Reconciliation or Recrimination?

In these recent heady days where we jittery world-watchers are on alert yet again for an imminent US invasion of Iran, it is hard not to imagine a broader agenda at work when a federal judge orders Iran to pay $2.6 billion in compensation to the survivors and the bereaved of the devastating attack on the US Marine barracks at the Beirut airport in 1983. Of course, I will not project that Dick Cheney has been pulling the strings behind Judge Lamberth's ruling, but the timing of the decision no doubt emphasises its significance, and will give support to any political depiction of Iran as a current threat and historical enemy to America. It also seems a rather strange move.

The precedent seems to be Libya's agreement in 2002 to compensate the families of the victims of the 1988 Lockerbie bombing, but the differences are clear. Libya's payment, combined with something of an admission of complicity in the atrocity, were part of Gaddaffi's post-9/11 rapprochement with the west - a consensual political gesture, not the result of a unilateral ruling by a foreign domestic court. Iran, of course, refuses to pay, to recognise the authority of the court, or to admit to any responsibility for the attack. One might ask what the point of such a ruling is, when there is no hope of any forthcoming payment.

The Lockerbie bombing was also by anyone's definition a terrorist attack and an act of murder, but can the same be said for the barracks bombing? The barracks, after all, were a military installation in the middle of a warzone. While political expediency in face of the War Powers Act meant that in Washington, the Reagan Administration insisted on defining the Marine deployment as a neutral peacekeeping force, the reality on the ground was that the Multinational Force was aligned on one side of a civil war. Though bound by stringent rules of engagement not to fight, the Marines' vague objective to protect the crumbling Lebanese Government and train its army marked them out as a clear enemy to the various militias vying for control of Beirut, and even, to a lesser and more indirect extent, the IDF. The barracks bombing, while villainous and atrocious, was an act of war - how many acts of war result in demands for compensation?. Can the families of the Marines killed by sniper fire expect a similar court ruling?

Other questions arise, such as why Syria, also considered to be involved in the creation of the early incarnation Hezbollah which is generally credited with the attack, has not received a similar order. Then there is the fact that the extent of Iranian involvement in the attack is simply not known - did Iranian Revolutionary Guardsmen order it? plan it? carry it out? or did they just give it blessing? All this is uncertain, which makes the basis for the ruling shaky. Stretching the questions further we might ask how the US government would respond to demands that it pay compensation to the Iranian victims of Saddam's army using US-made conventional or chemical weapons - let alone the civilian victims of the Contras. The court ruling seems to have little real authority, whether in precedent, logic, or in practical result.

At its very worst, this decision is politically designed (even if simply by one man) to escalate American public hostility towards Iran. At its best, it is an attempt to give relief and a sense of justice to over a thousand still-grieving Americans whose boys died on a mission of the best intentions but ultimately with no meaning or consequence. Either way, it is an odd, and entirely symbolic, use of the US justice system.