After seeing what was involved in putting in place a secure system for evacuating Americans, I now fully understand the time it took to get the assets in place to get us out. It wasn't efficient but you don't let the great be the enemy of the good.
What I don't understand it the lack of communications between the State Dept and those of us who were trapped. My guess is that this was simply an oversight by staff that were extremely busy working on our evacuation.
A simple update on the website each day or, much better, a blast email to each of us would have let us know that the process was working. More importantly, an email would have let us know that our electronic registrations had been successfully logged, which was not the case for many of us.
Let me also note that once the U.S. military was brought into the evacuation a week after the incident began, things scaled up on an historically unprecedented scale. I read that today 5,000 Americans were evacuated. That is truly stunning and a great tribute to our military. However, it does not erase the track record during the past week of the State Dept. We who were trapped in Lebanon wonder why it took seven days to dispatch the Iwo Jima amphibious battle group from the Red Sea to the coast of Lebanon.
Our government consists of numerous departments. Some have performed admirably. Some have not. This is just my opinion and I am grateful to live in a country where I am free to express it and those of you who choose to are free to disparage me.
I look at it (the evacuation itself) from an outsiders point of view, and I would say that I agree with the State Department spokesman when he answered the question of why it was taking the U.S. so long to evacuate it's citizens. He simply said it takes time to effectively coordinate plans to evacuate 25,000 of your own citizens.
Well, now you're showing entirely too much common sense for some folks to understand. That is NOT permitted. LOL
A nice well reasoned post. The important thing is that you and many other Americans are out of that warzone.