“The war was costing the Israelis billions of dollars and heavy casualties; the occupation of southern Lebanon brought worldwide denunciation; Israel’s inflation rate was 400 percent annually; and Israel’s body politic was badly split between hawks and doves. Still, Israel would not retire from Lebanon.” (1)
You’d almost think this quotation is about Israel’s deadly strike on Lebanon yesterday, or its attacks on Gaza, but it’s written by American historians Ambrose and Brinkley describing Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982. Israel invaded and occupied southern Lebanon under the guise of targeting the PLO, the Palestine Liberation Organization, but in reality, it was guided by its expansionist ideology based on the concept that its security is boosted by controlling more land.
What’s relevant here—beyond Israel’s expansionist ideology—is that neither the economic damage, nor the PR disaster, changed Israel’s behavior. This is why making predictions based on, e.g., the recent Pew poll showing the negative view of Israel among younger Americans may be of limited use.
The second noteworthy issue here was the U. S. cooperation with Israel. President Reagan committed the U. S. Marines to fighting in Lebanon in August 1982. What began as a peacekeeping mission as part of the Multinational Force, officially meant to stabilize the situation, such as the PLO’s withdrawal, turned into a dangerous ordeal, including the October 1983 Marine barracks bombing. The latter resulted in 241 American casualties.
According to Ambrose and Brinkley, by sending in these troops, the Reagan administration “had blundered in Lebanon as badly as Carter had blundered in Iran.” (2) The U. S. withdrew in February 1984. Of course, the U. S. had, and continues to have, its own interests in the Middle East. However, this 1982-84 disaster—decades before the present U. S. / Israeli war against Iran—raised questions about the extent to which Israel uses the U. S. to solve its own security issues—or imperial designs—real or imagined, at the expense of the U. S.
Source: Steven E. Ambrose and Douglas Brinkley, Rise to Globalism: American Foreign Policy Since 1938, the 2010 digital edition, pp. 309, 311.
