Fast forward 26 years later to Fort Hood Texas. Once again I witness another terroist attacking unarmed US Army personnel who could have stop this terroist after one bullet was fired if only they had been armed with their service handguns.

Can this country not learn that disarming our military personnel, is a invitation for the terriorist to kill us?

Your “hard lessons” are completely misplaced. Contrary to your assertion that we were there to “help other Muslims;” we were perceived to be supporting other factions against Muslims.

Far be it for me to defend Weinberger, but in this instance he was right. We should not have deployed troops to Beirut. This is really the hard lesson of Beirut: Know what you’re doing and why. It’s impossible to play the role of peacemaker if all sides view you as the enemy.

John Adams in his ‘Defense of the Constitution of the United States’ showed that democracy was a degenerate form of government. By bringing democracy to countries that refuse to separate church from state we only legitimize the factions that have majority control. We are seeing the consequences of this ill conceived idea with the increased bombings in Iraq and the voter fraud in Afghanistan.

Well-said. VERY well-said.

Some of the articles, that I have read, about the incident some thirty years hence have seemed to ask what our mission in Lebanon was and for what those 241 US Marines and 58 French Paras died for.

You are right the details of how we accomplished the mission was not clear and even in the clear as mud hindsight of almost thirty years since, the details of how to accomplish bringing democracy to Lebanon (and peace to the region) still isn’t there. I do feel that we tried to do our best in the region to prevent the spread of totalitarian regiemes and create democracy in the region. Our only problem is not fully understanding what sort of playing field we are on.

Not sure anyone said we didn’t know what the overall mission was.

The details of just how that mission was to be accomplished and what level of effort/violence our adversaries would use to stop us was by no means clear, nor was the lengths we were willing to go to counter them.

As to not knowing what we were doing there, actually it was pretty simple. We were trying to restore the status quo, which was the democratic tri-party government that had been ruling the country since the end of the Second World War. We had intervened once before in 1958 to help prop up the government of Lebanon with US Marines and US Navy personnel on the ground, Operation Blue Bat. We withdrew those units after 4 months on the ground. Hopeing the government would stay together. The Lebanonese Government lasted until 1975.

As to the restrictive ROE. I would like to point out that we weren’t the only ones operating under those. 58 French Paratroopers died on the same day due to a similar bombing. They too were operating under restrictive ROE’s regarding the usage of force and the appearance being a military force. The situation was never completely solved to anyone’s satisfaction. Numerous people have pointed fingers all over the place as to why things were done a certain way regarding security. The questions the historians and others looking at this need to ask themselves is how could we do it better in the future? What can we learn from this?