Appeasement verses War.

I haven't seen any of that here, but I've seen a lot of criticism directed at Bush for dismantling Clinton's war on terrorism prior to 9/11, and then fighting Iraq instead of terrorists afterwards.

If Bush had continued to monitor Al Qaeda, or had continued surveillance of Saudi extremists in this country, or had kept terrorism on the list of priorities, would 9/11 have been prevented?

We will never know for sure. But we do know, so long as Clinton did maintain those programs, there were no attacks. Can we at least agree, that it wouldn't have hurt, if Bush hadn't shut them down?

 

Are there no bounds for posting absurdities?

 

According to an article by Dana Priest (who is no friend to the Bush administration) of Washington Post, the US and it's allies have destroyed 75% of Al Queda.

And according to a report by UK's Royal Institute for International Affairs, the war in Iraq has marginalized Al Queda in the Muslim world.

quote -

"A growing number have embraced Islamist politics but will not sanction al-Qaeda's tactics and will pursue democratic avenues when they are made available. This radicalization may itself be a worrying development for the West, but it is also weakening al-Qaeda, whose legitimacy and ambition rest on approval from the Muslim masses...."

 

I'd be pleased to discuss anything about my post you'd care to deny. Go for it. The subject, BTW, is not whether or not Bush attacked Al Qaeda after 9/11; it's why he dismantled our defenses before that.

I'm very pleased that he went into Afghanistan; any president dumb enough to let 9/11 pass would have deserved impeachment. But I wish he had gotten terrorism as a priority before we had a disaster of that magnitude. I'll ask again; can we at least agree it would have been better if, before 9/11, Bush hadn't shut down programs to keep track of terrorists?

 

The premise of the OP is a logical error of a false dichotomy.
Since Bush himself has now said Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11, how would not invading Iraq have been appeasement?

 

Well, he'd still kinda like to have you think it was true.

 

The OP didn't mention Iraq at all.

"Logical error of a false dichotomy"???
That gives me a headache just reading it

 

I'd still be interested in hearing what about my statement you'd like to deny.

 

Are you talking about the time Clinton bombed that aspirin factory?:laugh:

Joseph Botwinick

 

I don't know what, if anything Pres. Bush 'dismantled'. He'd been in office 8 months when the 9/11 attacks were launched. Clinton let Bin Laden slip away, Sudanese officials offered to arrest Bin Laden and extradite him. The silence of the Clinton administration in responding to this offer was deafening. The US and it's allies have destroyed 75% of Al Quada. Which administration's efforts were more successful?

 

(Barbarian asks what in his statement was not true)

Operation Catcher's Mitt was closed down, and other anti-terrorism efforts curtailed.

"NEW YORK, March 21 PRNewswire -- Newsweek has learned that in the months before 9/11, the U.S. Justice Department curtailed a highly classified program called "Catcher's Mitt" to monitor Al Qaeda suspects in the United States, after a federal judge severely chastised the FBI for improperly seeking permission to wiretap terrorists. During the Bush administration's first few months in office, Attorney General John Ashcroft downgraded terrorism as a priority, choosing to place more emphasis on drug trafficking and gun violence, report Investigative Correspondent Michael Isikoff and Assistant Managing Editor Evan Thomas in the March 29 issue of Newsweek (on newsstands Monday, March 22)."
http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2006/9/11/105117/571

In fact, the Administration took terrorism off the list of priorities:


"WASHINGTON - The Justice Department under Attorney General John Ashcroft failed in 2001 to treat counterterrorism as a top priority, the commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks said in a report issued on Tuesday.
The commission staff statement focused on a Justice Department document that set out priorities for 2001 issued May 10 of that year. The top priorities were reducing gun violence and combating drug trafficking. It made no mention of counterterrorism.
The report said when Dale Watson, the head of the counterterrorism division, saw the report, he "almost fell out of his chair."
"The FBI's new counterterrorism strategy was not a focus of the Justice Department in 2001," the staff report said.
Then-acting FBI Director Thomas Pickard said he appealed to Ashcroft for more money for counterterrorism but on Sept 10, 2001, one day before the attacks on New York and Washington that killed nearly 3,000 people, Ashcroft rejected the appeal."
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/0413-01.htm

And Bush had dismantled the means by which we were keeping track of these guys. Whether they knew Bush had dropped the ball or not, they succeeded because we didn't know about them.

