30 Years Ago: When Reagan Cut and Run

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Thirty years ago this week, President Ronald Reagan made perhaps the most purposeful and consequential foreign-policy decision of his presidency. Though he never said so explicitly, he ended America's military commitment to a strategic mistake that was peripheral to America's interests. Three-and-a-half months after the bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut that killed 241 U.S. military personnel -- and after repeatedly pledging not to do so -- Reagan ordered the withdrawal of all U.S. troops from Lebanon. As Gen. Colin Powell later aptly summarized this military misadventure: "Beirut wasn't sensible and it never did serve a purpose. It was goofy from the beginning."

What was particularly remarkable about Reagan's bold decision was its rarity. Presidents often authorize using force or deploying troops to achieve some discrete set of political and military objectives. When they prove incapable of doing so with the initial resources and political support, the mission can be scaled back in its scope, enlarged to achieve additional missions, or, the atypical choice, terminated. The latter option requires having the ability to recognize failure, and political courage to end a U.S. military commitment. In large part, it is a combined lack of strategic awareness and political courage that explains many U.S. military disasters. . . . . .


Yet, just three days later, on Feb. 7, Reagan ordered the Marines to "redeploy" to their ships offshore -- which was actually a full withdrawal achieved in three weeks. Although the Marine's mission in Lebanon was not clearly defined and, subsequently, not achieved, Reagan's tacit admission of failure and withdrawal of the Marines from Lebanon limited America's further involvement in foreign-policy disaster -- saving money, lives, and time. Many pundits later claimed wrongly that Reagan was erroneous, because Osama bin Laden contended that the withdrawal was a sign of U.S. weakness; as if America's strategic choices should be held hostage to how terrorists choose to describe them.

U.S. officials and policymakers often share a long tradition of refusing to acknowledge strategic errors, or to place specific blame on individuals responsible for their authorization and execution. Rather, the causes of defeat are assigned to anonymous sources like "the bureaucracy," "lack of public will," or maybe "Congress." When serving or retired officials are asked whether a war or military intervention was a mistake, they often reply: "That's for historians to decide." Even then-Secretary of Defense Robert Gates said this when asked if Iraq was "worth it" just before he retired: "[I]t really requires a historian's perspective in terms of what happens here in the long term."

But historians do not make future policy decisions; they study and assess previous ones. Sending Marines to Lebanon for such an imprecise and unachievable end-state was a tremendous mistake. Reagan's decision to tacitly admit that it was a U.S. foreign-policy failure, and to then undertake corrective actions, was an admirable trait rarely seen in poilcymakers or presidents.

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