Re: Clinton Unhinged
A few more rants:
What bothers me most about Clinton's recent interview is the dishonesty.
To be fair and give the benefit of the doubt to everyone, few, if any, really anticipated anything on the scale of 9-11 ahead of time. It was unprecedented. I could give some credit to Clinton, if he would just say that:
Our perspective changed after 9-11. After the attacks, everything changed. Before then, we just saw Al Qaeda as a potentially harmful nuisance – not a serious national security threat. Just like the Nazis and Japanese in the 1930’s – we didn’t really wake up until Pearl Harbor.
Whether or not we should expect more perceptiveness and aggressive responses to such materializing threats from our leaders (we should), I could basically buy that defense. Instead, Clinton simply lies by trying to change history by ludicrously claiming that he made strong efforts to kill Bin Laden and Bush didn’t. It’s a lie. Why can’t he, for once, just make an honest defense?
Further, the focus NOW should be on what we’re facing NOW. I, for one, would choose to invade Iraq again if we could go back in time to March 2003. I still believe it was the right thing to do. Of course, I’d do some things differently, with all the benefit of hindsight, but that can be said of any war we have fought (we made countless blunders in the European theatre during WWII and still won).
The bottom line is that we are fighting Al Qaeda in Iraq now, and it’s probably the best place to fight them (e.g., the Brits just killed the Al Qaeda leader of S.E. Asia – instead of plotting and causing death and injury of Americans and others in S.E. Asia, he’s lying dead in Iraq). As the more-fully released excerpts of the recently-leaked intelligence report confirm (and it’s obvious to anyone with any awareness of what’s going on), if we win in Iraq and permit the emergence of a stable, moderate regime there, Al Qaeda is screwed. If we retreat, they will be emboldened. We Americans (and hopefully our allies) should commit ourselves to “winning.” We’ve never come close to losing a war when we have really tried to do so. Retreat or “exit strategy” will cause us tremendous heartache in the years to come. Bickering about how we got here doesn't really help either.
That is all.
|