“One of the House leaders who thinks the Marines should continue as cannon fodder between the feuding war lords of Lebanon for 18 more months abjures having the Lebanon issue come up ‘in the middle of the presidential election.’ In other words, the American people ought not have much to do with the decision. Eighteen months? Eighten minutes? Mr. Speaker, an incoming round can tear a person to pieces in a second. The time to stop the madness of America’s accidental interention in Lebanon’s 300-year old religious war is now.”
— Rep. Andrew Jacobs,Jr., Marine Corps veteran of the infamous “Hill 902” during the Korean War, who spent about 22 terms in the U.S. Congress, much of it trying to stem the damage of presidential Congressional warmaking. (One day, in a locker room at the House gym, a hawkish colleague said “Oh, it’s one of the doves? But at least you’re a fighting dove.” Jacobs looked over at the man, who had had better things to do than serve, and said “Better a fighting dove than a chicken hawk,” inventing a term you may have used all the time.)
Jacobs made the above statement in 1981, as Robert McFarlane was announcing that the U.S. was about to weigh in in Lebanon on the side of the Christians (“not mission creep but mission leap,” Jacobs calls it).
I Ain't Marching Anymore 