Caspar Weinberger Gives Aid and Comfort to the Enemy

Does this ever sound familiar:

Ronald Reagan's former defense secretary says he pleaded for the president to put Marines serving in Lebanon in a safer position before terrorists attacked them in 1983.

Caspar Weinberger says he was "not persuasive enough to persuade the president that the Marines were there on an impossible mission." The bombing in Beirut killed 241 servicemen.

I'm not saying that Weinberger sounds like a certain Mr. Murtha in this statement, the difference of course being that Murtha didn't have to get a Presidential pardon to avoid trial. But this notion that leaving=losing appears to have a long history. According to some press reports (which my Google monkey refuses to find for me at the moment) Weinberger had the hardest time getting around the idea that leaving Beirut would mean that "Marines cut and run."

Leaving does not mean losing in Iraq. That's an insult to the Iraqi people. Staying certainly means losing lives. And given that we've installed a theocratic Islamic republic, abandoned most of our proposed reconstruction projects, and failed to provide even basic security, it's an open question whether winning and losing mean anything anymore in Iraq. I've said for a long time that we passed that window ages ago. Now we appear to be holding on to a fanciful notion of victory while our troops are in the line of fire. Just like in Beirut. Weinberger is likely spinning himself into the hero since his opponent in this case is no longer alive, but the similarities are obvious. Iraq may not be Vietnam so much as it is Lebanon.