Are we prepared NOW?

President Clinton systematically downsized our military and intelligence organs, so President Bush had much work to do to bring them back to reasonable strength. His job was not complete on 9/11/2001.

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Are We Safer Today?

By Mark Alexander · Thursday, September 8, 2011

Al-Qa'ida may be down, but Islamo-Fascism 2.0 is thriving

"A universal peace ... is in the catalogue of events, which will never exist but in the imaginations of visionary philosophers, or in the breasts of benevolent enthusiasts." --James Madison

I'll Take It From Here

 

This Sunday marks the 10th anniversary of the 11 September 2001 attack on our nation by a terrorist cell of Islamic fascists. (If you were young and do not have a crystal-clear memory of that event, I suggest you link to our 9/11 retrospective page.)
It was a modern "date which will live in infamy" as Franklin Roosevelt said in regard to the attack on Pearl Harbor 60 years earlier. The two most significant similarities between Pearl and 9/11 are that we were wholly unprepared for both, and a like number of Americans were murdered.
After eight years of national security malfeasance under Bill Clinton's administration, and eight months of the newly installed George W. Bush administration's efforts to reorder national security priorities, only a handful of Americans were convinced that a deadly enemy had coalesced in our midst. Indeed, a well-organized terrorist cell had settled into American suburbs in the last years of Clinton's watch.
However, before noon on 9/11, it was tragically clear to all Americans that our vital national interests -- both the security of our homeland and the stability of our allies abroad -- were under assault. An enemy had declared war on the United States, and it was an asymmetric enemy better organized and more lethal than ever before.

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 Go read the whole thing.