Dutch: on War & Peace

Protected Israel, but demanded they stop shelling Beirut

This did not mean that the President forgave Begin and Ariel Sharon for encouraging the carnage in Beirut. Revealingly, at the height of Israel's bombardment of Beirut, he had invoked race memory in a phone call to Begin: "I told him to stop or our entire future relationship was endangered. I used the word holocaust deliberately and said his symbol was becoming a picture of a seven-month old baby with its arms blown off." Begin called back within minutes to say that the attack had been stopped.

Invaded Grenada right after Beirut bombing

On Oct. 23, a grinning suicide bomber had driven a yellow truck full of explosives through the guard gate of the Marine headquarters at Beirut International Airport, killing 241 US troops. The next few days, Reagan was involved in post-tragedy and pre-invasion meetings.

“Operation Urgent Fury” was an embarrassingly clumsy success. The world’s ranking superpower, hampered by old tourist maps and incompatible radio frequencies, needed two full days to overcome the resistance of an island not much bigger than Washington DC. Democracy was restored, and some damp Cuban documents impounded, along with 24,768 signal flares-clear evidence of incendiary Red activity.