It’s The War On Terror, Stupid!
By Tom Barrett (11/02/04)
We all remember the phrase, “It’s the economy, stupid,” which was used by Clinton in the 1992 presidential election. I wish this election was about something as mundane as the economy. Unfortunately it is not. If we do not win the War on Terror, then the debate over the economy and the Democrats’ desire to push homosexual marriage on our nation will be meaningless. Terrorists will force our country to its knees by destroying our major cities, and Islamic fundamentalists will decide who can marry. Only one man can lead us in the war on terror, and it’s not John Kerry.
Bush has proved himself an effective leader in the War on Terror. John Kerry proved yet again this week that he is no leader.
Kerry read a bogus story in the New York Times about unsecured conventional weapons in Iraq, and rushed into a TV studio to put on his makeup. Less than 24 hours later a Democrat ad was running with John Kerry blaming President Bush for something that was in reality nothing more than a rumor.
Can our country afford a man who acts without checking the facts like John Kerry did? Granted, it is the last few days before the election, and Kerry needs all the help he can get. But this episode says a lot about his character, or, more accurately, his lack of character. What if he was president and a rumor surfaced that some nation was planning an attack on the US? Would he go off half-cocked as he did this week? Remember, the New York Times story was little more than an unsubstantiated rumor when Kerry began throwing around his wild accusations the day after it was published. It has since been proven to be totally inaccurate in many of its points.
On the other hand, President Bush has proven himself to be a careful, capable leader in the War on Terror. Do you remember his steady, reassuring demeanor following 9-11? He told us that the terrorists would not get away with this atrocity. Then he carefully verified his facts and proceeded to destroy the Taliban and the Al Qaeda terrorist camps they harbored in Afghanistan. Today Afghanistan has a democratically elected, pro-American government and its people are free.
Bush wisely used Afghanis who wanted a free nation to prosecute the war in Afghanistan. Very few US troops were needed because the Bush doctrine dictated that our troops would advise, train and lead the people who knew the rugged mountainous terrain of Afghanistan the best. Kerry praised this doctrine at the time because he wanted to ride on the coattails of the President’s great success. Today (Flip-Flop!) he calls it “outsourcing” and “a tragic mistake.”
Isn’t that interesting? For political gain, Kerry has once again denigrated the sacrifices of our allies. The brave warriors of the Northern Alliance were not “ragtag warlords” as Kerry sneeringly referred to them. They were Afghani patriots who wanted their country free from Islamic fundamentalist terrorists. Many of theses allies of America died defending their country. And yet Kerry looks down his long patrician nose and derides them as “outsourced.” If mocking and insulting our allies, as Kerry and Edwards have repeatedly done during this campaign, is their idea of how to build alliances, then we should all fear a Kerry-Edwards administration.
One aspect of the Afghanistan War that the news media ignores is possibly the most important aspect in terms of historical perspective. Of course, the media (and Kerry, for that matter) have always exhibited a lack of historical perspective. Does anyone remember the British and Soviet attempts to conquer Afghanistan? All of the military might of the then-great British Empire was brought to bear against Afghanistan. The British were humiliated. Later, a modern Soviet army of hundred of thousands of troops equipped with the latest air and ground weaponry was forced to retreat in disgrace.
Yet Bush was able to do what the mighty British Empire and the huge Soviet military machine were unable to do. In a matter of weeks, with a handful of US troops in harm’s way, he pacified Afghanistan. And just a few weeks ago they had the first elections in their 5,000 year history.
A few days ago Al Qaeda endorsed John Kerry. Not in so many words, but Osama bin Laden did not suddenly appear after three years in hiding without a good reason. He is a very smart man, and he knew full well that his reappearance would help Kerry by stirring up the debate over the battle of Tora Bora. The recent video proves what we have long suspected: that Osama escaped our attempt to capture him. Kerry has tried to represent this as a Bush failure.
