18 Nov 2012 1:42 pm
Do you have a more mainstream source teacher?Yea, me.Not quite what I had in mind when I said, 'mainstream'. LOLThe DOD is saying that there was no way they could have gotten there in time to make any difference in the deaths of the four Americans.Read more: http://www.politico....l#ixzz2CbWNccsPHopefully we will learn something from this tragedy.But it seems to me that some people are only interested in using it to bring down a president.I remember in 1983, 241 American servicemen were killed in Beirut under Reagan's watch, after Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger had advised the administration against stationing U.S. Marines in Lebanon.In 2002, the Presidential Oral History Program at the University of Virginias Miller Center of Public Affairs interviewed Caspar Weinberger about the six years (1981-1987) he spent as Ronald Reagans Secretary of Defense. Stephen Knott, the interviewer, asked him about the bombing of the U.S. Marines barracks in Beirut on Oct. 23, 1983, which killed 241 Marines. Heres his answer:Weinberger: Well, thats one of my saddest memories. I was not persuasive enough to persuade the President that the Marines were there on an impossible mission. They were very lightly armed. They were not permitted to take the high ground in front of them or the flanks on either side. They had no mission except to sit at the airport, which is just like sitting in a bulls eye. Theoretically, their presence was supposed to support the idea of disengagement and ultimate peace. I said, Theyre in a position of extraordinary danger. They have no mission. They have no capability of carrying out a mission, and theyre terribly vulnerable. It didnt take any gift of prophecy or anything to see how vulnerable they were.When that horrible tragedy came, why, as I say, I took it very personally and still feel responsible in not having been persuasive enough to overcome the arguments that Marines dont cut and run, and We cant leave because were there, and all of that. I begged the President at least to pull them back and put them back on their transports as a more defensible position. That ultimately, of course, was done after the tragedy.http://middleeast.ab...qt/me081022.htmDid Dems attack Reagan after the bombing in Beirut?I don't remember that being the case.