Lies & the Lying Liars Who Tell Them_ A Fair & Balanced Look at the Right - Al Franken [43]
To be fair, two days after the Marine barracks bombing, Reagan did invade Grenada. Although he cut and ran in Lebanon, which might have been interpreted as capitulation, I think his bold attack on Grenada sent a clear message to violent Muslim extremists: If you attack us, we’ll invade a Club Med.
The Great Communicator scored another direct hit in the fight against terror by supplying arms to violent Muslim extremists among the Afghani Mujahedeen, as well as to his friends in Iran and Iraq. Crazy, you say? Crazy like a fox, say I!
Now, the Gipper wasn’t the kind of president who saw terrorism just in terms of black and white. No, Reagan distinguished between good terrorists and bad terrorists. He loved his terrorist death squads in Guatemala, El Salvador, and most of all, Nicaragua. Enough to violate the Constitution to support the Contras as they raped and tortured nuns. Bad terrorists, on the other hand, were those who used terror irresponsibly. See, Reagan saw the shades of gray, where a less nuanced politician may have only seen unmitigated evil.
On to Bush Sr. No huge terrorist attacks, thank goodness. And there was no way he could have known that Ramzi Yousef and a vast network of violent Muslim extremists were planning the World Trade Center bombing that would take place February 26, 1993. You may remember that no one blamed Bush Sr. for this bombing of the World Trade Center by radical Islamic terrorists. After all, it did happen on Clinton’s watch. He had been president for thirty-eight days.
The only tiny little thing I fault Bush Sr. for is the way he handled Afghanistan. After he continued arming his violent Muslim extremist friends there, the Soviets eventually withdrew in early 1989. Bush promptly implemented the top-secret Project Neglect, which consisted of abandoning (or “neglecting”) Afghanistan and allowing it to become a breeding ground for anti-U.S. terrorist training camps. As you will see, Project Neglect would prove a useful template for the far more extensive Operation Ignore put into effect during the first few months of his son’s presidency.
In his four State of the Union speeches, George Herbert Walker Bush said the word “terror” only once, in the context of the “environmental terrorism” perpetrated when Saddam set fire to the oil fields. That was it. Bush Sr. cared even less about terror than he did about the economy. Stupid, stupid.
Thirty-eight days after taking office, when the World Trade Center was attacked the first time, the handsome, brilliant young President Clinton learned a painful lesson about the consequences of ignoring the terrorist menace. He swung into action. No, he didn’t invade a Caribbean nation. Though later he did help restore democracy to Haiti. The way Clinton responded to the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center was to capture, try, convict, and imprison those responsible. Ramzi Yousef, Abdul Hakim Murad, and Wali Khan Amin Shah are all currently behind bars. You can visit them and ask them if they think Clinton was tough on terror. I hear they enjoy having visitors.
You can ask them, too, about the Clinton administration’s ability to thwart planned terrorist attacks. They were involved in further plots to kill the Pope and blow up twelve U.S. jetliners simultaneously. But neither happened. And neither did the huge attacks that were planned against the UN Headquarters, the FBI building, the Israeli embassy in Washington, the LA and Boston airports, the Lincoln and Holland tunnels, and the George Washington Bridge. Why? Because Clinton thwarted them. He thwarted them all. Why, he even thwarted a terrorist