“Operation Bluebat, the codename for the landings at Beirut, marked America’s first military campaign in the Middle East.”

 By Bruce Riedel

JULY 15, 1958 was a typical beautiful summer day in the eastern Mediterranean. Yet for 1,700 fully armed U.S. Marines aboard landing craft speeding towards the beaches of Beirut, Lebanon, the afternoon felt anything but idyllic. In fact, most were expecting to soon be in battle.

Supporting the Marines were 70 warships, including three aircraft carriers: the USS Essex, USS Wasp and USS Saratoga. As many as 10,000 additional troops waited at sea to go ashore after the first wave, while back in the United States, the U.S. Army’s 82^nd Airborne Division was on alert in case still more soldiers were needed.

Remarkably, the beach the Marines were preparing to storm wasn’t teeming with enemy combatants. The shoreline was filled not with machine gun nests, artillery batteries or barbed wire, but with foreign tourists frolicking in the surf and locals soaking up the afternoon rays. The unwitting sunbathers soon found themselves scrambling for cover however as the American landing craft drove up onto the sand and disembarked squads of combat troops.

As the Marines established their beachhead, no hostile forces advanced to meet them. Instead, an army of Lebanese vendors rushed forward with carts to sell cigarettes, cold drinks and sandwiches to the newly arrived Americans. Hot on their heels were scores of local teenage boys eager to help the Marines set up their equipment as others stood by to gawk at the absurd scene playing out before them.

Despite the vacationers, Lebanon was in fact in a state of civil war in the summer of 1958. On one side was the Christian, pro-Western government of Camille Nimr Chamoun. Opposing the regime was a coalition of Egyptian-backed pan-Arab militants up in arms by Chamoun’s illegal bid for reelection. As the crisis deepened, the Eisenhower White House dispatched a military intervention force to restore order and keep Lebanon in the U.S. orbit.

Operation Bluebat, the codename for the landings at Beirut, marked America’s first military campaign in the Middle East. Indeed, U.S. troops had been stationed in the region since the Second World War, but none had seen combat.

At the time of the landings, few in Beirut or Washington imagined that the mission would mark the beginning of decades of seemingly continuous American military deployments to the Middle East. Today, we can look back at Bluebat and see it as a decisive, albeit largely forgotten, turning point in U.S. foreign policy.

Despite the bizarre optics of the Marine landing, the crisis in Lebanon was deadly serious. Hostilities between the two factions had already created hundreds of casualties. The anti-Chamoun camp viewed the Marines as foreign enemies intent on keeping a reviled president illegally in power. For its part, the Lebanese national army, a fragile partnership between Christians and Muslims, saw the Americans as uninvited aggressors who were violating Lebanese sovereignty. U.S. commanders prepared for the worst, and were even ready to deploy nuclear weapons to the battlefield from bases in Germany, if the intervention was met with force.

Back in Washington, President Dwight D. Eisenhower, the hero of the war in Europe, addressed the nation about the campaign.

Following the 1956 Suez Crisis, the White House had proclaimed what would later become known as the Eisenhower Doctrine: the first statement by a U.S. president expressing that America has vital interests in the Middle East and would defend them with force if necessary.

Now with Marines deployed for action on foreign soil, Eisenhower took to the airwaves to describe the crisis to the American public. A coup d’etat in Baghdad, Iraq on July 14 had toppled the pro-U.S. monarchy of King Faisal II, he explained. The ruler there had been brutally murdered in the takeover and his government swept away. Meanwhile in neighbouring Jordan, then federated with Iraq, a “highly organized plot to overthrow the lawful government” of King Hussein had also been discovered. Actually, the Central Intelligence Agency had foiled the plot several weeks before. Eisenhower linked unfriendly factions in Lebanon to the wider unrest telling his audience that President Chamoun had requested American military intervention to stop “civil strife actively fomented” by the Soviets and the anti-Western leadership in Egypt. This would be the only occasion in the speech that the U.S. president alluded to the threat that genuinely worried Washington: the rising political power in the Arab world of Egypt’s charismatic young President Gamal abdal Nasser and his Arab nationalist movement.

Instead, Eisenhower largely framed the crisis in Cold War terms. Lebanon, the size of Connecticut, was under threat from Moscow. Just as the communists had seized Eastern Europe and China, they now threatened Lebanon. Should the United States fail to defend its tiny ally, Ike warned, the West would be inviting another Munich-like appeasement of dictatorship, a move that would surely lead to a third world war.

It was a less than candid explanation for sending in the Marines.

Eisenhower made no mention of the fact that Chamoun was actually illegally seeking a second term in office. The focus was entirely on the international communist conspiracy, falling dominos and Cold War intrigue. After all, these were issues Americans would understand more readily than the complicated politics of Lebanon or the Arab world.

Thanks to the very deft diplomacy of the American ambassador in Beirut with the help of visiting envoys from Washington, the invasion resulted in very little actual combat between Americans and local forces aside from a small number of sniper attacks. In fact, only one U.S. soldier was killed during the operation.

By the end of October, the campaign was over. Chamoun was eased out of power by U.S. diplomats and replaced with a less polarizing leader, Fuad Abdullah Chehab, who quickly moved to restore peace in Lebanon. All U.S. troops were soon withdrawn.

The three-month intervention quickly faded into obscurity in the minds of Americans. Future U.S. missions in the Middle East, be they against rogue dictatorships, state-sponsored terrorists or radical Islam, would be far more costly and much more difficult to end. In fact, involvement in the region continues to this day, dubbed by many as America’s Forever War.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Bruce Riedel is the author of Beirut, 1958. A 30-year-veteran of the Central Intelligence Agency, he served in the Middle East and Europe and was a senior advisor on South Asia and the Middle East for four U.S. presidents. He is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.