Our Conflict With Iran -- A Commentary

Iran’s War -- National Review

After a quarter century, too little learned.

Twenty-five years ago, several hundred U.S. Marines were stationed in Beirut on a peace-keeping mission. On September 26, an official with the Iranian Intelligence Service in Tehran phoned the Iranian ambassador in Damascus and issued an order to have them killed. Twenty-eight days later, at 06:22 on Sunday morning, October 23, 1983, two suicide bombers struck.

The death toll: 241 troops, “the highest loss of life in a single day since D-Day on Iwo Jima in 1945,” Timothy J. Geraghty, who had been the Marines’ commanding officer, recently noted.

We know about the phone call because, as Geraghty also noted, it was intercepted by the National Security Agency. Unfortunately, this was an occasion — neither the first nor the last — when vital intelligence was collected but not translated, analyzed, and acted upon in time.

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