Fortress Beirut

At the 2017 groundbreaking ceremony for the United States’ $1 billion-fortified new embassy in Beirut, then-U.S. ambassador to Lebanon Elizabeth Richard offered some words on the momentousness of the occasion:

Breaking ground today on our new embassy compound is a strong message to the Lebanese people that we are with you for the long term. We intend to continue the spirit of cooperation and partnership that has defined our journey together for two hundred years.

Given America’s history of backing Israel’s bouts of mass slaughter in the country, many Lebanese were presumably not overly reassured by the prospect of further “cooperation.” The ambassador’s chronological calculations regarding the joint “journey” were curious, as two hundred years ago Lebanon was part of the Ottoman Empire.

The first major U.S. “partnership” with the Lebanese did not take place until July 1958, when a horde of Marines washed up in Lebanon to save the country from communism following a coup d’état in nearby Iraq against the pro-West King Faisal II. A Brookings Institution dispatch on “America’s origin story in the Middle East” notes that the 1958 invasion was the “first-ever combat operation” in the region by U.S. armed forces—a foray that would “mark the beginning of decades of seemingly endless American combat missions in the Middle East.”

In reality, a Soviet takeover of the diminutive Levantine nation was hardly nigh. What really concerned President Dwight D. Eisenhower was the growing regional popularity of Egypt’s charismatic leader Gamal Abdel Nasser, who had charmed many an Arab with his reckless ideas about nationalism and sovereignty. Such concepts were so dangerous, in fact, that the U.S. military was “prepared for the worst and was ready to deploy nuclear weapons to the battlefield,” as Brookings recalls.

In its own lively July 1958 writeup of the Marine intervention, Time magazine described how, “as planes of the U.S. Sixth Fleet whizzed overhead, amphibious tracked vehicles mounting twin-turreted machine guns, their armored sides tightly buttoned, the drivers steering by periscope, lurched from the sea like hippopotamuses” onto the shore just south of Beirut. And yet there was no violent welcome awaiting America’s warriors from the “pro-Nasser rebels” opposed to Lebanese President and U.S. buddy Camille Chamoun’s illegal quest to remain in power (Chamoun himself had encouraged the Marine invasion). Instead, “curious crowds gathered on the sandy knobs along Lebanon’s shore line; bikini-clad lasses turned over on the beach to peer out across the blue-green sea.”

In the end, nuclear weapons were not needed, Chamoun renounced his dreams of reelection, and the last of the U.S. forces withdrew from Lebanon in October 1958. Obviously, nothing was resolved in terms of the acute socioeconomic inequality and sectarian oppression that would ultimately fuel the Lebanese civil war of 1975 to 1990—a conflict that also starred the neighboring state of Israel, which had up and invented itself on stolen Palestinian land just ten years prior to the beginning of America’s “origin story” in the Middle East.

Israel harbored its own predatory designs on Lebanese territory. A 1955 diary entry courtesy of Moshe Sharett, the second prime minister of Israel, outlined the vision of army chief of staff Moshe Dayan, who had advocated for coopting a Lebanese military officer to act on Israel’s behalf: “We should either win his heart or buy him with money, to make him agree to declare himself the savior of [Lebanon’s] Maronite population.” After that it would all be a piece of cake: “Then the Israeli army will enter Lebanon, will occupy the necessary territory, and will create a Christian regime which will ally itself with Israel.” And things would only get better. “The territory from the Litani [River] southward will be totally annexed to Israel and everything will be all right.”

Fast forward to 1978, when Israel launched Operation Litani, killing more than one thousand people in the span of a few days and kicking off the Israeli occupation of south Lebanon that would last for twenty-two years. The Israeli invasion of June 1982—dubbed Operation Peace for Galilee—was even more cataclysmic, resulting in the slaughter of tens of thousands of Lebanese and Palestinians. In a 1983 Foreign Policy article titled “The Green Light,” Israeli journalist Ze’ev Schiff reported that “whether wittingly or unwittingly, Washington gave Jerusalem the green light to invade Lebanon.”

In her Lebanese civil war memoir Beirut Fragments, Palestinian scholar Jean Said Makdisi—sister of the late Edward Said—describes the view from a balcony in the hills just above Beirut on August 12, 1982, the day a ceasefire ostensibly took effect after the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) agreed to evacuate Lebanon. Israel has never been much for ceasefires, and this day was no exception: “It was as though the Israelis had . . . achieved a paroxysm of violent hatred; a lunatic, destructive urge to kill, to blot out every living thing, to leave nothing standing, to eradicate the city.” As Makdisi documents, not only were tens of thousands killed in the paroxysm, hundreds of thousands were displaced and large sections of Lebanon’s major cities, as well as dozens of towns and villages, were destroyed.

