This has just gotta be seen to believed. The NYTs printed a book review yesterday that spent pretty much the whole article bashing Bush….I know, surprise surprise from the NYTs:
In the real world – and the United States exists in the real world, despite a national weakness for wishful thinking – failure has consequences. The prospects for American success in Iraq, which do not look promising, are the consequence of a cascading series of previous, all-too-familiar failures – the failure to heed intelligence warnings before 9/11, the failure to press the hunt for Osama bin Laden until he was caught, the failure to think twice before invading Iraq, the failure to send enough troops to establish security once the Iraqi Army quit fighting, the failure to recognize the growing insurgency until it was too big to crush, the failure to begin building an Iraqi Army and police services in a timely manner, the failure to foresee that a war in Iraq would draw jihadists from every corner of the Islamic world.
These failures are all the doing of President Bush and his remarkably small group of intimate advisers.
I will go through that first paragraph line by line:
The failure to heed pre-9/11 intelligence is whose fault exactly? Bush was in office a total of 9 months prior to that day but it’s his fault? No bias here. Clinton had 8 years to do something with this intelligence but what does he do? First he runs from a fight, Somalia, then he tell’s the Syrians “nah, we don’t want him” when they offered up Bin Laden on a platter, then he throws a few big bad missiles at some empty camps and a plant in Syria. Oh, and don’t forget he decimated our intelligence agencies and helped put up the famous “Gorelick” wall. But still, it’s Bush’s fault.
The failure to press the hunt for Osama bin Laden until he was caught. What planet does this guy live on? Since when have we stopped looking for him? But if we want to start discussing who missed Bin Laden, lets look no further then Clinton:
PREVIOUSLY unseen footage of Osama Bin Laden taken by a CIA spy drone reveals how close the Americans came to killing the Al-Qaeda leader two years before the September 11 attacks.
The pictures were filmed by a Predator unmanned aircraft and show Bin Laden, in white robes, with a small group of followers at a training camp near Khost in eastern Afghanistan Afghanistan at the end of 1999. The drone was one of the first to be used in Afghanistan by the CIA, but because of bureaucratic wrangles it was unarmed.
The pictures, thought to be the first spy plane footage of Bin Laden to be published, have been obtained from American sources by Al-Jazeera, the Arabic language television station. ?We had no doubt over his identity. Bin Laden can clearly be seen standing out from the rest of the group next to the buildings,? said Michael Scheuer, a former CIA officer who headed Alec Station, the agency?s unit which tracked Bin Laden during the 1990s.
He added: ?Nobody at the top of the CIA wanted to take the decision to arm the Predator. It meant that even if we could find him (Bin Laden) we were not allowed to kill him.?
The pictures are part of a mass of evidence now emerging of the missed opportunities to kill or capture Bin Laden and his associates before they launched the terror attacks on America in 2001.
They include at least three further occasions in Afghanistan between 1998 and 2000 when the CIA had Bin Laden in its sights but was prevented from acting. There were divisions between the agency and the White House over who would have the authority to fire and the legality of killing the Al-Qaeda leader.
On one occasion a satellite photographed the Al-Qaeda leader on a hunting trip, but the White House ordered the CIA not to launch a missile attack after finding out that princes from a friendly Arab country were in his party.
On another occasion a raid by local tribesmen on Bin Laden?s base in Kandahar, southern Afghanistan, was called off after American officials could not agree on whether it should go ahead.
The third episode, also in Kandahar, involved a human spotter tracking him for five days, but the decision was taken not to attack because of fears over civilian casualties.
The missed opportunities are documented in Blinking Red, an Al-Jazeera series beginning this week to mark the fourth anniversary of September 11.
It describes how Bill Clinton?s administration turned down an offer from the Sudanese government to help to capture Bin Laden when he was living in Khartoum in the early to mid-1990s. It also shows how the Americans ?lost? two of the September 11 hijackers despite having them under surveillance. The two men later entered America.
?The Al-Jazeera series also reveals how the January 2000 meeting in Kuala Lumpur, at which the September 11 attacks were planned, came to light after the CIA tracked the telephones of Khalid al-Midhar, later to become one of the hijackers.
Most of the senior planners of the attacks, including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Ramzi Binalshibh, were at the meeting, which was also photographed by intelligence agents. Shortly afterwards Al-Midhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi, another of the future hijackers who was also at the Malaysian meeting, flew to San Diego using their real names and passports. They were so casual that Al-Hazmi?s name appears in the San Diego residential phone directory for the period when they were in the area.
The ease with which the two men were able to operate in America came partly because the CIA did not show its evidence to the FBI ? responsible for internal security ? until June 2001, 18 months after the planning meeting and well after the two had entered the country.
The truth is that Al-Qaeda will not go away once he his caught. We have been more successful killing off the leadership of that group then we could possibly have imagined, all because of Bush’s leadership. Tell me, have we been attacked since 9/11? Didn’t think so.
The failure to think twice before invading Iraq. The world let Saddam off the hook for 12 years but now we didn’t wait long enough. He continually strung the world along playing his games until he was called on it by Bush. He had WMD’s….everyone and their mother knew that. Obviousley he got rid of them before we invaded but even without the WMD’s we had every reason to invade. The cease fire for which he was not obeying, the attacks on our fighters, the plot to kill Bush Sr, his refusal to obey 13 UN resolutions and on and on and on. It would have been criminal after 9/11 for Bush not to invade.