No, that was Bush. At Tora Bora, in Afghanistan, they let up too soon, and in the lull, Bush allowed Bin Laden to escape. But he says he doesn't care, so it's understandable.

There was a problem then. He had not been indicted in any crime against Americans at the time. If was brought here, his lawyer would have had him out at once. He was mentioned as an unindicted co-conspirator in the first attack on the WTC but that would not have been sufficient to hold him.

In fact, the last thing we wanted was Bin Laden to be extradited until he was indicted.

Clinton, of course, was more successful in using the FBI and other agencies to prevent an attack. Bush was quite successful in closing the barn door, after he let the horses escape.

 

Ok, to explain: it is a common mistake in present a problem as having only two possible, mutually exclusive, solutions - in this case either appeasement or war, one or the other, nothing in between and no combination of the two. For instance, sanctions and retalitory bombings are not appeasement, neither are they war.

 

Yes thank you. I knew what he meant. It seemed unnecessary to use $20 dollar words when $1 would have served the purpose.

 

Sudanese president Omar Hassan Ahmed Bashir offered the arrest and extradition of Bin Laden along with a treasure trove of intelligence on Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah and Hamas, including information on two of the hijackers who flew airliners into the World Trade Center.

The Clinton administration took a pass.

It would appear that the barn door was open before Bush took office.

 

In this case, the $20 word is more concise - well worth the price since you did understand.

Is there any evidence beyond al-Bashir's sayso that this is true? Is his word trustworthy or does he have his own agenda? Is it possible that he put this story out to get in good with the Bush admin?

 

"The Sudanese offer had its roots in a dinner at the Khartoum home of Sudanese Foreign Minister Ali Othman Taha. It was Feb. 6, 1996 -- Ambassador Timothy M. Carney's last night in the country before evacuating the embassy on orders from Washington.....

Taha, distressed at the deteriorating relations, invited Carney and Shinn to dine with him that Tuesday night. He asked what his country could do to dissuade Washington from the view, expressed not long before by then-United Nations Ambassador Madeleine K. Albright, that Sudan was responsible for "continued sponsorship of international terror."

Carney and Shinn had a long list. Bin Laden, as they both recalled, was near the top. So, too, were three members of Egypt's Gamaat i-Islami, Arabic for Islamic Group, who had fled to Sudan after trying to kill Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. Sudan also played host to operatives and training facilities for the Palestinian Islamic Resistance Movement, or Hamas, and Lebanon's Hezbollah.

"It was the first substantive chat with the U.S. government on the subject of terrorism," Carney recalled....

Sudanese President Bashir, struggling for dominance over the fiery cleric Hassan Turabi, had already made overtures to the West. Not long before, he had delivered the accused terrorist known as "Carlos the Jackal" to France. Less than a month after Taha's dinner, he sent a trusted aide to Washington.
Provide us with names, dates of arrival, departure and destination and passport data on mujahedin [holy warriors] that Usama Bin Laden has brought into Sudan," the document demanded. The CIA emissaries told Erwa that they knew of about 200 such bin Laden loyalists in Sudan.

During the next several weeks, Erwa raised the stakes. The Sudanese security services, he said, would happily keep close watch on bin Laden for the United States. But if that would not suffice, the government was prepared to place him in custody and hand him over....

"In the end they said, 'Just ask him to leave the country. Just don't let him go to Somalia,' " Erwa, the Sudanese general, said in an interview. "We said he will go to Afghanistan, and they said, 'Let him.' "

Link

 

Simple. There was no indictment of Bin Laden at the time. If we had extradited him, he would have gotten away easily and legally.

We got the intelligence, BTW. The reason that we didn't use it prior to 9/11, was Bush had told the FBI to back off on their surveillance of Saudi nationals. (remember the agent in charge of the program quit in protest of Bush's protection of them) So we weren't aware that they were in the country, learning how to fly jet aircraft.

It's possible that they still would have evaded detection, but can't you at least agree that it would have been less likely, if Bush hadn't protected them from investigation?