Finally someone agrees with me

The Daily Demarche muses about the war on terror and traces it back to Lebanon.

The struggle for Iraq, and ultimately the region and quite literally the future of the world as we know it will not be easy. We need to apply perspective. While every life lost in Iraq is a tragedy, America lost 295,000 dead in WWII- a war to save the world too, and one in which we elected to take the fight to an enemy that had not yet attacked us, but who posed a bigger risk over the enemy that. Our options are limited now, much as they were then- fight now, fight later at potentially much greater cost, or surrender. That war started for us in 1941. It ended in 1989. This war started some years ago, it is hard to pinpoint when exactly, but the October 23, 1981 bombing of the Marine Barracks in Lebanon might be a good point to start. For 20 years we pretended there was no war. In 2001 we came to our senses, and realized this is a war. Let's not lose them now.

I have never forgiven Ronald Reagan for doing nothing about the loss of 220 Marines in Lebanon. They deserved better.

I'm equally convinced that had we taken decisive action then, we may never have had to deal with the jihadis of today. Our display of weakness then merely encouraged them to kill more.