The lesson that neocons take from Beirut and Mogadishu is that our retreats from those occupations showed us to be a weak horse to bin Laden. And so they did. Their solution is to continue such missions no matter how unrelated to the national interest they might be.

An equally, and perhaps even more valid lesson, is to not get involved in such situations in the first place. Beirut and Somalia were unrelated to our national intersest, while Iraq was contrary to the national interest from the start. Perhaps we should stay home next time and look like a horse that can mind our own business. ~Clark Stooksbury

Clark nicely dissects the tiresome refrains of the anti-Lamont, “didn’t you realise there’s a war on?” crowd, in this case Mark Levin (who refers to Namont as Little Neddy–Three Amigos viewers will get the joke) and Cliff May (NRO has really been providing fat targets lately, haven’t they?).  His rebuttal raises the question to the wise men who have criticised the withdrawals from Beirut and Somalia: would they have really kept American soldiers in Lebanon in the 1980s indefinitely to suffer more and more attacks, and would they have persisted in a senseless mission to make a nation out of the fractious clans of Somalia?  If their answer is yes, I don’t see why anyone with an eye towards the American interest should ever give these people the time of day, much less take their pronouncements on anything seriously.  But what do I know?  They are the voice of “responsible” foreign policy–the sort that gets Americans killed on a regular basis.