Quote:
Originally Posted by daswig
Neutone, so you're saying that OBL recruited his people, trained them, planned 9/11, and executed it all between the time Bush took office and when it happened?
The democrats gutted, and I mean GUTTED, our military. It's barely a fraction of what it was when Clinton took office. Why don't we have more troops on the ground in Iraq? Because the Democrats took the military from being able to deal with two brush wars and the Soviet Union invading Europe simultaneously to being unable to deal with one brush war effectively.
OBL's animosity towards America FAR predates Dubya's taking office. And Clinton taught the Terrorists that the SAFEST thing they could do was to attack American targets by treating their attacks as a law enforcement matter.
There are two main lines of thought in foreign policy now. There's the "walk softly but carry a big stick" approach, and there's the "If we surrender now, they will not attack us anymore, maybe" approach. The Big Stick approach is far more effective.
Trillions for defense, not one goddamned penny for tribute.
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daswig, there is no way to tell if you post nonsense, or if there are facts in
your posts, since you seldom post links to sources of the facts in your posts.
I can find no irrefutable facts to back your statement that "democrats
gutted the military. In fact, I find the opposite is the factual case:
Quote:
Clinton's Strong Defense Legacy
Michael O'Hanlon
From Foreign Affairs, November/December 2003
Summary: Conventional wisdom holds that Bill Clinton presided over a disastrous downsizing of the U.S. military. But this claim is wrong. In fact, Clinton's Pentagon maintained high levels of readiness and enacted a bold military modernization program that bore fruit in Bosnia and Kosovo -- and in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Michael O'Hanlon is a Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution. He has written several books on U.S. foreign policy, including Defense Policy Choices for the Bush Administration and Crisis on the Korean Peninsula: How to Deal with a Nuclear North Korea, which he co-authored with Mike Mochizuki.
Of Related Interest
Topics:
National Security and Defense
Attitude Adjustment
By Alfred R. Barr
Foreign Affairs, March/April 2004
Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush's War Cabinet
James Mann. New York: Viking, 2004.
Against All Enemies: Inside America's War on Terror
Richard A. Clarke. New York: Free Press, 2004.
"Misunderestimating" Terrorism
By Alan B. Krueger and David D. Laitin
Foreign Affairs, September/October 2004
The Neglected Home Front
By Stephen E. Flynn
Foreign Affairs, September/October 2004
What Went Wrong in Iraq
By Larry Diamond
Foreign Affairs, September/October 2004
MAJOR MISUNDERSTANDING
The notion that President Bill Clinton was a poor steward of the armed forces has become so commonly accepted that it is now often taken for granted -- among moderates and independents as well as Republicans such as George W. Bush, who made the charge in the first place. The Clinton administration, so the thinking goes, presided over an excessive downsizing of the U.S. military, seriously weakening the magnificent fighting machine built by Ronald Reagan and honed by George H.W. Bush. It frittered away American power and left the country an object of derision to its enemies, tempting them to misbehave.
This assessment, however, is wrong. The Clinton administration's use of force (or lack thereof) may be controversial, but the Clinton Pentagon oversaw the most successful defense drawdown in U.S. history -- cutting military personnel by 15 percent more than the previous administration had planned while retaining a high state of readiness and a strong global deterrence posture. It enacted a prescient modernization program. And the military it helped produce achieved impressive successes in Bosnia and Kosovo and, more significant, in Afghanistan and Iraq. Although these victories were primarily due to the remarkable dedication and skill of U.S. troops, credit is also owed to Clinton's defense policy.
The Clinton defense team did not, however, do a good job of managing military morale, taking too long to figure out how to distribute a demanding workload fairly and sustainably across a smaller force. As a consequence, U.S. troops became overworked and demoralized, and many left the military or considered doing so. Although many of these problems were largely repaired by the end of the decade, they undoubtedly detract from Clinton's military achievements. But they do not justify the overwhelmingly negative assessment of his defense record.
