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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?


To: joseffy who wrote (768644)2/9/2014 11:32:33 PM
From: puborectalis1 Recommendation

Recommended By
bentway

  Respond to of 1572336
 
where is your condemnation of Reagan for a larger loss of life?........

Those Marines had been ordered into Lebanon by President Ronald Reagan as a part of an international peacekeeping force following the June 1982 Israeli invasion of that country and the Palestine Liberation Organization’s withdrawal.

Making an already-dangerous situation even more hazardous, the Marines were under strict presidential orders not to load their weapons — this, so that they would appear as peacekeepers and not as armed belligerents in the conflict and despite the fact that they were moving into a war zone.

Realistically, they had become “sitting ducks” from the moment they entered Beirut. And as a result of their absurd orders, when the explosives-laden truck sped toward their doomed barracks, the two unarmed guards had no way of stopping it.

According to Col. Timothy J. Geraghty, the commander of the Marines in Beirut: “It didn’t take a military expert to realize that our troops had been placed in an indefensible situation. Anyone following the situation in Lebanon in ordinary news reports could realize a tragedy was in the making.

“There was a growing feeling of frustration inside the Muslim and Druse community in Lebanon due to the United States’ direct backing of Israel in its 1982 invasion of Lebanon and other pro-Israel factions within Lebanon. These factions had been responsible for multiple attacks committed against the Muslim and Druse Lebanese population.”

While the blast led to the withdrawal of the international peacekeeping force from Lebanon, in retrospect, neither the invasion nor the Marine intervention should ever have occurred.