BIN LADEN WOULD LATER SAY that the United States had always been his enemy. He dated his hatred for America to 1982, “when America permitted the Israelis to invade Lebanon and the American Sixth Fleet helped them.” He recalled the carnage: “blood and severed limbs, women and children sprawled everywhere. Houses destroyed along with their occupants and high rises demolished over their residents…. The situation was like a crocodile meeting a helpless child, powerless except for his screams.”
[The Looming Tower (p. 151)]
"It seemed like a good idea at the time"
What Have We Learned?
"On September 19 1983, the New Jersey and other US warships began shelling Druze, Syrian and Palestinian positions in the Chouf Mountains outside Beirut. The battleship New Jersey with its 2,700 pound shells (“flying Volkswagens”) led the action. On 8 February 1984, New Jersey fired almost 300 shells at Druze and Shi’ite positions in the hills overlooking Beirut. The massive projectiles rained down on the Bekaa valley east of Beirut and constituted the heaviest shore bombardment since the Korean War. The accuracy of New Jersey‘s guns was a scandal in US government circles and was consistently called into question. An investigation into New Jersey’s gunfire effectiveness in Lebanon, led by Marine colonel Don Price, found that many of the ship’s shells had missed their targets by as much as 10,000 yards "
[I remember it well. Watching a WWII battleship pounding Beirut for hours straight was all "great spectacle" for a 15 year old kid who had yet to develop a conscience; and of course, for budding Neocons wanting to play "Battleship"]
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"I remember when I was with Special Forces. We went into a camp to inoculate some children. We left the camp after we had inoculated the children for polio, and this old man came running after us and he was crying. He couldn't see. We went back there, and they had come and hacked off every inoculated arm. There they were in a pile. A pile of little arms. And I cried, I wept like some grandmother. I wanted to tear my teeth out. And then I realized. They were stronger than we. If I had ten divisions of those men, our troubles here would be over very quickly. Because it's judgment that defeats us."
[Colonel Kurtz, Apocalypse Now]
