Alasdair Soussi: Déjà Vu in Beirut ... Lebanon’s current political crisis is eerily reminiscent of the crisis of 1958
[Alasdair Soussi is a journalist based in the Middle East.]
AS HIZB’ALLAH demonstrated its political and military dominance over Lebanon in early May, it’s doubtful that anyone in the Bush Administration seriously even entertained the thought that American military intervention was called for. Although the Lebanese proxy of the Iranian and Syrian arms of the “Axis of Evil” was consolidating its strategic grip on the Land of the Cedars, the United States, heavily committed in Iraq, could hardly contemplate getting involved in another Middle Eastern adventure.
And yet, twice before in the last 50 years, American presidents have sent in the Marines to save the situation in Lebanon. In 1982, after the Israeli invasion and the siege of Beirut, President Ronald Reagan dispatched them as part of the UN Peacekeeping force. That mission ended in tragedy, after a Hizb’Allah suicide bomber drove a truck into the Marine barracks in October 1983, killing 241 US personnel.
The earlier Marine intervention took place 50 years ago, in 1958, when President Dwight D. Eisenhower invoked the doctrine bearing his name and acted to thwart a perceived communist threat — in the form of Nasserite Pan-Arab nationalism — in the Middle East.
From the American landing onwards, it soon became clear that Eisenhower’s boulder had been used to crack a nut. Several thousand deaths notwithstanding, Lebanon’s first civil war was never likely to lead to outright revolution and complete collapse, nor was it the stirrings of international communism, to which the Eisenhower Doctrine was specifically aimed...
Read entire article at Egypt Today
AS HIZB’ALLAH demonstrated its political and military dominance over Lebanon in early May, it’s doubtful that anyone in the Bush Administration seriously even entertained the thought that American military intervention was called for. Although the Lebanese proxy of the Iranian and Syrian arms of the “Axis of Evil” was consolidating its strategic grip on the Land of the Cedars, the United States, heavily committed in Iraq, could hardly contemplate getting involved in another Middle Eastern adventure.
And yet, twice before in the last 50 years, American presidents have sent in the Marines to save the situation in Lebanon. In 1982, after the Israeli invasion and the siege of Beirut, President Ronald Reagan dispatched them as part of the UN Peacekeeping force. That mission ended in tragedy, after a Hizb’Allah suicide bomber drove a truck into the Marine barracks in October 1983, killing 241 US personnel.
The earlier Marine intervention took place 50 years ago, in 1958, when President Dwight D. Eisenhower invoked the doctrine bearing his name and acted to thwart a perceived communist threat — in the form of Nasserite Pan-Arab nationalism — in the Middle East.
From the American landing onwards, it soon became clear that Eisenhower’s boulder had been used to crack a nut. Several thousand deaths notwithstanding, Lebanon’s first civil war was never likely to lead to outright revolution and complete collapse, nor was it the stirrings of international communism, to which the Eisenhower Doctrine was specifically aimed...