I have this to say about Tora Bora. If Kerry had been President, we would never have gone into Afghanistan, because he is incapable of making a decision and sticking to it. Bush accomplished his main goals, which were to punish the Taliban for supporting Al Qaeda, and to destroy the Al Qaeda infrastructure. Capturing bin Laden was a secondary goal which was not accomplished. But who (except the self-proclaimed “war hero” Kerry) could say that they would have been able to find the needle in the haystack that was Osama?
Osama had thousands of supporters who had pledged their lives to protect him. He had look-alikes that could be sacrificed if we had gotten close to him. He also had the rugged mountainous terrain along the Afghan/Pakistan border, and thousands of caves and tunnels in which to hide. It would have been a miracle if we had found one small man in thousands of square miles under those conditions. (But Kerry would have, because he claims he would have been “smarter.”)
No, Bush was successful at Tora Bora. He succeeded in routing the Al Qaeda leadership. And he forced bin Laden into hiding for three years. The only reason the terrorist leader has risked his life by reemerging now is to influence the election next Tuesday. (If you were bin Laden, whom would you rather face: A resolute George Bush or the wishy-washy John Kerry?) Bush knew it was more important to destroy Al Qaeda’s base of operations than to catch any one man, and he set his priorities accordingly.
George Bush and his team are winning the War on Terror. They have conquered Afghanistan and transformed it in three years into a fledgling democracy. They have defeated and captured Saddam Hussein, a madman who used weapons of mass destruction to murder hundreds of thousand of his neighbors and his own people. Today Iraq is a free nation with its own government. And they have captured or killed two-thirds of Al Qaeda’s leadership. There is still work to be done, but you can be sure it will never be accomplished if Kerry wins. According to his own statements, he will “outsource” the War on Terror to the corrupt and ineffectual United Nations, because he believes the US does not have the right to defend itself without UN permission. (READ his book – which he has tried to hide – “The New Soldier”; LINK below.)
If we reelect President Bush he will continue his successful prosecution of the War on Terror. If we fire the only man who has experience defeating terrorists in favor of a rudderless blowhard, we had better start teaching our children the Koran so they will do well in their new schools.
INTERNET LINKS
Kerry Has Spent Hundreds of Thousands of Dollars to Keep You From Reading These:
View “Stolen Honor” online (Kerry Sued to Suppress This Powerful Documentary)
http://www.buttondepress.com/BostonManifesto/stolenhonor.wmv
Buy “Stolen Honor”, which proves that Kerry prolonged the suffering of POW’s
http://www.stolenhonor.com/
Intro to John Kerry’s Book, “The New Soldier”
http://nomayo.mu.nu/archives/New%20Soldier%20Intro.pdf
Excerpt from Kerry’s Intro:
“…If you read carefully the President’s last speech to the people of this country, you can see that he says and says clearly, ‘but the issue, gentlemen, the issue is communism, and the question is whether or not we will leave that country to the Communists or whether or not we will try to give it hope to be a free people.’ But the point is they are not a free people now, and we cannot fight communism all over the world. I think we should have learned that lesson by now.”
Body of John Kerry’s Book, “The New Soldier”
http://nomayo.mu.nu/archives/New%20Soldier.pdf
Excerpt from Kerry’s Book:
(Quoting one of the supposed veterans.) “By the time I had left Fort Polk, Louisiana, I wanted to kill my mother you know. Or anyone, that, that wasn’t you know, completely in agreement with me. I wanted to just kill everything, you know. It’s really bad. I went over to Vietnam with the same attitude because I, I had been trained and I knew I was an effective fighting machine. That I was going to kill everything in my path.”
Epilogue of John Kerry’s Book, “The New Soldier”
http://nomayo.mu.nu/archives/New%20Soldier%20Epilogue.pdf
Excerpt from Kerry’s Epilogue:
And so a New Soldier has returned to America, to a nation torn apart by the killing we were asked to do. But, unlike veterans of other wars and some of this one, the New Soldier does not accept the old myths. We will not quickly join those who march on Veterans' Day waving small flags, calling to memory those thousands who died for the "greater glory of the United States." We will not accept the rhetoric.
Photos from John Kerry’s Book, “The New Soldier”
http://ice.he.net/~freepnet/kerry/index.php?topic=NewSoldier
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