The failure to not send enough troops. Excuse me, Bush is Commander and Chief but he is not a micro-manager, thank god. He depends on his Military advisors to tell him what they need, and then he gives it to them. They asked for a certain amount of troops and he gave them to him. Was there poor planning post-victory? Sure, but our Military and our President has learned and adapted like any good leaders should.
The failure to recognize the growing insurgency until it was too big to crush. What a crock. An insurgency is never easy to defeat and to think that after disbanding the Iraqi army (as he should have done) it would have been easy to stamp out the insurgency if dealt with quickly is simply niave.
The failure to begin building an Iraqi Army and police services in a timely manner. These lefties are incredible. they actually believe a new country can build a completely new Army and Police agency from the ground up in what? A few months? In reality the progress made building these units in 2 1/2 years is amazing. You don’t just give the recruits a gun and tell them to go fight.
The failure to foresee that a war in Iraq would draw jihadists from every corner of the Islamic world. Um hello? Is there anyone home? Of course we foresaw this and counted on it. As Bush has said many many times, we fight them over there not over here.
And that is just the first paragraph of a BOOK REVIEW! I mean can they be anymore biased or ignorant here?
How about this doozy:
The consequence predicted by Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon, experts on terrorism and former members of the National Security Council under President Clinton, is implicit in the title of their new book, “The Next Attack: The Failure of the War on Terror and a Strategy for Getting It Right.” A long chapter examines the list of awful possibilities if terrorists simply take advantage of loopholes in our current domestic defenses. Some nine million shipping containers bring freight into the United States every year, Benjamin and Simon note. Only one in 20 is inspected; any one of the other 19 could contain explosives, biological agents, fissionable material, even a working atomic bomb. Or a well-placed bomb in a huge industrial plant producing toxic chemicals or dangerous gases might generate an “American Bhopal.” Occasionally their worries verge on fretting; what are terrorists going to do with ultralight aircraft, which strain to get one man aloft with a water bottle? (my emphasis)
Hmmm, let me see. Does he go on to examine how terrorists can take advantage of our secrets leaked to our MSM, cough New York Times cough, at the same time the Patriot Act is up for a vote? I didn’t think so.
This idiot goes on:
The administration, they argue, has its hands full trying to stem the growing insurgency in Iraq; how will it handle challenges elsewhere in the Islamic world? They quote an intelligence official who describes Saudi Arabia, home of the great majority of 9/11 hijackers and an important source of foreign suicide bombers in Iraq as well, as the “aircraft carrier of the jihad.” Citing the words of Stephen Cohen, a scholar at the Brookings Institution, they say Pakistan is “probably the most anti-American country in the world.” Opinion polls show a Pakistani approval rating of 65 percent for Osama bin Laden, who has probably been hiding in the tribal areas along Pakistan’s border with Afghanistan during the four years since an overconfident United States military allowed him to slip away from Tora Bora. The president of Pakistan, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, has narrowly escaped numerous assassination attempts; a successful one could throw control of the country, and of its nuclear weapons, into the hands of Islamic extremists.
All well and good. But all this was going on during Clinton’s administration also. I’m sorry, but terrorism did not just appear outta nowhere after Bush invaded Iraq. The lefties can wish this to be the case as much as they want, still doesn’t make it true. The history is clear. Clinton did NOTHING to battle terrorism except treat it as a law enforcement issue, which was a disaster. When he ran from Somalia like a coward he destined our country to 9/11…as Bin Laden has said:
John Miller: Describe the situation when your men took down the American forces in Somalia.
Bin Laden: After our victory in Afghanistan and the defeat of the oppressors who had killed millions of Muslims, the legend about the invincibility of the superpowers vanished. Our boys no longer viewed America as a superpower. So, when they left Afghanistan, they went to Somalia and prepared themselves carefully for a long war. They had thought that the Americans were like the Russians, so they trained and prepared. They were stunned when they discovered how low was the morale of the American soldier. America had entered with 30,000 soldiers in addition to thousands of soldiers from different countries in the world. … As I said, our boys were shocked by the low morale of the American soldier and they realized that the American soldier was just a paper tiger. He was unable to endure the strikes that were dealt to his army, so he fled, and America had to stop all its bragging and all that noise it was making in the press after the Gulf War in which it destroyed the infrastructure and the milk and dairy industry that was vital for the infants and the children and the civilians and blew up dams which were necessary for the crops people grew to feed their families. Proud of this destruction, America assumed the titles of world leader and master of the new world order. After a few blows, it forgot all about those titles and rushed out of Somalia in shame and disgrace, dragging the bodies of its soldiers. America stopped calling itself world leader and master of the new world order, and its politicians realized that those titles were too big for them and that they were unworthy of them. I was in Sudan when this happened. I was very happy to learn of that great defeat that America suffered, so was every Muslim. …
There is no one to blame for this other then Clinton.
This “book review” is nothing but another hit piece commissioned by the New York Times against our President. And they wonder why their readership dwindles.
Hmmm, let me see. Does he go on to examine how terrorists can take advantage of our secrets leaked to our MSM, cough New York Times cough, at the same time the Patriot Act is up for a vote? I didn’t think so.

See author page