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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Brumar89 who wrote (147479)	10/9/2004 3:35:47 PM
From: Dr. Id	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

I think Carter's failure to respond to that highly visible act of war was a big encouragement to others including the folks who brought us 911. What about Ronald Reagan's failure to respond to the murder of 200 plus Marines in Lebanon? Or his dealing arms with terrorists to fund an illegal military operation in El Salvador? Selective memory? :)

To: Brumar89 who wrote (147479)	10/9/2004 6:11:45 PM
From: Michael Watkins	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

So did the weak responses to a host of other attacks in the decades since that time. Its safe to say that NO administration spent enough time, money or energy on the terrorism file until the gruesome wake up call of 9/11. Its also a matter of public record that the Bush administration rebuked those in the intelligence community who were trying to push the threat of Bin Laden to the forefront. Instead, the trail is clear: Iraq dominated this adminstration from the get go. Bringing up Carter's failure decades ago is merely a diversion, or a lack of will to accept the facts: Bush did not take pre-emptive action on al Q'aida; Bush was single-mindedly focussed on Iraq. Its too bad that healthy skepticism has left so many people -- the world would be a better place if we all questioned our "leaders", and perhaps we'd get better quality leadership for having done so. If General "Stormin' Norman Schwarzkopf (Ret.) can have doubts about the "facts" being dispensed to a generally uncritical and unquestioning (at the time) public, should we not take a page from his book and ask the hard questions now? washingtonpost.com January 27 2003, pre invasion: "When he makes his [Rumsfeld's] comments, it appears that he disregards the Army," Schwarzkopf says. "He gives the perception when he's on TV that he is the guy driving the train and everybody else better fall in line behind him -- or else." As a result, Schwarzkopf is skeptical that an invasion of Iraq would be as fast and simple as some seem to think. "I have picked up vibes that . . . you're going to have this massive strike with massed weaponry, and basically that's going to be it, and we just clean up the battlefield after that," he says. But, he adds, he is more comfortable now with what he hears about the war plan than he was several months ago, when there was talk of an assault built around air power and a few thousand Special Operations troops. He expresses even more concern about the task the U.S. military might face after a victory. "What is postwar Iraq going to look like, with the Kurds and the Sunnis and the Shiites? That's a huge question, to my mind. It really should be part of the overall campaign plan." Indeed. Schwarzkopf here offers yet-another-example of prescient comments from people who know what they are talking about -- ignored by the Bush administration. When you reconstruct the timeline of everything that happened, from the initial 'get-Saddam' trial balloons floated by the Bush administration in 2001 and 2002, to the meagre attempt to work within the bounds of UN / UNSCOM, to the misrepresentation of easily understandable facts related to the nuclear smoking gun -- it becomes very easy to connect the factual dots and gain a crystal clear picture of the deception perpetrated on the American people and the world.