US Presidency
1984

First of all, when we and our allies, the Italians, the French, and the United Kingdom, went into Lebanon, we went in there at the request of what was left of the Lebanese government to be a stabilizing force while they tried to establish a government. But the first, pardon me, the first time we went in, we went in at their request because the war was going on right in Beirut between Israel and the PLO terrorists. Israel could not be blamed for that. Those terrorists had been violating their northern border consistently, and Israel chased them all the way to there. Then we went in with the multinational force to help remove, and did remove, more than 13,000 of those terrorists from Lebanon. We departed. And then the government of Lebanon asked us back in as a stabilizing force while they established a government and sought to get the foreign forces all the way out of Lebanon and that they could then take care of their own borders. And we were succeeding.