Posted on 10/04/2005 12:11:48 AM PDT by West Coast Conservative
The Bush administration will aggressively pursue terrorism in Iraq and on "every other front," Vice President Cheney said Monday, asserting that the United States is now paying the price for two decades of weak responses to terrorist attacks.
Addressing Marines who have just returned from Iraq, Cheney said the failure of both Republican and Democratic administrations to retaliate decisively after terrorism incidents during the 1980s and 1990s led directly to the atrocities of Sept. 11, 2001.
"The terrorists came to believe that they could strike America without paying any price. And so they continued to wage those attacks, making the world less safe and eventually striking the United States on 9/11," Cheney said.
The vice president highlighted seven occasions when he said he felt the United States did not hit back strongly enough. The first -- the 1983 bombing of a Marine barracks in Beirut that killed 241 Americans -- resulted in U.S. troops being withdrawn from the city by the Reagan administration. Many of those killed came from Camp Lejeune, members of the 1st Battalion, 8th Marine Regiment.
Cheney said the American response was also inadequate after the killing of U.S. soldiers in Mogadishu, Somalia, in 1993; the bombing of the World Trade Center in New York the same year; the car bombing at the Saudi National Guard Training Center in Riyadh in 1995; the killings at Khobar Towers, which housed U.S. military personnel in Saudi Arabia, in 1996; the destruction of two U.S. embassies in East Africa in 1998; and the suicide bombing of the USS Cole in 2000.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
Weak responses. Duh..First WTC bombing..we did NOTHING.
I'd go back to the 70's and Carter's response to Iran.
GENERAL REQUEST
Could someone engineer a photo of Dick Cheney's head on a picture of John Rambo's shirtless body with belts of bullets for his Squad Automatic Weapon just for fun?
Use Sylvester Stallones body from the Rambo movie series...
It would be good fun and kind of neat.
Although I think it's right to include this incident, perhaps our biggest failure was to cave in to Iran when they kidnapped our embassy people during Carter's failed presidency.
In fact, the very public demonstrations of US counterculture in the '60's and 70's, all the subsequent self-recrimination and political fallout after the Vietnam war, was the green light to our enemies that the we didn't have the spine or the stomach for stern resistance to challenges. No one will admit that in this age of instantaneous real-time information, these public and radical challenges to policy (even if carried out by numeric minorities here) is mana from heaven our enemies who need only play and re play the footage of this 'discord' for the illiterate masses all over the world. It's tailor made for them to just commandeer that footage and voice over anything they want. The ill-informed and un-informed all over the globe will swallow it whole...have for decades. For too long, they all believed the US was a paper tiger.
Did anyone else notice how hard they worked to avoid saying Clinton's name?
A little late, isn't it?
And on the domestic front, why did we give in to the Democrats and spineless Republicans and did not nominate a true known conservative to SCOTUS.
I hate to say it but for one reason or another we have become a paper tiger. At that's the way I see it based on current events.
why are about = why are we about
Aw....You're just picking on dims.....
Seeing how lately this board has been nothing but "Reagan would have done this, Reagan would have done that" to everything GWB does from picking judges to taking a piss, it's should be noted that a substantial chunk of this time was under RWR's watch.
I know the geo-political situation was different back then (for example we couldn't take it to the Syrians after Beirut because they were close with the USSR), but if you read Reagan's autobiography, you can see how reluctant he was to use our military and lose lives, when perhaps some preemption or even some good old fashioned revenge back then may have lessened the current situation.
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