Posted on 03/10/2002 3:59:45 AM PST by jalisco555
Six months on, they're still out there--in Frankfurt and Lyons and Rome, living on Eurowelfare and with the whole day free to liaise and plot. They're in Montreal, where the Province of Quebec operates an immigration policy independent of the rest of Canada and where young men from former French colonies in North Africa and the Middle East can blend in easily, knowing they're less than an hour's drive from New York and Vermont's low-security border posts.
And of course, they're in Boston, and Dallas, and Chicago, on long-expired student or tourist visas, beneficiaries of an era when the INS had neither the resources nor the inclination to keep track of them. They have access to significant sums of money back in Saudi, but they don't need a lot, or at least not in the large one-off amounts that attract attention. You could finance another Sept. 11 through ATM withdrawals in Newark, Boca Raton, Vancouver--a couple of hundred dollars here, a couple of hundred there--taken from accounts in the London and Paris branches of respectable Gulf banks. Unless the government's going to monitor every $40 withdrawal from the First National Bank of Dead Skunk, Idaho, no system can track such insignificant transactions.
They're almost always young men. Mostly they're called "Mohammed" or "Ahmed" and they have Saudi or Egyptian passports. But sometimes they're called "Richard Reid" and are bona fide British subjects with entirely legal documents issued in the name of Her Britannic Majesty. The so-called "20th hijacker" is a French citizen. Ahmed Ressam, arrested en route to blow up Los Angeles Airport two years ago, had a Canadian passport in a less obviously Arab name that he'd acquired by faking a Quebec baptismal certificate--an easy trick until the loophole was closed post-9/11, by which point who knows how many of Ressam's chums had their new documentation.
Every day, these people are probing, testing, finding the weak spots in the system. The government has to stop all of them each and every time. They just have to get through once. Richard Reid was within a few seconds of blowing up a trans-Atlantic jet before his fellow passengers jumped on him. Maybe the next Richard Reid will find himself seated next to a Todd Beamer type. Or maybe he'll get lucky and the next seat will be filled by an Ivy League professor immersed in a long article in Harper's about how crass and misguided America's war on terrorism is because we're not concentrating on the "root causes," and he won't notice the smoking loafer until it's too late. The enemy has a simple war aim: Kill Americans--and if, along the way, you happen to kill a few Aussies, Japanese, Pakistanis or the nationals of some 70 other countries who died on Sept. 11, well, that's no big deal. Mission accomplished.
None of us wants to think about this or live like this. When the FBI urges us to be extra vigilant, we pay no attention. When it emerges that a "shadow government" has been set up, we make jokes about it. But every American should know that there've been plenty of plans for a second Sept. 11 and be grateful that they were all foiled, or fell apart, or got stalled because some bureaucrat at a department of motor vehicles outlet in Florida or a passport office in Toronto or a check-in counter at the Netherlands was being a little more careful than he would have been six months ago.
The probability is that al-Qaida and its network of allies have the capability of detonating a "dirty nuke." America can hunker down, shut the borders, close the ATMs and demand you get to the airport five hours early for a 40-minute puddle-jump. Or it can take to the war to Islamofascism's center of operations and destroy it there. In other words, it can besiege the American people, or it can besiege the enemy.
Not a tough choice, you'd think. But the six-month suspension of normal politics is taking its toll on Democrats. "We seem to be good at developing entrance strategies," Sen. Robert C. Byrd, West Virginia's porkmeister par excellence, whined the other day, "and not so good at developing exit strategies."
Well spotted, senator. Here's something else that will shock you: Churchill didn't have an "exit strategy" for World War II. Exit strategies are for optional foreign adventures, when you go into the People's Republic of Basketcazia because you think General Ruthlez Bastardo would be a mild improvement on President Sy Kotik, but otherwise you've no vital interest at stake. You don't have exit strategies when your national territory's been attacked; you have a responsibility to see the war through to the end.
It's a shame Byrd can't seem to understand that. Maybe if we applied the traditional courtesies of West Virginia politics and agreed to rename Afghanistan Robert C. Byrdistan, he could see his way to being supportive for a couple of more months. Honestly, I don't like to complain but, given that the Senate has a talent pool of 200 million to draw on, the 100 members of "the world's greatest deliberative body" have performed abysmally since Sept. 11. The headline on Jules Witcover's column in the Baltimore Sun read, "Democrats Ask Tough Questions On War." In fact, tough questions would be welcome. But Byrd's and Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle's criticisms are pathetic: They're about spin, posturing, about how it'll play on TV. In war, grownups don't have time for silly games in the congressional schoolyard.
Six months on, it's clear that, in the ops room, the grown-ups are in charge: Bush, Rummy, Condi. The downside, alas, is that on the non-war fronts the Bush presidency has died. The education bill is a joke, and last week's steel tariffs are a disgrace. They've caused particular outrage among the only two allies who matter, Britain and Russia.
