An Israeli airstrike on the Hezbollah stronghold of Dahiyeh in southern Beirut reportedly killed senior Hezbollah commander Ibrahim Aqil, head of the terrorist group’s elite Radwan unit. The United States long had sanctioned Aqil for his role in the kidnapping and murder of Americans and had offered a reward for information leading to his capture. Specifically, the United States believed Aqil to be involved in the 1983 bombings of both the U.S. Embassy in Beirut and the Marine Barracks that together killed more than 300 Americans.
The question is, why didn’t the United States kill Aqil before Israel? After all, the Marine Barracks bombing was the deadliest attack on Americans until the September 11, 2001, Al Qaeda attacks.
Israel wanted Aqil dead for a number of reasons. He actively plotted the murder of Israelis and coordinated closely with Iran to import weaponry to achieve that goal. Certainly, Israel knew about Aqil’s general whereabouts for weeks, if not months or longer. They tracked him and knew the various apartments he frequented.
Either the United States had that information, or it did not. If it did not, that exposes an intelligence gap that William Burns, director of Central Intelligence Agency, should explain before Congress. If the U.S. intelligence community did know Aqil’s location, however, the question then becomes why the United States failed to act and the ramifications of that failure.
The problem with George W. Bush’s “Global War on Terror” is that terrorism is a just a tactic employed to further an agenda. At its core, there is a cost-benefit analysis: Does the attack further the goal and is the cost worth it?
When Ronald Reagan ordered U.S. forces to evacuate Lebanon after the bombings, Hezbollah leaders concluded that terror worked. So did Al Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden, who cited the Beirut withdrawal as evidence that his strategy could force the United States to decouple itself from Saudi Arabia.
Reagan’s willingness to trade arms for hostages only compounded the problem by convincing terrorists that hostage-taking could pay dividends. Yes, hostages came home but no sooner had Iran received the last load of spare parts for its war effort against Iraq than Hezbollah seized new hostages.
There was a road not taken by Reagan or his successors. Had the United States hunted down every perpetrator involved in the 1983 Beirut bombings, not only would it have avenged American deaths, but it also would have signaled that there is a very high cost associated with killing Americans. This is not simply a theory. Consider what the KGB did when Lebanese terrorists kidnapped Russian diplomats: “The Soviet secret police last year secured the release of three kidnapped Soviet diplomats in Beirut by castrating a relative of a radical Lebanese Shia Muslim leader, sending him the severed organs and then shooting the relative in the head.” Perhaps such in-your-face brutality is not America’s style, but a targeted killing by cruise missile or drone would convey the same point. Had Reagan, George H.W. Bush, or Bill Clinton ordered everyone involved in the 1983 bombings or subsequent hostage-taking killed, perhaps Bin Laden too would have reconsidered whether the United States was really as weak as he concluded.
The issue remains relevant today. Iran has engaged in a brazen scheme to seize Americans and ransom them for billions of dollars. Both Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden have been too willing to pay the price and keep the cycle alive.
If instead of rewarding hostage-takers the United States killed them, the chance that terror leaders would expect reward for future kidnappings would diminish precipitously.
The United States should applaud Israel for eliminating Aqil. That he survived for 40 years after the 1983 bombings, however, is an affront to justice and the memory of those American diplomats and peacekeepers killed while trying to bring Lebanon a better future.
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