Bush, 9/11, Obama, Boston and the Axis of Evil
It’s easy to forget the fear that gripped America in the aftermath of al Qaeda’s September 11, 2001 attacks on U.S. soil. It’s even easier to take for granted the homeland peace that followed until the Islamist-inspired Tsarnaev Brothers & Co. bombings in Boston on the Ides of April, 2013.
And it’s easier still to misremember what made the peace possible, especially if your political party opposed nearly every aspect of the national security policies that kept Fort Hood (Nov. 2009), Christmas Day Detroit Underwear (Dec. 2009), Times Square (May 2010), and Boston Marathon bombers at bay; and that led to the raid that took out Osama bin Laden and the drone that took out Anwar al-Awlaki.
Is it just a coincidence that the further away we get from the national security and defense apparatus put in place by President George W. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, the more we hear of terrorist near misses and the more dead American terrorist victims we bury as a result of Islamist successes? Last week’s dedication of the George W. Bush Presidential Center (library) in this tenth anniversary year of the invasion of Iraq seems a good time to evaluate the post-9/11 legacy of the re-elected Republican Bush43 and the post-apology tour national security record of his re-elected Democrat successor to the Oval Office.
We are continually reminded of the plethora of hawkish Bush policies retained by President Barack Obama despite his record of opposition to so many after his 2004 election to the U.S. Senate through his 2008 presidential campaign. Yes, its true that rendition, indefinite detention of illegal enemy combatants, and drone attacks continue unabated, if not enhanced. The Patriot Act remains in effect and yes; despite his Attorney General Eric Holder’s best efforts, Gitmo remains open, if only for non-droned, Bush-captured detainees.
But it appears to this observer that would-be terrorists aren’t fooled by what Bush policies Obama continued, whether after sober reflection on how best to discharge his duty to defend innocent American lives (and/or prevent re-election distractions) or after even Democrats in Congress rejected their abandonment (see Gitmo and Holder’s proposed anti-Bush, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed show trial in NYC).
The same terrorists-in-waiting that read faux hawk Democrats not named Joe Lieberman and hopeful “neo-con” Republicans praise President Obama for aspects of the Bush-Cheney defense regime continued under his administration; hear drones in their sleep and saw Zero Dark Thirty on Netflix, also know that:
- President Bush killed tens of thousands of trained-for-attacks-on-the-American-homeland jihadists in Iraq by going on offense in their Islamic homeland;
- President Obama was too disinterested in preserving the gains of the surge in Iraq to even bother with securing a Status of Forces Agreement there so as to retain an American presence large enough to prevent the establishment of the kind of safe havens for terrorists that Saddam had provided to Abu Nidal and others;
- Then-Senator Obama (and then-Senator Hillary Clinton) voted twice to de-fund American troops in the field in Iraq and Afghanistan;
- President Obama surrendered in Iraq and has set a date-certain for withdrawal from Taliban-resurgent Afghanistan;
- President Bush warned of an Iraq-Iran-North Korea “Axis of Evil”, not to tread on me (and this country) in January of 2002 and insisted upon funding SDI throughout his two terms as Commander in Chief;
- Then-Senator Obama opposed the funding of ‘Star Wars’ (SDI) that now remains the best protection America has nuclear missiles launched against Communist Kooks named Kim or Apocalyptic Twelfth Imam-seeking Islamist Iranian Mullahs; and
- President Obama silently observed Axis of Evil-directed slaughter in Teheran streets, while still begging for an audience with the ruling Mullahs’, Mahmoud MembersOnlyJacket-ejad (sp?) puppet Iranian president.
President Obama twice refused to authorize a raid of OBL’s Pakistani compound for months before finally agreeing to use intel gleaned from KSM and other non-droned captured members of al Qaeda after Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld-approved nose-swabbings (water-boarding enhanced interrogation) he and many Democrats (including Hillary but not Bill Clinton) opposed as “torture”, to take out the man who declared jihad war on America in 1996, felled our embassies in Tanzania and Kenya in 1998 killing over 200 and wounding over 4000; and who, along with KSM and Ayman al-Zawahiri plotted, planned and executed the 9/11 attacks on New York City and Washington, D.C.
