Daniel Larison thinks Grover Norquist's efforts to convince conservatives to give up the war on Afghanistan won't succeed, and isn't impressed with Norquist's analogy to President Reagan's pullout from Lebanon:
If we are having an honest conversation, the first observation I would make is that very few people are going to see the relevance of what the Reagan administration did after blundering into the middle of an Israeli invasion of its neighbor when it comes to thinking about Afghanistan one way or the other. U.S. involvement in Lebanon should never have happened in the first place, as the U.S. had no security interests at stake. Reaganâ??s recognition and correction of his earlier error were good, but the lesson to learn from Lebanon was that we should never have been involved. Very few people on the right agree that the U.S. should never have become involved in Afghanistan, and it seems to me that almost everyone on the right, including almost all opponents of the war in Iraq, believed that the war in Afghanistan was at least initially justified and appropriate, and almost all of them continued to believe this up until very recently. The Lebanon example doesnâ??t help get the conversation going, because it isnâ??t a particularly relevant example for the subject weâ??re discussing.
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.
Here's Max Boot:
Norquist seems quite enamored of Ronald Reaganâ??s pullout from Lebanon after the suicide car-bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut in 1983. Perhaps he is not aware that this incident was routinely cited â?? along with the U.S. pullout from Somalia in 1993 â?? by Osama bin Laden in the 1990s to justify his belief that the U.S. was a â??weak horseâ? that could be attacked with impunity.
In this telling, the Reagan and Clinton administrations should have never left Lebanon and Somalia but instead.... well, it's not quite clear what they should have done, is it? Stay? Until?
Either way, by dragging out the Lebanon example, Norquist is probably undermining his cause among most conservatives, not helping it.
