Well having pondered this overnight I still stand by what I wrote originally here thats now in the subarticle However his vote against a resolution allowing President Reagan to keep US Marines deployed as part of the Multinational Force in Lebanon on the grounds that he did not foresee obtainable objectives in Lebanon would seem prescient after the catastrophic Beirut barracks bombing a month later this vote would also gain him national media exposure and start his reputation as a political maverick  McCains public House floor speech was short and likely didnt include all his reasons against extending the deployment  I cant yet directly prove it with contemporaneous documents but I do believe that force protection was one of his concerns based on both his statements after the fact and the general nature of the debate at the time about which the dangers posed to the Marine deployment was constantly being discussed  See this NYT story or this NYT oped from a former Senator both published earlier in September  just as a couple of examples  I think the Marines as sitting ducks context was implicit in what McCain was saying and that the no forseeable objectives conclusion meant that casualties werent worth taking of course no one expected the extent to which the casualties would disastrously occur  The larger point is that opponents of illadvised military involvements rarely foresee all of what will go wrong or exactly what shape the wrong will take but they still usually get credit for recognizing that the involvement is misguided  This is true of early critics of the Vietnam War for example  Or take Iraq  during the Democratic primaries Obama got much of his base support for having opposed the war initially while Hillary supported it yet when you look at Obamas famous  speech youll see theres really only one sentence in it warning about the occupation  I know that even a successful war against Iraq will require a US occupation of undetermined length at undetermined cost with undetermined consequences  Its not like he was predicting say the depths to which the occupation would reach in the  period  But he still got credit for his opposition to the war from those opposed to the war and rightly so    So in sum if we include Lebanon I favor the inclusion of as much of the above subarticle text in the main article as Ferrylodges thoushaltgrownolarger commandment allows