Last week’s knee-jerk Mirandizing of surviving Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar A. Tsarnaev reveals that in the Age of Obama’s War on Amorphous Extremism, if a captured terrorist isn’t droned; instead of facing Zero Dark Thirty-style enhanced interrogations, they are reminded of the Fifth Amendment right to remain silent and given the telephone number to Eric Holder’s former Sixth Amendment pro-bono-for-terrorists law firm that stands ready to secure an anti-American show trial if Attorney General Holder can sneak you into Lower Manhattan while Congress is in recess:
Prosecutors unsealed an indictment against a son-in-law of Osama bin Laden on Thursday that charged him with conspiracy to kill Americans, after government sources said he was arrested overseas and brought to New York. Suleiman Abu Ghaith, a militant who appeared in videos representing al Qaeda after the September 11 attacks in 2001, had initially been picked up in Turkey and was brought to the United States in an operation led by Jordanian authorities and the FBI, the sources said.
The Turkish government deported him to Jordan, the sources said, where local authorities and the FBI took custody of him. He was brought to the United States in the last few days, a law enforcement source said. U.S. officials including Attorney General Eric Holder announced the indictment on Thursday, saying he would be arraigned on Friday at U.S. District Court in lower Manhattan, only blocks from the site of the World Trade Center, which was destroyed in the September 11 attacks.
Abu Ghaith becomes one of the highest-ranking al Qaeda figures to be brought to the United States for civilian trial. When Holder previously announced plans to try defendants in the September 11 attacks in the same courthouse, he was forced to back down by public opposition, and the trials were moved to the U.S. military base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
For those that don’t remember, or in denial about, the aftermath of 9/11 including Saddam Hussein’s saber-rattling (including First Gulf War ceasefire terms that hundreds of American armed forces died to achieve such as daily firing on American planes enforcing the No-Fly Zone), hide-and-seek WDM games with United Nations inspectors, and live TV appearances with the Palestinian parents of Israeli-pizzeria suicide bombers; its probably too much to ask that we re-visit the decade before 9/11. But given the Democrat Obama Administration’s return to the failed Clinton-Reno-Gorelick, Democratic Party treatment of Islamist terrorism as mere “crime”, we must.
We learned this week that neither the FBI, CIA or DHS shared troubling terror connection intel they each had concerning both Tsarnaev brothers and their mother; including inspiration from the late drone-killed al-Awlaki, who also inspired and/or supported the workplace incident protagonist Major Nidal Malik Hasan at Fort Hood, Underwear bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, and Times Square bomber Faisal Shahzad. It appears that the Gorelick Wall protecting terrorists has been re-erected while non-terrorist ladies, old and young alike are groped by TSA at airports, despite the sequester no less.
Terrorists are not stupid. They know the thousands of dead terror allies that Commander in Chief Bush killed with shock, awe and years of patience while Barack, Hillary, Biden, Kerry & Co. (Democrats) initiated the BushLied Era when Iraq failed to become Meso-Connecticut-potamia within 72 hours of our 2003 invasion of Iraq.
Terrorists now know what OBL didn’t know when he still considered America the weak horse and paper tiger in the Middle East after Bush43 succeeded Clinton42:
Republicans are strong and Democrats are weak.
Funny they missed that truism from Cold War history and nature on par with the laws of gravity, death and taxes. Again, repeat after me, Democrats are aggression-inviting weak appeasers of evil; and Reagan/Bush Republicans declare empires and terrorist harborers evil and proceed to defeat them as long as Americans keep Democrat hands away from the power to surrender. Democrats can’t wait to use drone kills as an excuse to cut and run even before dead Ambassadors and embassy personnel in Benghazi are buried.
A confession. I always used to cringe when President Bush would justify our troops-on-the-ground war on terror in the Iraq and Afghanistan with his: We have to fight them over there, so we won’t have to fight them over here. Why? Because, it is probably impossible to stop every attempted attack on a free nation with de facto open borders like ours. The better construction for Bush speeches would have ended with “…so we won’t have to fight them as much over here.” Moreover, we did break up terror cells after 9/11 and probably thwarted follow-up attacks on the homeland that we never heard about, many of which were not thwarted by intel gathered over there.
