Opinion

FAFO Warning: Marine Corps Commandant Edition

26 October 2023
KITDAFBS

Jason Hirschfeld

BEEGE WELBORN HotAir

This week is always difficult for Marines. The memory of the Beirut bombing is one of those sores that never heals. It’s a betrayal that you never fully learn to deal with if you were active duty when it happened. You keep the memory alive both to honor your fallen brothers and to keep fresh the manner of enemy they were dealing with. Still dealing with to this very day.

Screencap @COJacksonville

That’s why this year’s anniversary – the 40th since the bombing of the Marine barracks with its horrific losses – was especially poignant but particularly in focus.

Marines are being sent back to those same shores at this very moment to deal with the exact same barbarians.

Only instead of a patriot as president, we have a befuddled, malevolent vegetable whose own administration has financed and succored both the perpetrators of the October 7th massacre in Israel, and their ideological and material godfathers in Iran.

An administration so morally twisted that they can claim they “stand with Israel” as it roots out those responsible for the horrors inflicted upon its innocent citizens in their very homes, even as they actively work against the Israeli plans.

The Biden administration is actively holding the Israelis back from finishing the savages off. There are myriad reasons and didn’t David just post on the most recent. Possibly the scariest.

Oh FFS.

The story about why Israel has yet to make a ground invasion of Gaza is becoming clear, and it is yet another embarrassment for the United States under Joe Biden.

Israel has been prepared to enter Gaza to eliminate Hamas, but the ground invasion keeps getting delayed. The reason why?

The US is unprepared to defend US military installations in the area.

These pathetic, waffling doofuses – perpetually running 6 steps behind even as they commit US troops to the theater.

Hamas gets stronger and regroups with every break in the action. Iran has to be gloating at the complete lack of strength projection in the US posture. Instead of threatening the mullahs with death raining from the skies if their militias – who have already injured some 2 dozen US troops with their drone attacks – launch one more zoomzoom at our Syrian or Iraqi outposts, what does POTATUS do?

Basically tell our kids to…DUCK!!

…The White House on Monday said Iran was in some cases “actively facilitating” rocket and drone attacks by Iranian-backed proxy groups on U.S. military bases in Iraq and Syria, and President Biden has directed the Department of Defense to brace for more and respond appropriately.

YGTBFKM

One person who doesn’t seem to be a ducking type, nor is he ruffled by the constantly changing plans is the new commandant of the Marine Corps – Gen. Eric Smith.

As I said at the top, he’s got Marines en route to the Eastern Med right now. His focus is on them, with the memories…

…and hard learned lessons in mind that run deep through the very sinews of the Corps.

War in Middle East looms over Marines’ 40th memorial of Beirut attack

…But with Israel at war with Hamas following the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas militants, the dread of more violence on U.S. service members in the region was present in the ceremony’s speeches.

The 26th Marine Expeditionary Unit, a special operations capable unit of approximately 2,400 Marines and sailors, was sailing in the direction of the East Mediterranean, the Marine Corps confirmed, having left an exercise in Kuwait early because of the outbreak of the Israel-Hamas war.

The 26th MEU has not been tasked with a specific mission but is “on a high readiness status prepared to respond should the department have need,” U.S. Central Command said in a statement to Marine Corps Times on Monday.

Similar to the battalion that suffered immense losses in Lebanon in 1983, the 26th Marine Expeditionary Unit is part of II Marine Expeditionary Force, based at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina.

Leave the waffling and mealy-mouthed talk to the weakling, winking Bidens, Blinkens and nodding yes-men who enable this perfidious pack of political pimps to slip and slide through every slimy orifice of international double-dealing. In the face of the American military representation evinced by the likes of Milley, Austin, and their host of woke Army and Air Force generals, the Marine Corps commandant’s words during the Beirut memorial service, especially with Marines who could soon be in harm’s way, brooked no misunderstanding and implied no kumbayahs of respite, resupply, or reconciliation for any of the jihadis.

‘T’weren’t nuthin’ but a good, old-fashioned FAFO.

…Gen. Eric Smith, the Marine commandant, had a blunt message for anyone who would target the Marine expeditionary unit now heading into the region near Israel.

“The secretary of defense has been very clear that, whatever their mission may be, don’t target those Marines — he said it very carefully — because they come ready to respond,” Smith said during his keynote address at the ceremony in Jacksonville, North Carolina.

“I’ll be less diplomatic and more Marine-like,” Smith said, to cheers from the audience, according to a live-streamed video of the event.

“For those that are in the area, if that MEU has to go in, if you target them, someone else will raise your children.”

That’s how it’s done.

#SemperFi

Original Here