On Wednesday evening, ABC News' foreign correspondent Julia Macfarlane suggested that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was delusional when he blamed the Lebanese Hezbollah for the October 1983 Marine barracks bombing.


Macfarlane is wrong. Pompeo is right. Indeed, Macfarlane's contention is the equivalent of Russia's claim that the GRU officers responsible for attacking Sergei Skripal, his daughter, and two innocent Britons were actually tourists.

While the Lebanese Hezbollah did not formalize its existence until the publication of its ranting founding document in 1985, the group was operationally existent from at least 1982. Allies and servants of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini's Islamic revolution, Hezbollah received significant financial, logistical, and organizational support from Iran. But as is almost always the case with revolutionary Iran, the support came with significant strings attached. Such was the case in the barracks bombing. While the attack was purportedly carried out by Islamic Jihad, that organization was a bare cutout (or deniable front) for the burgeoning Hezbollah.

The use of cutouts is a go-to tactic for the Iranians and their proxies, in that they believe it allows them to carry out attacks that might otherwise invite retaliation (see the Karbala attack in 2007, the 2011 Washington plot, and the failed 2018 Paris plot). In the same way, Islamic Jihad gave Hezbollah cover to slaughter hundreds of Americans and, as it turned out, successfully push the U.S. out of Lebanon (arguably, President Ronald Reagan's worst foreign policy decision).

Regardless, the fact that Macfarlane proudly does not recognize this history (she retweeted her original tweet) is concerning. After all, it really isn't that controversial. The Islamic Jihad cover story is widely regarded by the U.S. and French intelligence communities for what it is: a joke.

In short, Pompeo is right. And for the U.S. Marine Corps, the Hezbollah blood feud was born. Fortunately, the U.S. got some good revenge in 2007 when senior Hezbollah operations officer Imad Mughniyah was pulverized by a joint CIA-Mossad gift.