But it is hard to ignore the increasing return of terror to U.S. soil coincident with the replacement of an American president feared by the Islamist enemy with a Commander in Chief that refuses to utter a discouraging word about Islam’s obvious connection to our enemies. It is impossible to imagine that our terrorist enemies lack the common sense to discern the difference between the force they face in Obama and the Democrats versus the force they faced from Republican Bush Cowboys.
Cowboys and all out war vs Drones? Cowboys win.
Cowboys came in handy after 9/11 didn’t they? It is clear that they would have come in handy after the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993. But much as Winston Churchill, who warned of the NAZI threat prior to their Bleitzkreig Battle on Britain, was famously discarded by the British people after he and his American ally (see also American-armed and equipped Stalin on the eastern front) won WWII; so did the American people seek another illusory peace dividend by playing nice with people they supposed were only upset with Bushes and neocons. Hence, the installation of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, the labeling of Syria’s Assad before the slaughter as a reformer, and leading from behind in Libya.
Yes, our present Chief Executive finally killed bin Laden and plays Drone-Battleship for lunch in between mothballing navy aircraft carriers, gutting the Marine “Corpse” and recruiting teen daughters for combat; but Islamist terrorists aren’t fooled. Even as the so-called “mainstream” aka cover-for-the-Democratic Party press in this country focused on the WMD shell game lost by Bush (but somehow not Bill Clinton, France, Democrats in Congress and the UN), terrorist enemies focused on lives and safe nation-state harbors lost.
After the 1998 African Embassy bombings, OBL and the Taliban were sure that President Bill Clinton would authorize and execute an invasion of their lairs in Afghanistan. They hid. No American invasion followed. When all we did was talk tough and lob a few missiles at compound night watchmen, they were emboldened to bomb the USS Cole and hijack planes for the 9/11 attacks.
President Bush eliminated the safe terrorist havens in the Middle East, including Iraq; forced Muammar Gadaffy’s WMD surrender; and decapitated the leadership of al Qaeda. He greatly de-populated the cabal of terrorists trained in Afghanistan and Iraq. Yes, Saddam had terror training centers for over a decade and tried to have President George H.W. Bush (41) assassinated, which pretext (along with Hussein’s refusal to cooperate with the U.N. WMD inspectors) was among those used by President Clinton when he ordered the Operation Desert Fox bombing of Iraq in December of 1998.
Funny the nuclear/chemical/biological WMD obsession of Democrats when none of the terror attacks before 9/11 or since (save for Saddam’s in Kurdistan) have used WMD to kill thousands of Americans, but I digress.
Bush = Safety. Obama, Not So Much
President Bush kept us safe after 9/11. And btw, prevented a recession with his tax cuts after Clinton’s tech bubble burst and 9/11. Unemployment averaged 5.2% under eight years of Bush43, as opposed to 9.4% so far under Obama44 but again, I digress.
President Obama has not kept the homeland safe; and launching more drones and reminding us that OBL was buried at sea won’t gather the intel required to get us safe.
The Axis of Evil, thanks to President Bush, no longer includes Iraq, but soon could given his seemingly intentional surrender of the Bush Surge gains there. We can only hope that the purple-finger revolution, despite our mistakes after Shock & Awe and the capture and execution of Saddam, survives well-enough intact so that they remain the best example of a lamb-like Arab Spring in the Muslim World. North Korea remains an Axis threat, but at least faces a Hawaii and West Coast defended by Reagan-GOP-Bush-built SDI missiles. Iran can only feel more empowered as the Evil leader said Axis given Obama’s appeasement of their own Mullahs, hood brothers in Egypt and Miranda rights if caught.
But what may be almost as troubling as Iran’s nuclear advances, are the new Evil members emboldened to join the Axis since President Obama was first Inaugurated. Libya was in a box. No longer. Egypt was an ally of Israel. No longer. Northern Africa and Syria are in flames. And no new inmates have been seen at Gitmo since before Obama started lowering the world’s oceans and raising energy prices on the American poor.
How many more liberal Democrat “why do they hate us” experiments and the slaughter that results, (not to mention their poverty-increasing Keynesian economic policies at home) must we endure before we as a country eliminate Democrats as an acceptable choice to defend us against enemies foreign and domestic? Hopefully at least by 2016.
“One man with courage makes a majority.” – Andrew Jackson
