David Horowitz: How Democrats Undermined America's Security

David Horowitz: How Democrats Undermined America's Security

Phil Brennan, NewsMax.com
Thursday, July 18, 2002

Editor's note: This is Part 2 of a review of David Horowitz's "How to Beat the Democrats: And Other Subversive Ideas."

Part 1: David Horowitz Reveals 'How to Beat the Democrats'

This may be the most shocking of all the stories David Horowitz says the Republicans have to tell. It recalls the astonishing nonchalance of Bill Clinton and his fellow Democrats in the face of the obvious threats to national security that culminated in the horrific events of Sept. 11 – events that cost thousands of lives, and deprived countless numbers of children of their fathers, wives of their husbands and mothers of their sons and daughters.

The attack on the World Trade Center should never have come as a surprise. As Horowitz notes, the twin towers of the huge complex had been bombed eight years earlier – and by the same enemy.

"The terrorists themselves were already familiar to government operatives, their aggressions frequent enough that several commissions had been appointed to investigate. Each had reached the same conclusion. It was not a matter of whether the United States was going to be the target of a major terrorist assault; it was a matter of when.

Horowitz recalls that the U.S. first faced the al-Qaeda terrorists in Somalia in 1993. Despite the fact that U.S. troops were in that beleaguered nation merely to feed the starving people, 18 Americans were killed and 80 wounded. "A dead U.S. soldier was dragged through the streets in an act calculated to humiliate his comrades and his country."

Clinton's reaction to this outrageous challenge to the United States of America was to cut and run, like a frightened rabbit, giving the murderous thugs of al-Qaeda a victory.

Under the leadership of Clinton, "there was no military response to this humiliation. The greatest superpower the world has ever seen did nothing. It accepted defeat and left."

Eight months prior to the humiliating Somalia disaster, the first bombing of the World Trade Center took place. It was, as Horowitz notes, "the most ambitious terrorist attack every attempted, anywhere, ever."

Clinton's Strategy: 'Accept Defeat'

The attack was an "atrocity [and] no mere criminal event, and … involved more than individual terrorists," including "hostile terrorist states." Yet the Clinton administration’s response was "to absorb the injury and accept defeat."

"The president did not even visit the bomb crater or tend to the victims. Instead, America’s commander-in-chief warned against ‘over-reaction.’ In doing so he sent a clear message to our nation’s enemies: We are unsure of purpose and unsteady in hand; we are self-indulgent and soft; we will not take risks to defend ourselves; we are vulnerable."

It was a message read loud and clear by Osama bin Laden, his al-Qaeda killers and the brutal dictator of Iraq, Saddam Hussein.

Clinton's Failure in Somalia Encouraged bin Laden

Said bin Laden in an interview with an ABC news reporter: "We have seen in the last decade the decline of the American government and the weakness of the American soldier who is ready to wage Cold Wars and unprepared to fight long wars. This was proven in Beirut when the Marines fled after two explosions. It also proves they can run in less than 24 hours, and this was also repeated in Somalia. We are ready for all occasions. We rely on Allah."

Other examples of Clinton’s abdication of his responsibility as commander in chief read like a criminal indictment of a man whose ignoring of a clear and present danger ultimately led to the tragedy of 9-11 and the death of almost 3,000 innocent people:

Yasser Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization "created the first terrorist training camps, invented suicide bombings and been the chief propaganda machine behind the idea that terrorist armies were really missionaries for ‘social justice.’ Yet, among foreign leaders Arafat was Clinton’s most frequent guest. (It was Arafat who was kept waiting on the White House lawn for Clinton when the president was in the Oval Office having sex with Monica Lewinski)."

"Far from treating Arafat as an enemy of civilized order and an international pariah, the Clinton Administration was busily cultivating him as a ‘Partner for Peace,’" Horowitz writes.

And it was Clinton’s embrace of the canard that terrorism was the product of poor social conditions in Arab nations that led to the left’s current hue and cry about the injustice of it all.

Clinton carried this craven adoration of this false doctrine when he "embarked on a presidential hand-wringing expedition to Africa in March 1998, "two months after Monica Lewinski became a White House thorn and a household name."

Blame America First

Clinton, Horowitz recalls, made a "pilgrimage" to Uganda where he apologized for the crime of American slavery even though no slave was ever imported to America from Uganda.

Furthermore, he notes that "slavery in Africa preceded an American involvement by a thousand years; that America and Britain were the two powers responsible for ending the slave trade, and that America had abolished slavery a hundred years before – at great human cost – while slavery persisted in Africa, without African protest, to the present day."

"Four months after Clinton left Uganda, al-Qaeda terrorists blew up the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania."

In November 2001, Clinton told an audience at Georgetown University that Americans who were "from various European lineages" were "not blameless" and that America’s past involvement in slavery should humble it as it confronted their attackers. He took no blame for his own failure to protect America from the attacks.

In the face of the terrorist attack on the Khobar Towers U.S. military barracks in Saudi Arabia (19 American soldiers killed) the blowing up of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania (245 dead, 5,000 injured), the bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen (17 U.S. sailors dead, 39 injured) – all obvious acts of war – the Clinton administration refused to see them as such.

Horowitz recalls a startling remark by Clinton national security adviser Sandy Berger, who described the administration’s attitude toward these acts of war against the U.S. as "a little bit like a Whack-a-Mole game at the circus. They bop up and you whack ‘em down, and if they bop up again, you bop ‘em back down again."

Time for Monica, Not for CIA

"By Clinton’s own account, Monica Lewinski was able to visit him privately more than a dozen times in the Oval Office. But according to a USA Today investigative report, the head of the CIA could not get a single private meeting with the president, even after the World Trade Center bombing of February 26, 1993, or the killing of 18 American soldiers in Mogadishu on October 3 of the same year.

"James Woolsey, Clinton’s first CIA director, says he never met privately with Clinton after their initial interview. When a small plane crashed on the White House grounds in 1994, the joke inside the White House was ‘that must be Woolsey, still trying to get an appointment.’"

There’s much more to this part of the "story"; more than enough to make any American’s blood boil. Columnist Andrew Sullivan summed it all up when he wrote:

"Whatever the excuse the Clintonites can make, they cannot argue that the threat wasn’t clear, that the solution wasn’t proposed, that a strategy for success hadn’t been outlined. Everything necessary to prevent September 11 had been proposed in private and in public, in government reports and on the op-ed pages, for eight long years. The Clinton Administration simply refused to do anything serious about the threat."

"On January 2oth, 2001, George W. Bush was sworn in as president of the United States," Horowitz concluded. "Within months after taking office, he ordered a new strategy for combating terrorism that would be more than 'swatting at flies,' as he described Clinton’s policy. The new plan reached the President’s desk on September 10, 2001. It was ‘too late,’ as Andrew Sullivan wrote. ‘But it remains a fact that the new administration had devised in eight months a strategy that Bill Clinton had delayed for eight years.’"

This is a story the Republicans must tell the American people if they are to be warned about the dangers of putting their trust in the party of Bill Clinton by casting their votes for Democrats come November.

Next: Strategy for a GOP Victory

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