Benghazi, a Brief Prequel for Comparison

Note: this is excerpted with some modifications for brevity and clarity from a longer New Yorker  article by Jane Mayer        

        Around dawn on October 23, 1983, in Beirut, Lebanon,  a suicide bomber drove a truck laden with the equivalent of twenty-one thousand pounds of TNT into the heart of a U.S. Marine compound, killing two hundred and forty-one servicemen. The U.S. military command, had left a vehicle gate wide open, and ordered the sentries to keep their weapons unloaded!

         The only real resistance the suicide bomber had encountered was a scrim of concertina wire. the Marine barracks were flattened. Under  smoking slabs of collapsed concrete,  American voices were begging for help. Thirteen more American servicemen later died from injuries, making it the single deadliest attack on American Marines since the Battle of Iwo Jima. This was horrific, but.......

        Six months before, militants had bombed the U.S. embassy in Beirut, too, killing sixty-three more people, including seventeen Americans. Among the dead were seven C.I.A. officers, including the agency’s top analyst in the Middle East, an immensely valuable intelligence asset, and the Beirut station chief.  No investigation. Compare this to the 4 dead embassy staffers in Benghazi. Let me make this clear: The Reagan administration and those responsible to it in various capacities had a six month warning about the dangers facing Americans in Lebanon. This warning included more than four times the American death toll of Benghazi!  There was every opportunity (and justification) for laying  blame for the horrific losses at high U.S. officials’ feet. There was loss of life precedent six months earlier for enhanced security. Military staff were unprepared, essentially unarmed.

        Unlike today’s Congress, congressmen did not talk of impeaching Ronald Reagan, who was then President, nor were cabinet members subpoenaed.  Just as today, the opposition party controlled the majority in the House. Tip O’Neill, the Democratic Speaker of the House, was no pushover. He, like today’s opposition leaders in the House, demanded an investigation—but a real one, and only one. Instead of a witch hunt/smear campaign for political points,  The US  House  undertook a serious and measured  investigation into what went wrong at the barracks in Beirut, and why. Two months later, it issued a report finding “very serious errors in judgment” by officers on the ground, as well as responsibility up through the military chain of command, and called for better security measures against terrorism in U.S. government installations throughout the world.

       In other words, Congress actually undertook a useful investigation and made helpful recommendations. The report’s findings, by the way, were bipartisan. The Pentagon, too, launched an investigation;  its report was widely accepted by both parties.

        In March of 1984, three months following the closure of the investigation and the issuance of its bi-partisan report,  militants again struck American officials in Beirut, this time kidnapping the C.I.A.’s station chief, Bill Buckley. Buckley was tortured and, eventually, murdered. Reagan, tormented by a tape of Buckley being tortured, blamed himself. Congress held no public hearings, and pointed fingers at the perpetrators, not at political rivals.

        If you compare the costs of the Reagan Administration’s serial (3) security lapses over little more than a year  in Beirut to the costs of Benghazi, it’s clear what has really deteriorated in the intervening three decades. It’s not the security of American government personnel working abroad. It’s the behavior of American congressmen at home.

        The story in Beirut wasn’t over. In September of 1984, for the third time in eighteen months, jihadists bombed a U.S. government outpost in Beirut yet again. President Reagan acknowledged that the new security precautions that had been advocated by Congress hadn’t yet been implemented at the U.S. embassy annex that had been hit. The problem, the President admitted, was that the repairs hadn’t quite been completed on time. As he put it, “Anyone who’s ever had their kitchen done over knows that it never gets done as soon as you wish it would.”  Imagine how Congressmen Trey Gowdy,  Darryl Issa and Fox News would react to a similar explanation from President Obama today!