Free Republic

<p>November 3, 2003 -- The helicopter shootdown that killed at least 15 Americans sadly recalls another chopper downing where gleeful enemies danced at the deaths of U.S. troops - portrayed in the movie "Black Hawk Down" - and which drove then-President Bill Clinton to hastily retreat from Somalia. To President Bush's team and many other analysts, there's a clear line from that Somalia retreat to 9/11, because, they believe, terrorists concluded from Somalia that the world's sole superpower is soft and will retreat in the face of attack and losses.</p>

October 03, 2003, 8:25 a.m. What’s It All About? Playing high-stakes poker like never before. The objectives and methods of the terrorists and ambushers in Iraq are not hard to fathom. Their strategy is twofold. First, if each week they can kill five to six Americans, along with inflicting a few million dollars in damage, they hope to weaken public opinion here at home to such a degree that we might precipitously withdraw and leave a Lebanonized Iraq to the law of the jungle: bad for everyone else, good for them. The drop in support for the war in public-opinion...

The objectives and methods of the terrorists and ambushers in Iraq are not hard to fathom. Their strategy is twofold. First, if each week they can kill five to six Americans, along with inflicting a few million dollars in damage, they hope to weaken public opinion here at home to such a degree that we might precipitously withdraw and leave a Lebanonized Iraq to the law of the jungle: bad for everyone else, good for them. The drop in support for the war in public-opinion polls here suggests that this is not a far-fetched premise — especially when, in an...

<p>Yesterday's anniversary of the attack on America is a painful reminder of the deadly stakes in the war on terrorism and why national security will be a pivotal issue in next year's presidential election, campaign strategists say.</p> <p>The political reverberations from the nation's solemn observances remain a highly sensitive subject for President Bush's campaign and Republican Party officials &#8212; who refuse to discuss any campaign implications of the September 11 anniversary, on or off the record.</p>