Norquist, Lebanon and Afghanistan

I would disagree here and say that it’s quite relevant (politically) and quite unhelpful to Norquist’s cause. In my understanding of mainstream conservative sentiment on the issue, Reagan made a huge mistake in pulling out of Lebanon in response to Iranian attacks on U.S. marines. In the conventional wisdom that has taken hold among many conservative analysts, the Beirut bombings marked the beginning of the Islamist “war against the West” and Reagan’s act of loss-cutting served only to embolden our enemies. ~Greg Scoblete

Scoblete is correct in that much of the mainstream right remembers the withdrawal from Lebanon as a disaster or a prelude to a disaster. Hawkish interventionists and most conservatives in the GOP view the withdrawal from Lebanon so negatively that Norquist may have scored an own-goal when it comes to persuading mainstream conservatives to turn against the war. One reason I didn’t mention this in the original post was that I assumed that anyone who views Lebanon this way would never be remotely receptive to arguments for withdrawing from Afghanistan. Norquist’s target audience has to be conservatives who are not ideologically committed to U.S. power projection everywhere in the world, conservatives opposed to “nation-building” and conservatives worried about deficit spending, and among them this misguided understanding of the withdrawal from Lebanon doesn’t have as much influence. It’s true that Norquist didn’t help himself with people who believe this, but most of them are going to reject his message anyway.

As I acknowledged in the comments to my earlier post, mainstream conservatives have had it drilled into them that leaving Beirut in 1983 was a sign of weakness. What I was trying to say the first time was that pulling out of Lebanon wasn’t a sign of weakness, but was instead proof of intelligence. Lebanon and Afghanistan aren’t actually comparable, which is why Norquist’s use of Lebanon as a starting-point for sparking debate over Afghanistan seems misguided to me. To the extent that mainstream conservatives accept that the two missions are comparable, it will be in a way that is damaging to Norquist’s goal. So Norquist’s Lebanon example may be useless, or it may be very harmful to the cause of opposing the war, but we can agree that it isn’t going to start a conversation that is going to go Norquist’s way.