WHEN I WAS IN BEIRUT * IN MEMORY OF OUR 240 MARINES OF THE 24TH MAU who PERISHED

We are expanding! Please forgive the transition and growing pains. This page will still be here, but you can access my new blog at PROGRESSIVE FREEDOM BLOG

You can reach my Home page at: LYDIA CORNELL

And to discuss SPIRITUAL SOLUTIONS to the world crises, along with some amazing prayer miracles in the next few weeks, please check out RADICAL PRAYER at my other blog THE PEACEMAKERS * LIGHT OF TRUTH Just posted a wonderful article "Disowning Conservative Politics Is Costly for Pastor" over there. Blessings to a brave Christian who woke up and realized the truth. Of course he will be persecuted for it.

Found this photo of Johnny Grant, Kelly Patterson and myself with the troops in Beirut, Lebanon for USO tour. God Bless the brave Marines of the 24th MAU, who died from a suicide truck bomb launched by Hezbollah shortly after we left Beirut. Years later I received fan mail from the 13-year-old son of one of these Marines. He asked me if I had ever met his father, and would I describe him to him. The boy was dying of cancer.

I will post parts of my Beirut Diary, which was published by US magazine, in the coming weeks. Audrey Meadows, who played my grandmother on Too Close For Comfort, was the one who encouraged me to go to a war zone on Christmas Eve, 1982. I will always be grateful to her for pushing me to go on this "trip of a lifetime." I was scared to death flying into Lebanon; have some hilarious stories about paranoia and mine fields in a blacked-out city.

There were so many wonderful Marines I met before the attack. I wonder if Col. Black Jack is still alive? Does anyone know Black Jack? He gave me a plaque with a gold Black Jack card engraved on it.

Contemplate this photo of Sedona: it does wonders to bring down stress levels.


"Dissent is the highest form of patriotism." Thomas Jefferson.

Why the Middle East Crisis Isn't Really About Terrorism
By insisting it is, President Bush clouds the real issues, which are how much the U.S. should do for Israel and what it should do to Iran
By LISA BEYER

Posted Sunday, Jul. 30, 2006
A year after 9/11, Richard Armitage, then the Deputy Secretary of State, was asked at a Washington forum whether the Bush Administration had plans, in its war on terrorism, for the Lebanese Islamist group Hizballah, factions of which the U.S. believes were responsible for the 1983 bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut that killed 241 U.S. service members. Armitage, a bear of a man, gave a chest-thumping reply. "Their time will come," he vowed. "There is no question about it. They have a blood debt to us, and we're not going to forget it."

The time appears to be now. By supporting Israel's ferocious offensive against Hizballah in Lebanon, especially by pushing back international efforts to broker a cease-fire in order to give the Israeli military more time to lay waste to the group's fighters and armaments, Washington has taken a forceful swing at the militia, even if it's by proxy. It's not exactly about avenging the Marines, of course. It's about fighting the global war on terrorism.

Or is it? Should it be?

Enunciating a new security doctrine nine days after the 9/11 attacks, President Bush declared that the war on terrorism would be fought not just against al-Qaeda but also against "every terrorist group of global reach." Hizballah can certainly be said to fit in that category. However grand it may be to fight all global terrorists, though, the simple fact is that we can't: we don't have the troops, the money or the political will. That means it may make sense to limit our hit list to the groups that actually threaten us. Hizballah does not now do that. Nor does the other group currently in the spotlight, the Palestinian Islamist organization Hamas. The U.S. has sound reasons for wanting to constrain these groups, principally that they threaten our ally Israel. But those reasons have largely gone unarticulated as Bush falls back on maxims about the need to confront terrorism, as if Hizballah and Hamas are likely to be behind the next spectacular that will top 9/11. They are not, and pretending that they are costs the U.S. credibility, risks driving terrorist groups that aren't allied into alliance and obscures the real issues at hand in the Middle East: How do you soften up militants who vehemently oppose Israel's existence? What should the U.S. put on the line for Israel? And does it make sense for Washington to engage in boxing by surrogate with Tehran?

THE NATURE OF HIZBALLAH

Formed in 1982 to resist Israel's occupation of Lebanon, Hizballah established its terrorist bona fides in the 1980s by kidnapping some 50 foreigners in Lebanon, including 18 U.S. citizens, and killing two of them, notably CIA station chief William Buckley. The group's global reach was achieved perhaps in 1985 with a suspected connection to the saga of TWA Flight 847, in which hijackers shot dead a U.S. Navy diver and dumped him onto a Beirut tarmac. In 1992 Hizballah bombed the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires, killing 29, and, in 1994, a Jewish cultural center there, killing 95. Read the rest of the article at: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1220505,00.html