Lesson learned

Caroline Glick in the Jerusalem Post recalls “one of the most egregious failures in US military history” — the murder by Hezbollah terrorists of 241 marines in the barracks at the Beirut airport on October 23, 1983. Glick is hardly one to look at the world through rose colored glasses. However, she finds it “hard not to be amazed by the radical transformation in thinking that the US military has undergone in the past 10-15 years.” Glick captures a key part of that thinking in her concluding paragraph:

Back in Beirut in 1983, US Marines greeted Israeli soldiers with hostility as they, like the rest of America, lived in denial of the reality that our nations’ enemies are common ones. So perhaps the fact that as the US builds conceptual models for its wars of the future it asks Israelis to participate in its war games as “subject matter experts” is the best indication that in the final analysis, the Americans have drawn the proper lessons from their Beirut catastrophe.

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