The end of August saw a return of eight hundred Marines to Lebanon, this time part of a multinational force tasked with overseeing the PLO’s evacuation. After providing assurances that Lebanon’s remaining Palestinian population would be protected in the absence of the PLO, the Marines withdrew in September. They would return later in the month, following the Sabra and Shatila massacre in Beirut, when several thousand Palestinian refugees and Lebanese civilians were slaughtered by Israeli-backed right-wing Lebanese Christian militiamen. The Israeli military, which had yet to withdraw from the Lebanese capital, provided such assistance as firing nighttime flares to facilitate the carnage. Pregnant women were stabbed in their bellies and fetuses torn out. An Israeli commission of inquiry would subsequently assign “personal responsibility” for the massacre to then-Israeli defense minister—and future prime minister—Ariel Sharon, but it’s not like the Americans had no inkling of what the Israelis were up to. Scholar Rashid Khalidi has argued that the United States was in fact entirely responsible for the massacre, with U.S. diplomats having been informed by Sharon just prior to the killing spree that there were allegedly still “thousands of terrorists in Beirut” and that “we’ll kill them. They will not be left there. You are not going to save them.” The post-massacre return of U.S. troops to Beirut constituted an “ill-defined mission,” as Rashidi puts it—one in which the United States would become definitively “embroiled in the bloody conflict in Lebanon.”

The next year, 1983, bombings of the U.S. embassy and the Marine barracks in Beirut killed 17 and 241 Americans, respectively, setting the ball in motion for a full withdrawal of U.S. troops in 1984. The attacks were claimed by a Lebanese outfit that went by the name of Islamic Jihad, but the United States has relentlessly pinned the blame on Hezbollah, invoking these attacks as proof of the group’s unquestionably terroristic nature. Never mind that Hezbollah formed as a direct result of the blood-drenched 1982 invasion, which objectively speaking was nothing if not terrorism. From the point of view of Israel—a state predicated on eternal war—the more enemies the better, and the rise of Hezbollah would give the Israeli military lots more excuses to wreak U.S.-backed havoc in the country for decades to come.

In May 2000 Israel was compelled to end its torture-obsessed occupation of south Lebanon—an ignominious exit for which it would never forgive the Hezbollah-led Lebanese resistance that forced its withdrawal. The Israelis were back in 2006, though, with a thirty-four-day summer assault that killed approximately 1,200 people in Lebanon and left much of the country in rubble. The United States contributed to the effort by rush-shipping bombs to Israel and laboring to delay a ceasefire for as long as possible, while then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice hailed the devastation as the “birth pangs of a new Middle East.” President George W. Bush, for his part, busied himself inventing words like Hezbollian and engaging in productive banter about hand-knitted sweaters with British Prime Minister and war-on-terror henchman Tony Blair.

In the meantime, said war on terror was going strong—and Lebanon was hardly spared the fallout. (It is a lesser-known fact that Ziad Jarrah, one of the people who commandeered United Airlines Flight 93, believed to be bound for the U.S. Capitol building on 9/11, was Lebanese. He spent “weeks under shell-fire” as a child in Beirut during the 1982 Israeli invasion, as the late journalist Robert Fisk reported.) The United States pushed the withdrawal of Syria from Lebanon in 2005 in order to have a freer hand in the region and would ramp up its support of the ever-ineffectual Lebanese state in the name of combating the presence on Lebanese territory of al-Qaeda and ISIS (both of which owed their evolution to U.S. policy in the first place). For good measure, the CIA went ahead and teamed up with Mossad in Damascus in 2008 to assassinate the iconic Hezbollah military chief Imad Mughniyeh, the accused mastermind of the 1983 U.S. embassy and Marine barracks bombings—attacks that never would have transpired, mind you, if the United States didn’t have its fingerprints all over Israeli crimes in Lebanon.

And the Lebanese still can’t get a break. In October 2023, Israel launched a genocide of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and decided to take advantage of the bellicose momentum to go after Hezbollah as well. The Israeli military was no doubt encouraged by the obscene increase in military aid and weaponry from the United States; after President Joe Biden authorized an additional $26 billion in wartime assistance to Israel in April 2024, Israel’s former Foreign Minister Israel Katz took to X to applaud the aid package as sending “a strong message to all our enemies.”

