Posturing While America Burns
By Judson Cox (04/12/04)
When politicians see television cameras, even the most reasonable and responsible among them become more than willing to sink the ship of our nation with the inflammatory rhetoric spewing from their loose lips. The 9-11 Commission has done nothing to further the prevention of terrorism, but has been a dirty political blame game that must have been very entertaining for Osama bin Laden (assuming he has access to television in the hole he is cowering in). The public hearings have been a dangerous farce, eroding the confidence of some and exposing our divisions to those who wish us ill.
The Democrats on the committee seem to believe President Bush has the deductive abilities of Sherlock Holmes, the omniscience of God and the physical abilities of Superman. They would have us believe that when President Bush read al Qaeda chatter saying, “Something big is going to happen,” he should have swung into action! He should have known that terrorists were going to hijack airplanes. He should have known who was going to do the hijacking, what planes they were going to hijack and the buildings they were targeting. President Bush should have donned his cape, flown out of a White House window, grabbed those planes, landed them safely, slapped the terrorists around and escorted them to jail. He should have zipped over to Afghanistan and zapped bin Laden with his laser vision!
Ben-Veniste and Kerrey didn’t actually paint that comic book scenario, but it is clear they believe that President Bush should have known what was going to happen and should have stopped it. Let’s pretend that after finally assuming the Presidency (after months of fighting Democratic election fraud and obstruction), the President and his team moved into a White House (vandalized and looted by Democrats) and began picking up the pieces of our intelligence services (defunded, degraded, hampered and nearly destroyed by Democrats from the Church Commission to Clinton). Richard Clarke tells President Bush the details of the 9-11 attacks. Clarke, having spent the previous two years as the nation’s leading Chicken Little, warning that the year 2000 would usher in a cyber Armageddon, somehow convinces the President of his veracity.
Should the President have pushed for a strengthening of our intelligence services, a coordinated effort that would have allowed the monitoring of terrorist suspects within the United States – a Patriot Act? Democrats and many Republicans would have screamed that a fascist regime was undermining American civil liberties. The ACLU and other legal groups would have flooded the courts with lawsuits, and impeachment hearings would have followed.
Should the President have ordered an investigation of Islamic groups? The nation would have cried that he was a religious bigot bent on imposing Christianity on America. Should he have ordered tightened security at airports, and the screening of Middle-Easterners? He would have been branded a racist, and enemy of civil rights.
Should he have ordered Air Marshals be present on all domestic flights? Should he have shot down the planes before they reached their targets? Should he have closed our borders? Should he have rounded up all suspected terrorists and placed them in internment camps? All of these actions could have prevented the 9-11 attacks. None of them would have been tolerated by the Congress, the courts or the American people.
There are only two ways another 9-11 can be prevented. America can become a police state, in which every citizen is watched and investigated. Or, terrorists can be killed or imprisoned before they enter our nation. President Bush has chosen the latter, and he has strengthened our intelligence services to investigate suspected terrorists within our borders. Any reasonable person can see the wisdom in this approach – simply stated, it is best to chop the head off of a snake before he has the opportunity to strike.
President Bush has shown the wisdom and fortitude to wage a world wide war on terror regardless of the opinions of the world. Under his leadership, America has overturned terrorist regimes and their sponsors and created a trend of pro-American democracy in the Middle East. As President Bush said, this will be a long war, with many battles. There will be more terrorist attacks, here and abroad. America will make new allies and new enemies, and at times it will seem like the whole world is against us. However, we are on the right track, pursuing the only workable strategy. With the resolve and courage to set aside political posturing, we will win.
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