up the Maronites, we became the Muslims' target.
When Baghdad fell on April 9, we put ourselves into the middle of the same sort of violent social conflict. By invading Iraq and removing Saddam, the United States in effect deposed the ruling Sunni Arab minority, about 20 percent of Iraq's population. In case there was any doubt about the end to Sunni power, the coalition made it final on May 16 when it banned senior Baath Party members from public office and then dissolved the army on May 23 -- targeting the two organizations through which the Sunni Arabs had ruled. Having destroyed Iraq's political balance, we can pretty much count on taking casualties.
So why was the U.N. headquarters hit rather than an American target? After all, the group behind the U.N. bombing could have easily run the same truck into an American patrol, killing dozens of soldiers. Again, I go back to Lebanon, 1983. The terrorists' objective then was to create a sense of complete hopelessness in Washington. They wanted to show the Americans that no amount of military might, money or international assistance would help -- that U.S. deaths would be in vain and that the only logical response was to pull out.
If the people behind the U.N. bombing are the same ones who are responsible for last week's sabotage of Baghdad's water main and the oil pipeline to Turkey, this may very well be their plan. By attacking the United Nations and other indirect targets, they are probably attempting to drive away any potential international investment. They want the Bush administration to feel isolated. They also are willing to let ordinary Iraqis, who bear the brunt of the campaign, suffer. The terrorists regard this as unfortunate but unavoidable. They think in the long term.
If things go from bad to worse in Iraq, Washington will want to blame outside agitators. It will be hard to admit that the Iraqis have turned against the occupation. We saw this happen in Lebanon: The Reagan administration convinced itself that Syria was behind the attacks on the embassy and the Marines. It came close to fighting a real war when a U.S. battleship shelled Syrian military positions around Beirut. As it turned out, it was the Lebanese (with Iranian financial backing) who had carried out the bombings against us.
It is still too early to tell how much outsiders are involved in Iraq. With the Lebanon template in mind, I tried to get a sense of this earlier this year, in the weeks running up to the war. I was on contract with ABC News at the time. My first meeting was with Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah, the Lebanese Shiite cleric accused of issuing a fatwa that encouraged the Beirut embassy bombing. We met at his Sitt Zaynab mosque office, outside Damascus. One reason Fadlallah kept an office there was to court the support of Iraqi Shiite exiles, who also had offices in the area. I thought Fadlallah might have a good idea of what was going on in Iraq.
My first question was whether he or other Islamic leaders would declare a jihad against the United States if it invaded Iraq. "We don't need to," he said. "The Iraqi people will spontaneously rise in opposition to a U.S. invasion." When I pressed him about whether he thought fighters from other countries would go to Iraq, he said some would -- but in the end, it would be Iraqis themselves who would expel the coalition.
I also talked to Munir Makdah, a member of Yasser Arafat's Fatah movement and a leader of the Islamic Resistance Movement in Lebanon -- the same resistance that forced Israel to withdraw from Lebanon in 2000. Makdah was less guarded than Fadlallah. He said he intended to send fighters to Iraq, and if the coalition managed to occupy the country, a relentless jihad would ensue. To make his point, Makdah handed me a document circulating on the Internet that called for a jihad against the United States.
Whether you believe Fadlallah or Makdah, or even that "remnants" of the regime are behind the latest attacks, my sense is that we are in for a rougher time in Iraq.
One of the lucky ones to survive Tuesday's bombing, Ghassan Salame, shares this view. Salame, my professor at the Sorbonne years ago and a minister in the Lebanese government until this year, was working for the U.N. mission and had left Vieira de Mello's office just before the bomb went off.
When we talked in March, he declined to predict how the war would go, but he was certain the United States would end up in the middle of a violent social upheaval. By removing Saddam, he said, we would disenfranchise the Sunni ruling elite. Smashing Iraq's already fractured society would lead to sustained violence, he warned, at least until a new balance is found.
"But you know," Salame said, as best I can recall the conversation, "you can't just get up and walk away from Iraq like you did Lebanon. No matter how bad it gets. If Iraq turns into anarchy, it's likely to spill into the rest of the Gulf. It would be a catastrophe."
Salame is right, of course. Leaving Iraq now, in a state of anarchy, would lead to civil war. And then almost anything could happen, from pulling in Iran to spreading chaos to the Arab sheikdoms of the Gulf -- which, by the way, control something like 60 percent of the world's oil reserves. No matter how tough things get, we cannot leave Iraq until it is mended.
Robert Baer is a former CIA officer who served in the Middle East for 21 years, leaving the agency in 1997. His book "Sleeping With the Devil: How Washington Sold Our Soul for Saudi Crude" (Crown) was published last month. |
