US Presidency
1984

We were there for the better part of a year. Our position happened to be at the airport. Oh, there were occasional snipings and sometimes some artillery fire, but we did not engage in conflict that was out of line with our mission. I will never send troops anywhere on a mission of that kind without telling them that if somebody shoots at them, they can darn well shoot back. And this is what we did. We never initiated any kind of action; we defended ourselves there. But we were succeeding to the point that the Lebanese government had been organized, if you will remember, there were the meetings in Geneva in which they began to meet with the hostile factional forces and try to put together some kind of a peace plan. We were succeeding, and that was why the terrorist acts began. There are forces there, and that includes Syria, in my mind, who don't want us to succeed, who don't want that kind of a peace with a dominant Lebanon, dominant over its own territory.