--- [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > Let me start with the first WTC bombing about which > Clinton did nothing. Well we caught the guys who did > it. What were we to do next?
They didn't act alone. They were supported by Bin Laden, among many others. We should have been a _lot_ more aggressive in going after their sources of support. You conveniently ignore the multiple other gestures of weakness made by the Administration. Nothing after the Cole. Nothing after Khobar Towers. Virtually nothing after an attempted assassination on ex-President Bush. A pinprick cruise missile launch on a pharmaceutical plant in the Sudan. A handful of trivial bombing raids in Iraq. If Clinton had had the fortitude to continue Desert Fox for another few weeks at least some people think Hussein would have fallen then. I don't have access to that evidence to evaluate it, but he didn't even _try_, which tells you something. > > We had enough evidence to know that he was > launching > > terrorist attacks against the United States, and > was > > planning on doing so again. We should, of course, > > have had Sudan hand him over, interrogated him, > found > > out everything he knew about his organization, and > > killed him. > Of course being a cowardly terrorist he would have > admitted everything. The rest of the world would > have said he is obviously planning something truly > massive so we can understand you playing fast and > lose with international law. We all know that > Arafats refusal to accept an agreement brokered by > Clinton that would have made peace possible would > inevitably lead to an upswelling of anti-americanism > in the arab "street" We all could see the coming of > suicide bombings it was so obvious. So obvisous that > the Bush administration took extraudinary efforts > during it initial months to bring about peace in > Israel. He would, eventually, have admitted everything, certainly. I didn't suggest reading him his rights. If we couldn't get information out of him, well, the Israelis or the Egyptians could. We _did_ all know that Bin Laden was an international terrorist at the time - he was, as I recall, on the freaking cover of Newsweek well before 9/11, so it wasn't exactly a secret. As for the rest of the world - who cares? Whether the rest of the world would even have _known_ is, at best, doubtful. Even if they did (and there's an argument to be made that it would be _better_ that they did) the only people who would have gotten very upset with us about Bin Laden - well, they wouldn't like us much no matter what we did. If someone is out there killing Americans - and he was - and the rest of the world object to us stopping them, that isn't an argument to allow someone to keep killing Americans. As for the other stuff - Bush didn't try to get Israel to commit suicide, no, the only thing which could have placated the Palestinians. You're okay with that, I'm guessing. The rest of it - while the suicide bombers concern me, they're not killing Americans. Bin Laden was. So the rest of your stuff has nothing to do with nothing. > Better _before_ 9/11 than after it, > > because 9/11 was an inevitability as long as he > was > > free. The fact that it happened didn't surprise > > anyone I knew in the field - in fact, as Graham > > Allison said a few days later, in a real sense we > were > > very lucky. > And of course it was obvious to the Bush > administration before 9/11 because they made it a > priority to boost anti-terrorism funding immediately > upon entering office rather than cutting same. As I > remember it was right behind putting more arsenic > into our water supply. Bob, get a grip. You know I like you, so I'm not saying this lightly. To go - very briefly - over the arsenic thing, the Bush Administration decided to _review_ a decision by the Clinton Administration to _decrease_ acceptable levels of arsenic below current levels, a decision that had very questionable public health benefits and imposed extremely high costs on some parts of the country. Just because you don't live in Arizona it is not, in fact, unimportant. How, exactly, is that "putting more arsenic into our water supply"? Unless Terry McAuliffe is paying you, that's abusrd. Even then it's absurd, but that's what I'd expect from the DNC, not from someone having a serious discussion. Frantically defending every last folly and idiocy of the Clinton Administration while attacking the Bush Administration on, well, fictional, grounds doesn't exactly make for a discourse. As for the Bush focus on anti-terrorism - one of the profound ironies of the situation (among many) is that Bush had ordered the development of a plan to engage Al Qaeda far more aggressively. It was scheduled to be delivered to the White House - on September 12, 2001. I have, on various occasions, praised elements of the Clinton Administration's foreign policy on this list. I agreed with them with regards to North Korea, for example. I was wrong (as were they) but their decision was, given what everyone knew at the time, understandable. I have written fairly extensively on the brilliance of their foreign economic policy which was, under Rubin and later Summers, nothing short of astonishing. But Clinton's policy with regards to terrorism was feckless, and betrayed the fact that he was fundamentally unfit to be President. It never seems to have occurred to him that when someone is trying to kill large numbers of Americans, sitting on your hands waiting for a warrant wasn't the best approach. You go to war. This was a group of people who, through some combination of irresolution, irresponsibility, and a fundamentally flawed view of the world, raised foreign policy incompetence to something that looks sort of like performance art. Gautam __________________________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Tax Center - forms, calculators, tips, more http://taxes.yahoo.com/ _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
