by James P. Pinkerton, Breitbart:
This author recalled in 2021, here at Breitbart News, the 1983 suicide truck bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut, Lebanon, that left 241 American servicemen dead. That disaster brought a quick end to the U.S. mission in Lebanon, which was “peacekeeping” in a war zone. If that doesn’t sound like such a good idea, that’s because it wasn’t. In the wake of the disaster, I wrote, “Uncle Sam had learned a lesson about the dangers of misbegotten missions in the Middle East—at least for a little while.”
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It was, indeed, a lesson learned for “a little while”—and only for a little while. Because, as we all remember, in the early 2000s, the U.S. launched new misbegotten missions in the region, first in Afghanistan, and then in Iraq. (The Afghanistan mission was justifiable at the outset; however, it stretched out for too long, into misbegottenness. As for Iraq, that was most definitely misbegotten from the outset—and never got better.)
Rescuers probe the wreckage of the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut, Lebanon, on October 24, 1983, a day after a suicide truck bomb destroyed the barracks. (AP Photo/Zouki)
An American peacekeeper searches the debris of the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut on October 27, 1983, looking for bodies and personal belongings of the victims of the truck bomb that destroyed the U.S. command center in Lebanon. (AP Photo/Foley)
A Marine honor guard and band are shown with 16 coffins of U.S. Marines killed in the Beirut bombing, during a service at Dover Air Force Base on October 29, 1983. (AP Photo)
So now, President Joe Biden has announced a new mission for the U.S. military in the Middle East—and this one, too, has “misbegotten” written all over it. In his March 7 State of the Union address, Biden said that Uncle Sam would build a pier to help deliver relief aid to Gaza.
President Joe Biden during a State of the Union address at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, DC, on March 7, 2024. (Shawn Thew/EPA/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
The most obvious concern about this pier is that it’s going to be another Beirut barracks-type situation; that is, American service personnel working to build the pier and managing supply logistics while Hamas, Iranian agents, and who-knows-who-else are looking on with suspicion and quite possibly taking aim with rifles, rockets, and drones.
