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Posted on 04/19/2004 10:58:27 AM PDT by Aggie1
…' Commentary by Kathleen Parker
Headline November 10, 2004
President-elect John F. Kerry's rise to the nation's highest office came as little surprise following almost four years of remonstrations against President George W. Bush for his bizarre attack on the defenseless people of Afghanistan.
Kerry, a decorated Vietnam veteran, was the right man for a nation outraged by the Bush administration's pre-emptive war, which, it now seems clear, was based on highly speculative intelligence that Saudi Arabian-born terrorist Osama bin Laden was planning an attack on the United States.
Absent absolute proof of an imminent attack, Bush's Sept. 10 bombing of Afghanistan earned him international condemnation and, in all likelihood, an indictment in coming weeks.
Bush faces federal charges for his baseless arrest of 19 foreign nationals, whose "crime" was attending American flight schools.
Kerry's campaign mantra - "You go to war because you have to, not because you want to" - resonated with Americans as they tried to make sense of Bush's Sept. 10 attack on Afghanistan. Neither the president, nor national security adviser Condoleezza Rice convincingly defended their actions during the recent "9-10 Commission" hearings, which Congress ordered in response to public outcry to try to determine what compelled the president to launch a war against Afghanistan.
The target of the attack was bin Laden, friend to Afghanistan's brutal Taliban regime, as well as al Qaeda training camps in that war-ravaged nation. Al Qaeda, an international terrorist network, has been blamed for numerous attacks on U.S. interests, including the USS Cole bombing, which killed 17 sailors.
Some intelligence sources speculate that bin Laden's operatives may be trying to secure weapons of mass destruction from Iraq's Saddam Hussein. Kerry says he is committed to containing Saddam through continued sanctions and the U.N. oil-for-food program.
In any case, experts say that intelligence about Saddam's WMD program is just as speculative as was the intelligence that prompted Bush to attack Afghanistan. The man credited with sounding the alarm on bin Laden and al Qaeda was Richard Clarke, a counterterrorism expert who has served four presidents.
In a Jan. 25 memo to Rice, Clarke urged immediate attention to several items of national security interest: the Northern Alliance, covert aid, a significant new '02 budget authority to help fight al Qaeda and a response to the USS Cole.
At Rice's and Clarke's urging, Bush called a meeting of principals and, after "connecting the dots," decided to wage war against Afghanistan. What did the dots say? Not much, in retrospect. Apparently, the president decided to bomb a benign country on the basis of "chatter" that hinted at "something big."
With no other details on the "big," and weaving together random bits of information from a variety of questionable sources, Bush and company decided that 19 fundamentalist Muslim fanatics would fly airplanes into the World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon on Sept. 11.
Under questioning by the "9-10 Commission," Clarke denied that his memo was anything more than a historical overview with a "set of ideas and a paper, mostly." The bipartisan commission concluded that Bush's "dot-connecting" had destroyed American credibility and subjected the United States to increasing hostility in the Arab-Muslim world.
Saddam Hussein and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat joined French and German leaders in condemning Bush and urging American voters to cast their ballots for regime change in America.
In a flourish of irony and the spirit of bon vivant for which the new president is widely known, Kerry gave his acceptance speech from Windows on the World, the elegant restaurant atop the World Trade Center's Tower One.
Kathleen Parker is a syndicated columnist.
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