Enough

After five years of obstruction, obfuscation, nay-saying, undermining and misleading the American people about the War on Terror, we now know the Democrats national security plan for the election. They're going to run on Bill Clinton's record!

Brendan Miniter offers some highlights for your consideration:

With that in mind, let us examine Mr. Clinton's war on terror. Some 38 days after he was sworn in, al Qaeda attacked the World Trade Center. He did not visit the twin towers that year, even though four days after the attack he was just across the Hudson River in New Jersey, talking about job training. He made no attempt to rally the public against terrorism. His only public speech on the bombing was a few paragraphs inserted into a radio address mostly devoted an economic stimulus package. Those stray paragraphs were limited to reassuring the public and thanking the rescuers, the kinds of things governors say after hurricanes. He did not even vow to bring the bombers to justice. Instead, he turned the first terrorist attack on American soil over to the FBI.

In his Fox interview, Mr. Clinton said "no one knew that al Qaeda existed" in October 1993, during the tragic events in Somalia. But his national security adviser, Tony Lake, told me that he first learned of bin Laden "sometime in 1993," when he was thought of as a terror financier. U.S. Army Capt. James Francis Yacone, a black hawk squadron commander in Somalia, later testified that radio intercepts of enemy mortar crews firing at Americans were in Arabic, not Somali, suggesting the work of bin Laden's agents (who spoke Arabic), not warlord Farah Aideed's men (who did not). CIA and DIA reports also placed al Qaeda operatives in Somalia at the time.

By the end of Mr. Clinton's first year, al Qaeda had apparently attacked twice. The attacks would continue for every one of the Clinton years.
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You go read the whole thing.

Let's don't let the Clintonistas airbrush history.

As I watch this debate unfold, each time I think that the other side couldn't possibly sink any lower, I'm surprised again. It's ike watching a bad sit-com where the character gets caught in a lie and just keeps digging himself a deeper hole.

Instead of acting like leaders, Democrats, many of whom voted for the war, have scurried like scared rabbits at any sign of difficulty.

Iraq is where our military is engaging the jihad. Al Qaeda knows Iraq is the central front in the war. Saddam deserved to be gone whether he was connected to 9/11 or not. If we prevail there, we'll go a long way toward eliminating this scourge.

This week, someone chose to leak a snippet of the classified NIE. A NY Times article stated,"A stark assessment of terrorism trends by American intelligence agencies has found that the invasion and occupation of Iraq has helped spawn a new generation of Islamic radicalism and that the overall terrorist threat has grown since the September 11 attacks."

What the actual report said was,

The Iraq conflict has become the “cause celebre” for jihadists, breeding a deep
resentment of US involvement in the Muslim world and cultivating supporters for
the global jihadist movement. Should jihadists leaving Iraq perceive themselves,
and be perceived, to have failed, we judge fewer fighters will be inspired to carry
on the fight.

In other words, they've come to fight us there, and if we succeed, there will be fewer of them. Sounds like we ought to stay and slug it out.

Beat Again!

There comes a moment in most contests when a keen observer can detect a momentum shift. Just such a moment occurred two weeks ago with the Buffalo Bills leading the Patriots 17-7 and driving in the third period. On fourth and one from the Patriots 7-yard line, the Bills elect to go for it, run Willis McGahee into the line and get stuffed.

I watched the rest of the game but I knew it was over. The Patriots took the ball and drove 93 yards for the score. Still only 17-14, with plenty of time left, but it was over. Final score 19-17, Pats.

This week offered up a similar momentum switch as Democrat hopes for taking Congress began to fade like the Bills hopes of knocking off the Pats.

It all began to come undone on the fifth anniversary of 9/11. Seeing those images again had an effect. And then, unaccountably, ABC went ahead and broadcast "Path to 9/11" over the strenuous objections of Bill Clinton and sundry other Democrats. I suspect even the most partisan of Democrats must have been a little taken aback at the heavy-handedness of the Dems' run at Disney. Threatening their broadcast license?

For a Conservative, having been on the receiving end of plenty of Hollywood hit pieces left me with decidedly mixed emotions on the program. On the one hand, I have my issues with the whole "docu-drama" genre. Too often, the ones I'd seen had become psuedo-historical platforms for launching a partisan agenda.

On the other hand, it's an important subject. Television is still THE medium for telling a big story to the masses. If there were blatant distortions, it risked being seen as some sort of propaganda piece. If there were blatant distortions, I wouldn't want to see it, even if those distortions tilted towards my side of the political spectrum.

I watched. It was pretty good, excellent in places. It made George Tenet, Sandy Burglar and Madeleine Albright look bad. They deserve to look bad. It made Richard Clarke and John O'Neill look like heroes. What happened to Richard Clarke? Brilliant guy, but evidently he got ignored on a bi-partisan basis.

It suggested that Clinton's Monica troubles may have compromised his freedom of action in confronting bin Laden. C'mon now, does anyone seriously think that they didn't? Does anyone think that his travails didn't inflame the radicals? Oral sex with a Jewish girl in the Oval Office? Does anyone think that facing impeachment didn't distract the administration?

Anyway, they showed it. It's into the bloodstream. The President gave a great speech in the middle of it. People realized that five years have gone by without attack. And, people got a rememberance of the Clinton years. Honestly, who can say any drama is perfectly accurate? I'm sure there were trifling inaccuracies in the presentation. Things were condensed, scenes created that never strictly happened, but the essential historical narrative was intact.

Interestingly, Clinton paid a lot more attention to Iraq than Afghanistan. Astonishingly, he chose the day he admitted lying to the American people about Monica to launch missile strikes on an aspirin factory in Sudan. Appallingly, he chose to launch a bombing campaign against Iraq the day he was impeached. No politics there. It's hard to believe that it took impeachment to get Clinton to do something about national security.

Does anybody else remember John Kerry exhorting the President to take out Saddam in 1998?
Alone if necessary?

Clinton knows that the main impression people will get about his presidency was that he had an affair, got caught, lied about it, got caught lying, got impeached and as a result did not fully confront the threat emerging from Al Qaeda. As a draft-dodger, and a felon, he lacked the moral authority to order men into battle and so he limited himself to ordering missile strikes and bombing raids.

9/11 happened on George Bush's watch. That makes him responsible. It's too bad nobody from either administration didn't take out bin Laden before 9/11. But there can be no doubt about which party has responded more forcefully since.

Radical Christian Radical Muslim