42 years after Beirut Marines Barracks bombing, the US has learned nothing

On April 18, 1983, a van packed with explosives rammed into the US embassy in Beirut. The attack killed 63 people: 17 Americans—including eight Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) officers—32 Lebanese citizens, and 14 others whose nationalities remain unknown. Among the dead was Robert C. Ames, the CIA’s Near East Director and one of the agency’s most respected Arabists.

The bombing was not just an act of violence. It shattered the illusion of American neutrality and revealed the explosive consequences of a foreign policy built on calculated contradictions. The United States had long projected itself as a broker of peace in Lebanon. But in truth, it was underwriting Israel’s war machine, supporting sectarian militias, and engaging in covert diplomacy with the very actors it refused to recognise publicly. That duplicity—strategic in intent—was unsustainable.

The mirage of neutrality

In July 1958, pro-Western president Camille Chamoun requested American assistance amid a political crisis that had escalated into armed insurrection—fuelled not only by the wave of pan-Arabism sweeping the region, but also by widespread domestic opposition to his attempt to extend his presidency beyond constitutional limits.

Operation Blue Bat followed. Around 1,700 Marines landed near Beirut, eventually joined by US Army troops, bringing the total force to nearly 15,000. Their mission was clear: stabilise the Chamoun regime and secure the post-war regional order.

To many, it worked. US troops withdrew after a few months. There were no major battles, and Lebanon’s political transition was relatively smooth. But this was no template for peace—it was Cold War theatre.

Lebanon’s sovereignty was subordinated to Washington’s desire to project strength and contain revolutionary Arab nationalism. The US left no rubble, but it emboldened a pro-Western regime that proved unable to resolve internal crises without relying on major powers—reinforcing a pattern of dependence on foreign patrons to suppress domestic opposition that would consistently resurface at different intervals.

The Marines may have come and gone swiftly, but their appearance reinforced an enduring precedent: that American power could—and would—intervene in Lebanon whenever its strategic interests dictated, regardless of local political dynamics.

From peacekeepers to targets

Two decades later, the US returned to Lebanon under different pretences. After Israel’s 1982 brutal invasion and the siege of Beirut, US Marines joined a Multinational Force to oversee the Palestine Liberation Organization’s (PLO) withdrawal. But the mission, billed as peacekeeping, quickly turned partisan.

Washington’s support for Bashir Gemayel—who was backed by both the United States and Israel—made it increasingly clear where American sympathies lay. When Gemayel was assassinated and Israeli forces expanded their presence in West Beirut, the US issued no meaningful objection.

Days later, as Israeli forces maintained control over the area, militias associated with the Phalange party entered the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps and carried out a massacre of hundreds of Palestinian civilians—an atrocity enabled, and effectively facilitated, by the Israeli army’s presence.

Even Israel’s own Kahan Commission later concluded that the Israeli government bore a great degree of responsibility, and that Israeli officials had ignored and in effect enabled the bloodshed. The United States had brokered a ceasefire promising civilian protection. It failed to act. It failed to speak. It failed.

From that moment, more clearly than ever, the US ceased to be seen as a neutral actor.

For many Lebanese—particularly within Shiite communities devastated by war and state neglect, and for rising anti-imperialist and revolutionary movements resisting occupation—the Americans were no longer observers. They were occupiers. Their bases, uniforms, and alliances made that clear, even when their statements insisted otherwise.

Robert Ames and a path not taken

The 1983 embassy bombing killed one of the few Americans who envisioned a different kind of US engagement with Lebanon and the Arab world. Robert Ames was not just a spy—he was a fluent Arabic speaker and a quiet strategist who had cultivated rare trust and strong channels with key Palestinian leaders.

His relationship with Ali Hasan Salameh—the PLO’s intelligence chief and Yasser Arafat’s close confidant—offered a glimpse of what diplomacy could look like outside the optics of domination and the United States’ unconditional support for Israel.

Their channel was unofficial, unpublicised, and unsanctioned by American political elites. It was also arguably the most honest communication the US had ever maintained with the Palestinian revolutionary movement, especially the PLO.

But in 1979, Mossad assassinated Salameh in a car bombing in Beirut. And in 1983, Ames was killed by a similar act of violence. Together, their deaths marked the end of a possibility—the end of a US foreign policy based on relationships, recognition, and realism rather than force and hypocrisy.

That path, cautious and complicated as it was, stood little chance in a political climate more committed to airstrikes, bombings, and atrocities than in understanding and diplomacy.

The tragedy of US involvement in Lebanon is not simply that it failed. It is that it was designed to fail. Washington tried to have it both ways: support Israel without alienating Arabs, marginalise the PLO while using its intelligence, speak of sovereignty while backing warlords. This was not confusion. It was calculated contradiction.

But the contradictions caught up. In October 1983, just six months after the embassy bombing, 241 US Marines were killed in another suicide bombing targeting their barracks. By February 1984, US forces withdrew. The world’s most powerful country had been driven out—not just by explosives, but by its own incoherence, the rise of a growing constellation of resistance movements in Lebanon.

This marked not only a military retreat, but an ideological collapse. The US had lost the moral cover it once claimed, and with it, any pretence of impartiality in a country it had helped fracture.

Lessons unlearned

Today, Lebanon is again in freefall. Its economic collapse, political paralysis, and elite impunity echo the failures of the civil war era. And once again, US policy is heavy on rhetoric, light on substance. Washington praises reform while funding security agencies, supports “civil society” while enabling sectarian oligarchs, and still plays both sides of regional conflicts—often at the Lebanese people’s expense.

The contradictions persist, sustained by selective memory and strategic denial. And so does the wreckage—visible in every failed promise.

The US embassy bombing in Beirut should have shattered illusions. But instead, it became another story of American martyrdom, stripped of history and accountability. That narrative does disservice to the dead—and to those still living in the ruins of that era.

The US was not attacked because it represented democracy. It was attacked because it abandoned neutrality, betrayed its promises, and played power politics in a country already shredded by them.

Until US policy stops mistaking military presence for diplomacy, and domination for leadership, it will remain part of the problem—not just in Lebanon, but across the region.

The embassy has been rebuilt. But the contradictions remain. And so does the damage.

And in an era where Donald Trump—who once promised to end endless wars—now vows to “reassert American dominance” in the Middle East while offering unconditional support to Israel, the danger isn’t just that the US repeats its past, but that it doubles down on it.

Dr. Jeffrey G. Karam is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the Lebanese American University (LAU). He is also a Research Fellow at the Center for Middle Eastern and North African Politics at Freie Universität Berlin and at the Lebanese Center for Policy Studies (LCPS). He is a member of the prestigious Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities (BBAW), specifically affiliated with the Arab-German Young Academy of Sciences and Humanities (AGYA). Karam is the editor of The Middle East in 1958: Reimagining a Revolutionary Year, co-editor of The Lebanon Uprising of 2019: Voices from the Revolution, and co-editor of Global Authoritarianism: Perspectives and Contestations from the South. His scholarly and public writing has appeared in Intelligence and National Security, Arab Studies Journal, Journal of Political Science Education, H-Diplo/ISSF, TRAFO, Jadaliyya, The Washington Post, openDemocracy, The Daily Star, Megaphone, and other outlets.

Follow him on X: @JGKaram

Have questions or comments? Email us at: editorial-english@newarab.com

Opinions expressed in this article remain those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The New Arab, its editorial board or staff.