EQUIPPED FOR A NEW ENEMY
Advocates of military transformation, the current rage in defense policy circles, do not think that the Clinton administration went far enough in modernizing and reshaping the military. But this assessment is unfair. Although Clinton spent only half of what Reagan did on procurement, this was partly because much of the military's antiquated weaponry had already been replaced during the Reagan buildup. Moreover, the Clinton Pentagon made good use of the scarce funds it had, purchasing key battlefield technologies and improving behind-the-scenes preparedness.
The technological superstars of the Afghanistan and Iraq campaigns included not only F-16 fighter jets, Abrams tanks, and Bradley fighting vehicles -- built largely under Reagan -- but unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVS), missile defense systems, satellite-guided weapons, and improved rapid-targeting and radar technology, developed chiefly during the Clinton years. The Predator UAV, for example, which was used to monitor key targets in Afghanistan and to attack fleeing terrorists, began as an experimental program in 1994. Global Hawk, a larger and higher-altitude UAV, was developed around the same time.
The Clinton years also saw the development of the Patriot Advanced Capability-3 (PAC-3) missile defense system, a huge improvement over the primitive Patriot system that performed so poorly in Operation Desert Storm in 1991. <a href="http://www.foreignaffairs.org/20031101faessay82612/michael-o-hanlon/clinton-s-strong-defense-legacy.html">http://www.foreignaffairs.org/20031101faessay82612/michael-o-hanlon/clinton-s-strong-defense-legacy.html</a>
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And.....from factcheck.org
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.........Furthermore, Bush's own father, who was then President, and Richard Cheney, who was then Secretary of Defense, proposed to cut or eliminate several of the very same weapons that Republicans now fault Kerry for opposing. In his first appearance before Congress as Defense Secretary in April 1989, for example, Cheney outlined $10 billion in defense cuts including proposed cancellation of the AH-64 Apache helicopter, and elimination of the F-15E ground-attack jet. Two years later Cheney's Pentagon budget also proposed elimination of further production of the Bradley Fighting Vehicle and targeted a total of 81 Pentagon programs for termination, including the F-14 and F-16 aircraft. And the elder President Bush said in his 1992 State of the Union address: "After completing 20 planes for which we have begun procurement, we will shut down further production of the B - 2 bombers. . . . And we will not purchase any more advanced cruise missiles." So if Kerry opposed weapons "our troops depend on," so did Cheney and the elder President Bush.........<a href="http://www.factcheck.org/article209.html">Pro-Bush group repeats misleading attacks on Kerry's defense record.</a>
<a href="http://www.factcheck.org/article147.html">Did Kerry Oppose Tanks & Planes? Not Lately</a>
<a href="http://www.factcheck.org/article153.html">Bush Strains Facts Re: Kerry's Plan To Cut Intelligence Funding in '90's</a>
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This is attributed by factcheck.org to Bush's father's 1992 State of the Union address, 12 months before Clinton took office:
Quote:
But by 1992 even President Bush (the current incumbent's father) was calling for cancellation of the B-2 and promising to cut military spending by 30% in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union. It was no secret -- Bush did that in his 1992 State of the Union address. But (Zell) Miller left out that little detail.<a href="http://www.factcheck.org/article252.html">Zell Miller's Attack on Kerry: A Little Out Of Date</a>
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Your criticism of Clinton's strategy and results in fighting terrorists is equally
lacking in accuracy. Here are links that contain facts of Clinton effectiveness
<a href="http://www.opednews.com/hersh_080404_republicans_sabotaged.htm">Republicans Sabotaged Clinton's Anti-Terror Efforts</a>
Please alert me when you are ready to carry on a fact based discourse
concerning the points you raised in your post.
<a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?pagename=article&node=&contentId=A17702-2001Oct6¬Found=true">Conservatives Sound Refrain: It's Clinton's Fault</a> |
