Was recently reading this and he mentioned the Marine barracks bombing in Beirut, which certainly I’d heard about but apparently didn’t know the details. His description was as follows:
“In Beirut, U.S. and French troops intervened to prevent the Israeli military from obliterating the cornered Palestine Liberation Organization. U.S. Marines literally rescued the PLO and evacuated Yasser Arafat and 15,000 fighting men safely to exile in Tunis, Tunisia. For their pains, the Marines and the French troops had their barracks blown up by Islamic extremists, losing over 400 soldiers between them.”
Is this how it went? Somehow in my lifetime it has always seemed that the U.S. was a little too pro-Israel and didn’t really know how long it had been that way. Were we really stepping in solely to save the cornered PLO and everything else that was described in the article?
Any info would be appreciated… I know a lot of the focus has moved away from the Israel/Palestine thing, but it’s all gotten me thinking about how little I really know about the history of the conflict, why we support who we do, or whether its as obvious a bias as I would have thought.