Like so many Americans, when I got up this morning, I prepared my coffee, lit my first cigarette (yeah, I know) and checked the news on the Fox website. As I scanned the news, one of the first articles that caught my eye  had headline, “U.S. to close Embassy in Yemen”, I read the story and like any good American, became outraged. Later, I came back to re read the story and the lead had changed; now it was “U.S., U.K. Shut Embassies in Yemen Over Terror Threats” http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,581803,00.html (last visited Jan. 3,10) and realized that America has finally lived up Osama bin Laden’s view that the United States is a “paper tiger”. He was inspired to make this observation after the U.S.’s rapid withdrawal of peacekeeping forces from Lebanon and Somalia after suffering casualties. Now we are closing an embassy in Yemen, because of a THREAT!

I wonder if our current administration really thinks that this move will keep America safe from terrorism. Just like did President Jimmy Carter think that after Nov. 4, 1979, when fifty-two American citizens were taken hostage by militant students of radical Islam stormed the U.S. Embassy in Tehran? His immediate response was to order a complete embargo of Iranian oil. Later, he placed stronger economic embargoes on Iran. Then in April, 1980, his ultimate response, severing diplomatic relations with Iran after negotiations for the hostages' release failed. Granted, Carter did make an attempt for rescue, but that cost 8 American service men their lives. Strange, that the attempt came during the election period, and Carter’s poll numbers were tanking. Was it political? Should action have been done sooner? It took the election of President Reagan and the possibility of military force to finally get our hostages released after 444 days of captivity. Then to add insult to the to the humiliation of the Iranian hostage crisis, Iran elects one of the leaders of the takeover as “president”, and what does the U.S. do, nothing, not a word.

Some thought that when President Reagan was elected, American interests overseas might be safer, and for a time it was. When Reagan received intelligence reports in May 1981, that Libyan leader Muammar el-Qaddafi had plans to assassinate American diplomats in Rome and Paris, he expelled all Libyan diplomats from the U.S. and closed Libya's diplomatic mission in Washington, D.C. Just like the Iraq war under President Bush, some alleged that the U.S. exaggerated the terrorist threat from Libya, in part because Libya was an easy target.  Libya was and still is considered a minor player in the Middle East with no steadfast allies. U.S. officials denied Libya was used as a scapegoat, maintaining that it posed a credible terrorist threat against U.S. targets and that Libya had sufficient oil funds to mount a significant attack on U.S. interests. Then three months later, Reagan ordered U.S. Navy jets to shoot down Libyan fighters if they ventured inside what was known as the "line of death.” This line created by Qaddafi to demarcate Libya's territorial waters, which he said extended more than 100 miles off the country's shoreline; the U.S. and other maritime nations recognized Libyan territorial waters as extending only 12 miles from shore. As expected, the Libyan Air Force counter-attacked and Navy jets shot down two SU-22 warplanes about 60 miles off the Libyan coast. President Reagan proved to America and the world, that America was a force to be feared by the terrorists.

Then two years later, things began to change. Did politics start to end Reagan’s war on terror?  In April 18, 1983, a suicide bomber drove a pickup truck loaded with explosives into the U.S. Embassy in Beirut, Lebanon. This terrorist attack cost sixty-three people their lives. Among the dead were 17 Americans, eight of whom were employees of the Central Intelligence Agency, including chief Middle East analyst Robert C. Ames and station chief Kenneth Haas. Even though Reagan administration officials said that the attack was carried out by Hezbollah operatives, a Lebanese militant Islamic group whose anti-U.S. sentiments were sparked in part by the revolution in Iran and the operatives, who carried out the attack on the embassy reportedly, were receiving financial and logistical support from both Iran and Syria. According to retired Marine Lt. Col. Bill Cowan, a covert military team entered Beirut in order to gather intelligence in preparation for retaliatory strikes. But, the U.S. government took no military action.

Later in 1983, a contingent of 1,800 Marines were sent to Lebanon as part of a multinational force to help separate the warring Lebanese factions. This was not the first time U.S. troops were deployed to Lebanon, twice before, in the early 1980s, U.S. troops were sent to Lebanon to deal with the fall-out from the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon. In the first deployment, Marines helped oversee the peaceful withdrawal of the PLO from Beirut. Then on Oct. 23, 1983, a truck loaded with the equivalent of six tons of TNT was driven by a Muslim terrorist down the airport road in Beirut, Lebanon. This terrorist plowed into the four-story barracks where more than 300 U.S. troops from a U.N. peacekeeping mission slept and detonated what the FBI would call the largest non-nuclear bomb in history. The explosion and fireball pulverized the concrete fortress killing 241 American servicemen (220 Marines, 16 Navy personnel, and 3 Army soldiers). It was the deadliest single-day death toll for the Marines since the World War II battle of Iwo Jima and the deadliest for the U.S. military since the 1968 Tet offensive in Vietnam. Minutes later a second blast struck the compound of the French peacekeeping force and killed 58 more Western troops.

Following this terrorist attack, Reagan assembled his national security team to devise a plan of military action. The planned target was the Sheik Abdullah barracks in Baalbek, Lebanon. This barracks housed the Iranian Revolutionary Guards believed to been involved in the training of Hezbollah fighters. Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger aborted the mission, reportedly because of his concerns that it would harm U.S. relations with other Arab nations. Instead, President Reagan ordered the battleship USS New Jersey, stationed off the coast of Lebanon, to fire on the hills near Beirut. The move was seen as largely ineffective. Four months after the Marine barracks bombing, the Marines were ordered to start pulling out of Lebanon. Later, Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger would say in an interview with Frontline in September, 2001, “that the U.S. still lacks "actual knowledge of who did the bombing" of the Marine barracks. But it suspected Hezbollah, believed to be supported in part by Iran and Syria. Hezbollah denied its involvement….well DUH!

On Dec. 12, 1983, a series of bombing attacks took place on targets that included the American embassy, the French embassy, the control tower at the airport, the country's main oil refinery, and a residential area for employees of the American corporation Raytheon in Kuwait. Six people were killed, including a suicide truck bomber, and more than 80 others were injured. The suspects were thought to be members of Al Dawa, or "The Call," an Iranian-backed group and one of the principal Shiite groups operating against Saddam Hussein in Iraq. Again, the U.S. military took no action in retaliation.

In Aukar, northeast of Beirut, on Sept. 20, 1984, a truck bomb exploded outside the U.S. Embassy annex killing 24 people, including 2 U.S. military personnel. In the U.S. State Department's 1999 report on terrorist organizations, elements of Hezbollah are "known or suspected to have been involved" in the bombing. Again, the U.S. mounted no military response to the embassy annex bombing, but it did begin to explore covert operations in Lebanon. According to investigative journalist Bob Woodward, the CIA trained foreign intelligence agents to act as "hit teams" designed to destroy the terrorists' operations. Ambassador Robert Oakley says the U.S. merely attempted to set up a "protective unit," a Lebanese counterterrorist strike force. Unfortunately, President Reagan and the CIA called off covert operations when Lebanese intelligence operatives -- some allegedly trained by the U.S. -- set off a car bomb on March 8, 1985, in an attempted murder of Sheik Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah, the Shiite Muslim cleric who some believed to be the spiritual leader of Hezbollah. Over 80 people were killed in the attack near a Beirut mosque. Sheik Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah survived.