`Well, having pondered this overnight, I still stand by what I wrote originally here, that's now in the subarticle: ``However, his vote against a resolution allowing President Reagan to keep U.S. 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.``  McCain's public House floor speech was short, and likely didn't include all his reasons against extending the deployment.  I can't 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 op-ed from a former Senator, both published earlier in September 1983, 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 weren't worth taking (of course, no one expected the extent to which the casualties would disastrously occur).  The larger point is that opponents of ill-advised 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 Obama's famous 2002 speech, you'll see there's 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.``  It's not like he was predicting, say, the depths to which the occupation would reach in the 2006 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 Ferrylodge's thou-shalt-grow-no-larger commandment allows.      `