Of the many apho­risms on  hind­sight, the one which ought to be the truest was penned by the ancient Greek writer Homer: “After the event, even a fool is wise.” Too often and albeit for dif­fer­ent rea­sons, pol­i­cy mak­ers and jour­nal­ists have an abil­i­ty to be the excep­tion. One of the most sin­is­ter exam­ples is jihadism and I was, in a small way, part of it.

Short­ly after Islam’s manda­to­ry mid­day prayers on Octo­ber 27, 1983, in a dingy build­ing in Baal­bek, east­ern Lebanon, a humour­less man with a neat­ly trimmed beard and dark, fath­om­less eyes pulled a Beretta auto­mat­ic pis­tol from under his jack­et, placed it on the messy desk between us, and asked me what I want­ed to talk to him about. 
Four days ear­li­er, at 6:22 a.m., a grin­ning beard­ed man in a Mer­cedes truck sped through two U.S. Marine guard posts at Beirut air­port and into a four-sto­ried build­ing known as the BLT (short for Bat­tal­ion Land­ing Team) and set off what FBI foren­sic inves­ti­ga­tors lat­er deter­mined was the sin­gle-largest non-nuclear explo­sion on earth since World War II. The blast killed two hun­dred and twen­ty Marines and twen­ty-one oth­er Amer­i­can ser­vice per­son­nel. It left a crater thir­ty feet deep. At the exact same time, anoth­er sui­cide truck bomber crashed into a build­ing used by French para­troop­ers, killing fifty-eight.
A pre­vi­ous­ly unknown group call­ing itself “Islam­ic Jihad” claimed responsibility.
My respon­si­bil­i­ty was to ask Hus­sein Mous­sawi, the man in front of me, whether he was, as the Rea­gan admin­is­tra­tion had pub­licly charged, the mas­ter­mind of the massacres.
                           A SORT OF EXCUSE 
In hind­sight, the place and cir­cum­stances encap­su­lat­ed the hubris, fanati­cism, will­ful igno­rance, cul­tur­al chasms and pure evil that have woven the fab­ric of vio­lence which bedev­ils mod­ern times. At the time, my head was too busy try­ing to wrap itself around the prob­lem of inter­view­ing some­one whose mind­set was half a mil­len­ni­um removed from mine, with the pow­er to inflict, with impuni­ty, things too dread­ful to con­tem­plate on me and my cam­era crew, the leg­endary “Greeks”, Paul Vit­toroulis and Georges Ioannides. 
Added to that,  the 9,000-year-old Phoeni­cian city of Baal­bek was infest­ed with drug lords, Syr­i­an mil­i­tary and Mukhabarat (secret police), Islam­ic Amal forces, Iran­ian Rev­o­lu­tion­ary Guards, and fifty mem­bers of the Red Army Fac­tion ter­ror­ist group, all of whom were hyped up in expec­ta­tion of Amer­i­can retaliation. 
                                      IN SIMPLE TERMS
Mous­sawi tout­ed the Beirut bomb­ings as a “nat­ur­al con­se­quence” of the pres­ence of for­eign troops on Lebanese soil. Amer­i­cans, he said, did not under­stand that Moslems were will­ing to die for their cause.
“We are not afraid of Amer­i­cans,” he snapped. “We will even con­front their tanks with our daggers.” 
Mous­sawi was bold­ly — and equal­ly impor­tant­ly, with pride – avow­ing the state of war that already exist­ed between his ilk and the West, the U.S. in par­tic­u­lar. Bare­ly six months ear­li­er, six­ty-three peo­ple, among them sev­en­teen Amer­i­cans, were killed when a sui­cide bomber in a white van shat­tered the U.S. embassy in West Beirut.
On avail­able evi­dence nei­ther the Rea­gan admin­is­tra­tion nor the U.S. mil­i­tary grasped the sig­nif­i­cance. When the Marines were hit, their rules of engage­ment includ­ed: “When on post, mobile or foot patrol, keep loaded mag­a­zine in weapon, bolt closed, weapon on safe, no round in the chamber.”
                                THE LEGACY
While not on a par with the hubris that pow­er-point­ed the George W. Bush administration’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, it did imply a shock­ing unfa­mil­iar­i­ty with a sem­i­nal quote from what many senior mil­i­tary offi­cers I’ve met claim is essen­tial read­ing for their pro­fes­sion, “The Art of War”, attrib­uted to the Chi­nese mil­i­tary strate­gist Sun Tzu fif­teen hun­dred years ago:
“If you know the ene­my and know your­self, you need not fear the result of a hun­dred bat­tles. If you know your­self but not the ene­my, for every vic­to­ry gained you will also suf­fer a defeat. If you know nei­ther the ene­my nor your­self, you will suc­cumb in every battle.”
The jihadists knew their ene­my and quick­ly learned how to turn their cause into a fran­chise. ISIS grew out of the dis­as­trous U.S. “de-Baathi­fi­ca­tion” and army dis­so­lu­tion pol­i­cy imposed on post-inva­sion Iraq.
The “caliphate” may have been destroyed, but its spin-offs add to Afghanistan’s mis­ery, plague much of the impov­er­ished but min­er­al-rich Sahel region and are gain­ing footholds in West Africa.
The metas­ta­siz­ing couldn’t have been extrap­o­lat­ed from Moussawi’s warn­ing, but an abun­dance of stud­ies has shown it deserved more atten­tion than it got, both from the media and the pol­i­cy plan­ners, who still haven’t come up with a viable counter to the jihadists tried and test­ed busi­ness model.
Exten­sive inter­views with (for­mer) jihadists and defec­tors”… sug­gest that, in jihadist groups’ train­ing camps across the con­ti­nent, ensur­ing the recruits’ reli­gious train­ing and ide­o­log­i­cal com­pli­ance com­mands more effort and time than mil­i­tary train­ings (sic).”
Homer may have been wise, but we’ve not always proved him right.

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