But most presidents get to pick their priorities. Bush has no choice in his. If Byrd wants to know the "end game," here's a few signs of how things will look when it's over:
*Regime changes in Iraq and Iran.
*The liquidation of Saudi Arabia, with the territory partitioned between Jordan and the less unenlightened Gulf emirs.
*The dissolution of NATO: America needs to stop overguaranteeing European security. For one thing, it allows EU governments to fritter their revenues on lavish welfare programs that allow young Arab immigrants to sit around plotting terrorism at the taxpayer's expense.
*The embrace by the Middle East of the same reforms Turkey embarked on 80 years ago.
In other words, these are early days, and there are plenty of horrors to come. It's war, there's more, get used to it.
*The liquidation of Saudi Arabia, with the territory partitioned between Jordan and the less unenlightened Gulf emirs.
*The dissolution of NATO: America needs to stop overguaranteeing European security. For one thing, it allows EU governments to fritter their revenues on lavish welfare programs that allow young Arab immigrants to sit around plotting terrorism at the taxpayer's expense.
*The embrace by the Middle East of the same reforms Turkey embarked on 80 years ago.
1 and 4 might happen, they might not. 2 and 3 seem way, way too extreme and unlikely to me.
None of us wants to think about this or live like this. When the FBI urges us to be extra vigilant, we pay no attention.
Of course, if we had a clue what to pay attention to, it would help. I don't think I've seen anything they want to know about, but who can be sure?
I especially liked these lines:
In fact, tough questions would be welcome. But Byrd's and Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle's criticisms are pathetic: They're about spin, posturing, about how it'll play on TV. In war, grownups don't have time for silly games in the congressional schoolyard.America needs to stop overguaranteeing European security. For one thing, it allows EU governments to fritter their revenues on lavish welfare programs that allow young Arab immigrants to sit around plotting terrorism at the taxpayer's expense.
Priceless.
I had to laugh right out loud when I read this!
You don't have exit strategies when your national territory's been attacked; you have a responsibility to see the war through to the end.
This is probably the best answer I've seen on this.
"Cordial-ly"
Bobby-Bubba Bird
Grand Wizard
I suspect it will be both in the long run especially if we really begin to check papers of all that travel the USA.
Maybe your tin foil is just a tad too tight and blocking out all the signals.... lol. But if all else fails we can watch ceretain tv pundits and they can tell us what to be aware of.....
This has never been better said!
I had never thought of this before but it's absolutely true. If the U.S. didn't guarantee our (European nations) security so overtly our governments would have to stop wasting our money on those who don't deserve it.
Excerpt:
Not a tough choice, you'd think. But the six-month suspension of normal politics is taking its toll on Democrats. "We seem to be good at developing entrance strategies," Sen. Robert C. Byrd, West Virginia's porkmeister par excellence, whined the other day, "and not so good at developing exit strategies."
Well spotted, senator. Here's something else that will shock you: Churchill didn't have an "exit strategy" for World War II. Exit strategies are for optional foreign adventures, when you go into the People's Republic of Basketcazia because you think General Ruthlez Bastardo would be a mild improvement on President Sy Kotik, but otherwise you've no vital interest at stake. You don't have exit strategies when your national territory's been attacked; you have a responsibility to see the war through to the end.
It's a shame Byrd can't seem to understand that. Maybe if we applied the traditional courtesies of West Virginia politics and agreed to rename Afghanistan Robert C. Byrdistan, he could see his way to being supportive for a couple of more months. Honestly, I don't like to complain but, given that the Senate has a talent pool of 200 million to draw on, the 100 members of "the world's greatest deliberative body" have performed abysmally since Sept. 11. The headline on Jules Witcover's column in the Baltimore Sun read, "Democrats Ask Tough Questions On War." In fact, tough questions would be welcome. But Byrd's and Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle's criticisms are pathetic: They're about spin, posturing, about how it'll play on TV. In war, grownups don't have time for silly games in the congressional schoolyard.
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"You ask, what is our policy? I say it is to wage war by land, sea and air--war with all our might and with all the strength God has given us--and to wage war against a monstrous tyranny never surpassed in the dark and lamentable catalogue of human crime. That is our policy.
"You ask, what is our aim? I can answer in one word. It is victory. Victory at all costs. Victory in spite of all terrors. Victory, however long and hard the road may be, for without victory there is no survival...."
--Speech to the House of Commons, May 13, 1940
Agreed
I hope this gets widely read and (dare I hope) paid attention to by the Dems.
Oops, sorry, got carried away there for a minute...
That would be asking too much.
knews hound
We KNOW this , the democrats can't accept a war,
it means their stranglehold grasp of domestic affairs is moot.
With out a foreign policy champion they are toast.
It galls them, but I like it.
And a good and noble one too. Churchill was a good man!
Yeah, I liked that one too!
The execrable Bird's alcoholism-induced senility is of the Kennedy strain.
Like teddy kennedy, he's been Korsokoffs' Syndrome senile for sixty years.
Priceless!
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