Comments on: Did the Marines Die in Beirut for Absolute Power?

By: Jim

Jim — Sun, 26 Oct 2008 03:16:53 +0000

Alpowolf, I’m glad you survived that time in the fire.

I appreciate your insights on the perceptions of the enlisted men at that time.

They sounded much sharper than the policy wizards like McFarlane who weren’t putting their own hides on the line to make some BS statement.

By: alpowolf

alpowolf — Sat, 25 Oct 2008 22:57:21 +0000

Those jerkoffs.

Sorry, but I was there in 1983, so this sort of nonsense irritates me.

Of course I was just a lowly enlisted man. But the thing about us enlisted men is this: few of us have access to much of the intel; a lot of us hardly read much of anything other than skin books. But all of us, whatever our educational level, can smell indecision and ignorance in our leadership. We smelled it big time in the fall of ‘83. It was painfully obvious to even the dullest of us that our “leaders” had no clue and no plan. They just stuck us in there in the blind hope that it would make them look “decisive” and that they would be able to muddle through. If some of us got killed, well, what the hell, that’s what we’re paid for, right?

Those jerkoffs.

By: Fascist Nation

Fascist Nation — Sat, 25 Oct 2008 21:54:59 +0000

Back when Reagan ordered the troops into Lebanon, my father — a WWII vet and lifelong Republican — turned to me and said this would be the biggest mistake of Reagan’s presidency and a lot of those soldiers would get killed. He even predicted pretty succinctly exactly the manner in how they would get killed.

By: Dirk W. Sabin

Dirk W. Sabin — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 18:13:30 +0000

I read McFarlanes chest thumping strut piece after I sent the prior and it hits a new low for the Times. This “Paper of Record” has abandoned its post as an important element of the Fourth Estate and is now little more than a Sousa March Band for the various Think Tanks, War Profiteers and Eternal Crusaders that make the White Man’s Burden into the cockeyed thing it so richly is. The least they could have done is had Friedman…or someone else, counterpoint McFarlane’s screed against Weinberger but they didn’t and so it is…All the News that is Fit to Print Halfway.

By: Jim

Jim — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 02:46:26 +0000

Friedman’s book on the follies of Middle East policies and politics was superb. He was especially courageous exposing the massacre at the Palestinian refugee camps.

But that seems like a thousand years ago, at least compared the stuff he has been shoveling during this century.

The fact that the New York Times would give McFarlane a chance to strut on the anniversary of the Marines’ killings is appallilng.

By: Dirk W. Sabin

Dirk W. Sabin — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 16:00:40 +0000

Thomas Friedman, flat earth Booster wrote a tremendous book on the Lebanese-Palestinian situation early in his career. Entitled “From Beirut to Jerusalem, the book chronicles the complexity of issues involved in the conflict and accurately portrays both the fatalism of the people in the midst of tribal antagonism and the nihilistic …psychotic quality of the conflict. What is most interesting is the great hope many in Lebanon saw in the deployment of Marines initially but how this was undone by our own rash, ill-informed and arrogant deployment of a naval bombardment induced by one Lebanese tribe against another……under false premises. I believe it was Bud McFarlane, purportedly, who went over the heads of military brass on the ground and encouraged the President to allow the use of naval artillery at the behest of one faction against
another. Friedman suggests that the attack on the Marine barracks was a direct response to our mistaken involvement in factional warfare.

Sound familiar? As a certain low fat Napoleon sage avers, “fool me once , shame on you, fool me again…and well you can’t be fooled again”. I suppose when one is locked in a permanent phase of serial foolishness, the word “again” is immaterial.