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« on: September 08, 2011, 08:56:06 PM » |
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The Patriot Post - Are We Safer Today?
From The Federalist Patriot
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Are We Safer Today?
By Mark Alexander · Thursday, September 8, 2011
Al-Qa'ida may be down, but Islamo-Fascism 2.0 is thriving
"A universal peace ... is in the catalogue of events, which will never exist but in the imaginations of visionary philosophers, or in the breasts of benevolent enthusiasts." --James Madison
This Sunday marks the 10th anniversary of the 11 September 2001 attack on our nation by a terrorist cell of Islamic fascists. (If you were young and do not have a crystal-clear memory of that event, I suggest you link to our 9/11 retrospective page1.)
It was a modern "date which will live in infamy" as Franklin Roosevelt said in regard to the attack on Pearl Harbor 60 years earlier. The two most significant similarities between Pearl and 9/11 are that we were wholly unprepared for both, and a like number of Americans were murdered.
After eight years of national security malfeasance under Bill Clinton's administration, and eight months of the newly installed George W. Bush administration's efforts to reorder national security priorities, only a handful of Americans were convinced that a deadly enemy had coalesced in our midst. Indeed, a well-organized terrorist cell had settled into American suburbs in the last years of Clinton's watch.
However, before noon on 9/11, it was tragically clear to all Americans that our vital national interests -- both the security of our homeland and the stability of our allies abroad -- were under assault. An enemy had declared war on the United States, and it was an asymmetric enemy better organized and more lethal than ever before.
Why were we so blatantly unprepared2?
In 2001, the U.S military had been severely downsized with the Justice Department and CIA operating under very restrictive Clinton budgets and mandates. Clinton's final national security policy directive (in December 2000) did not mention "al-Qa'ida" once in its 45,000-word text, and mentioned "Osama bin Laden" only four times. The directive remains a self-incriminating document that lays bare the Clinton administration's "strategy" of swatting flies -- of lobbing the occasional cruise missile at a nearly empty building (excepting for poor janitors) and of treating terrorists as mere "fugitives" who should be extradited to "answer for their crimes."
Michael Scheuer, former CIA chief of the team responsible for hunting Sheik Osama bin Laden, confirmed with great disdain that SpecOps had not one but two opportunities to kill OBL before 9/11. With bin Laden literally in their sights, however, Clinton pulled the plug3 on both operations.
Fortunately, President George W. Bush was decisive both in identifying our enemy4 and in responding. "This nation is at war with Islamic fascists who will use any means to destroy those of us who love freedom, to hurt our nation," the president said, in preparation for launching the Global War on Islamic Terrorism.
Global indeed. The Patriot Post coined the term "Jihadistan" to refer to the borderless nation of Islamic extremists that constitutes al-Qa'ida and other Muslim terrorist groups around the world.
Within days of 9/11, Bush specifically identified OBL and his Taliban support network as the perpetrators of the attack, and within three weeks, Operation Enduring Freedom - Afghanistan was underway. OEF-A was followed by OEF campaigns to capture or kill members of al-Qa'ida and other Islamic terrorist groups around the world, including operations in the Philippines, Horn of Africa, Pankisi Gorge, Trans-Sahara regions, Kyrgyzstan, the Caribbean and Central America.
Thus, the advent of Fourth Generation Warfare5 in the Second Nuclear Age6.
Seventeen months and 17 toothless United Nations resolutions7 later, George Bush finally launched Operation Iraqi Freedom.
On 9/12, there had been grave doubts about whether our nation could prevent another catastrophic attack in the days and weeks ahead -- much less whether the Bush administration could keep the homeland free from major attack for the remaining seven-plus years of Bush's presidency. There were also questions about whether OEF and OIF would be sufficient to contain Jihadi elements.
As noted in The Patriot Post's five-part National Security Primer8, our objective has been to keep the battle on our enemy's turf, and keep them off of ours. That was the central theme of the Bush Preemption Doctrine9 behind OEF and OIF.
Make no mistake: It is not for a lack of Islamo-Fascist will that we have avoided another massive attack; indeed, individual jihadists have, during the first 30 months of the Obama administration, launched a failed Christmas Day airline bombing and a failed Times Square bombing, as well as a successfully murderous assault on Fort Hood. Despite this -- and as affirmed by classified cable traffic regarding interdiction operations -- our Armed Forces, law enforcement and intelligence agencies have established an effective, though certainly not impenetrable, gauntlet against such an attack. We have dodged many bullets over the last decade.
Predictably, the most significant obstacles to our national security during the Bush years came in the form of opposition from bed-wetting pantywaists on the Left. Our enemies have been greatly emboldened by Leftist traitors10 in Congress and their efforts to undermine President Bush's re-election prospects by politicizing questions about the Iraqi WMD threat11 while thousands of American combat personnel were in harm's way.
Second only to the Left's aiding and abetting the enemy is that of their Leftmedia sycophants12.
Recall if you will these words, first reported by The Patriot Post: "I say to you: that we are in a battle, and that more than half of this battle is taking place in the battlefield of the media." That quote is part of an intercepted and authenticated communiqué from Osama bin Laden's chief lieutenant, Sheikh Ayman Muhammad al-Zawahiri, to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, before the murderous Zarqawi's termination in June 2006. |
