The truck sped down Beirut's airport road, quickly arriving outside the heavily guarded walls of its target. The driver ignored the shouted orders to stop and crashed the truck through a flimsy wooden barricade. In front of him stood a long, concrete building. The driver rammed the front of the building, came to a stop, and pressed a switch in the cab. Twenty thousand pounds of explosives detonated a few feet behind him.
             In an instant, tons of broken concrete and twisted steel had buried more than 200 United States Marines. The truck and its driver were blown to pieces. Within a few weeks, the United States would remove its forces from the war-torn nation of Lebanon. In the name of Ayatollah Khomeini and Hizballah, one man's suicide had forced the world's most powerful nation into a humiliating retreat.
             In the late 1970's, Khomeini, an Islamic clergyman from the Middle Eastern nation of Iran, lived in exile. The government of Iran, under the rule of Shah Reza Pahlavi, had forced Khomeini to leave his homeland. From Iraq to France, Khomeini used an inexpensive tape recorder to record his fiery, revolutionary sermons. His followers smuggled the tapes into Iran, where they were copied and sold by the thousands.
             The Shiite Muslims in Iran revered Khomeini as their spiritual leader. The Shiites are an Islamic sect with members in many Middle Eastern countries, including Iraq and Lebanon. In Iran, the Shiites form a majority of the population. Khomeini and his Shiite followers believed in a government strictly based on the laws of Islam. Through his recorded sermons, Khomeini called on Iranians to overthrow the shah and establish an Islamic government.
             The shah of Iran employed a modern army and a large network of secret police to control his country. He made billions of dollars from the sale of Iran's oil and also had the support of the United States. Nevertheless, anger towards his harsh r...