In keeping with tradition, Israel’s supposed “targeted” assassinations of Hezbollah officials in Lebanon managed to inflict indiscriminate slaughter, and some four thousand people were killed in the country between October 2023 and November 2024 alone as Israel went about blowing up personal electronic devices and engaging in other forms of literal terrorism. Over the same time period, at least 16,520 people were injured. The assassination of Hezbollah Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah in September 2024 somehow required the leveling of no fewer than six apartment buildings in Beirut. In the two months following a United States-brokered ceasefire in Lebanon in November 2024, the Israeli military killed at least eighty-three people.

In spite of its ongoing role in tormenting Lebanon, the United States continues to boast with a straight face about sending security assistance to the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF) in order to “strengthen Lebanon’s sovereignty [and] secure its borders,” as per a State Department fact sheet published this January. According to their calculations, “U.S. investments of more than $3 billion to the LAF” since 2006 have “enabled the Lebanese military to be a stabilizing force against regional threats,” while the partnership between the United States and the LAF has served to build “the LAF’s capacity as the sole legitimate defender of Lebanon’s sovereignty.” Seeing as the LAF has not once succeeded in defending Lebanese sovereignty, one would be forgiven for concluding that this is not in fact the point of said partnership—and indeed U.S. security assistance to the Lebanese military has never entailed any sort of weaponry or training that would enable it to either threaten Israel or adequately protect Lebanon against Israeli attack.

Meanwhile, construction of the Beirut Embassy proceeds apace as America fulfills its promise “to the Lebanese people that we are with you for the long term.” In his award-winning essay “Beirut and the Birth of the Fortress Embassy,” published last year by the Middle East Research and Information Project, journalist Habib Battah notes that the “19-structure ziggurat . . . dwarfs any government facility in Lebanon,” encompassing a “labyrinth of megalithic blast walls emerging from deep excavation pits.” The new mega-embassy occupies more than forty acres in the predominantly Christian village of Awkar, located in the hills overlooking Beirut, and is the second-largest U.S. embassy in the world after Baghdad’s. This in a country with a population less than that of New York City.

The embassy website offers images of the new compound suggestive of a ludicrous gated community in Dubai. In his report, Battah specifies that a “buffed marble will run the length of the compound’s interior courtyard” and will be “lined with slabs of stone carved from various mountains across the country to, in the words of the architect, ‘help preserve Lebanese heritage.’” The journalist remarks drily: “Rock quarrying is among the most unregulated and environmentally destructive industries in the heavily polluted country.”

As for what the United States is actually up to with its new giganto-fortress, it bears mentioning that the new embassy is located smack next to the current embassy, which when I last visited in 2012 seemed to be enough of a fortress already. I had come to renew my passport, a process that required depositing all of my belongings across the street from the diplomatic monstrosity and navigating all manner of armed security. The highlight of the excursion was hitchhiking back to Beirut and getting picked up by three members of the Lebanese army, who at 11 a.m. offered me a choice between vodka and beer for the ride.

But it appears that the United States has bigger-than-ever plans for the region, particularly after embroiling itself in Israel’s war on Iran and doubling down on its quest for comprehensive Arab normalization with Israel. And what better than a new embassy to serve as a command center for militarized diplomacy, now that Hezbollah’s capabilities have been significantly degraded? To be sure, the Islamic Republic has long occupied a special place in American crosshairs, with Iran and all things Iran-backed acting as a permanent thorn in the side of U.S. empire and impeding the achievement of uncontested regional hegemony—even as the United States has occupied itself with interim enemies like ISIS, which happen to be enemies of Iran as well. It’s no secret that U.S. embassies double as intelligence hubs and headquarters for the general propagation of nefariousness and engenderment of local ill will, and Beirut is poised to take center stage in that regard: the Donald Trump administration is now threatening to gut the U.S. diplomatic presence at the heretofore reigning giganto-fortress embassy in Baghdad.

But, hey, the buffed marble courtyard, trapezoidal swimming pool, and other amenities mean that personnel at the new embassy compound will at least be riding out any potential blowback in style. On April 30, the embassy announced the deployment of Major General Michael Leeney “to provide a full-time senior U.S. military leader in Beirut” whose presence will naturally help “fully safeguard Lebanese sovereignty.” U.S. Special Envoy Thomas Barrack has also been unleashed to harass the Lebanese government into forcing Hezbollah’s disarmament despite Israel’s continuing attacks and its military presence at five different points in south Lebanon. Here’s hoping for Lebanon’s sake that it won’t be another two hundred years of “cooperation and partnership.”