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Originally posted by bilmore
Poor Reagan got blind-sided by Beirut. He thought we were on the good guys's side there.
Hell, he thought there WERE good guys there. He didn't understand that the Christians were killing the Muslims, who were killing the Coptics, who were killing the Druse, who were killing . . . .
And they were all doing it for money and power and nothing else. He walked into a gang war, with very bad intelligence.
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There's an easy and cheap joke in rejoinder to "poor Reagan," but I'll avoid it. I'll take your point that he (we) walked into something we didn't fully understand.
And to others, yep -- you're right, it was a Marines barracks, now that I think about it. My bad.
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I remain convinced that, had Bush I won, 9/11 would never have happened, we'd be on top of the world in an intelligence sense, and the economy would have actually turned out better. Having said that, I think the temperament (if not the experience, and maybe raw intelligence) of Bush I is not as well suited to a post-9/11 world as is the cowboy. I like the cowboy to a great degree because he is a cowboy, and we need a cowboy right now.
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I don't follow your logic that, had Bush I beaten Clinton, that we'd have avoided 9/11. As mentioned above, I think that OBL drew his perceptions of American weakness from a longer window of time than The Clinton Years.
FWIW, I also don't think that Clinton's foreign policy was abysmal.
Finally, while there is some merit to having a cowboy in a post-9/11 world, what bothers me is (a) that cowboy-ness has its limits, and (b) he was a cowboy well before 9/11, and was telling the rest of the world to FU before such fundamental and more justifiable reasons lay behind it, instead because (I suspect) it fit within a Ford-era world view and, well, it just kinda felt good.
