A little history. From 1977 to 1985 Rep. Edward Boland, D-Mass, chaired the House Intelligence Committee. In the early ‘80s, in spite of strong opposition from the Reagan Administration, Boland authored a repeated series of spending bill amendments that would prohibit any and all aid to the contra rebels who were fighting to overthrough the Sandinista government in Nicaragua. According to Rep. Edward Markey, D-Mass, “(Boland) took the New Deal values of Roosevelt, fighting against poverty and ignorance and injustice and used those values in the Boland Amendment to help the Nicaraguan people.” All good and well, except that the Sandinista’s were a bunch of brutal, oppressive communists in bed with Castro. From 1983 to 1986, using what it believed to be a loophole in the Boland Amendments, the National Security Council under Robert McFarland, and later, John Poindexter, conducted a series of covert operations to raise money from both private and foreign sources to provide military aid to the contras. One of these NSC fund-raising events was what has now become known as the Iran-Contra Affair. Iran-Contra in fact had a lot of noble goals: support the contra rebels in their fight against the communist Sandinista government, induce the Iranians to push for the release of American hostages held in the Middle East by Iranian backed terrorist organizations, AND provide the Iranians with military support in their war against – Iraq! And it’s that last goal that nearly everyone on the Democratic side of the aisle seems so eager to overlook. An aside. In 1981 I participated in a NSA sponsored Middle East war-game. My role? Saddam Hussein. Our Iraqi team took a chapter straight out of Hitler’s Blitzkrieg, caught the West entirely off guard, and in less than a week (game time) captured the Persian Gulf and the entire Arabian Peninsula. At that point, “I” owned some 65% of the world’s known oil reserves and it was no problem whatsoever getting all the military and political support I needed from the Soviets. The American contingent (down the hall, and headed by “Jimmy Carter”) was completely befuddled. Their options boiled down to two: nuke me (and risk World War III with the Soviets), or spend six to twelve months gearing up for a D-Day type assault (during which time the U.S. economy would have collapsed). Game over. And, by the way, I was frankly stunned (thankful, but stunned) when Saddam halted his August 1990 invasion in Kuwait. There wasn’t a thing to prevent him from marching all the way to the Arabian Sea. Sure, his supply lines would have been unmanageably long, and eventually he would have got his butt kicked anyway, but it would have taken us a whole lot longer and been vastly more expensive (in terms of both dollars and lives). And, in the meantime, he could have wrecked massive havoc on not just the Kuwaiti oil infrastructure, but that of the Emirates and Saudi Arabia as well. We would have been in a REAL hurt-locker. As it was, we were ENORMOUSLY lucky he stopped in Kuwait. In November of ’86, the Iran-Contra scandal broke and a host of Congressional Committees began holding hearings that ultimately led to the appointment of special prosecutor Lawrence Walsh. One of those hearings was held by the Senate Subcommittee on Narcotics, Terrorism and International Operations, led by (wait for it)... Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass. (Interesting how all these guys seem to come from Massachusetts. Kind of makes one wonder.) Anyway, the rest of Iran-Contra is history. But, just two years after the fall of the Shah of Iran in 1979, it was VERY clear to many of us in the intelligence community that the REAL threat in the Northern Tier was Saddam Hussein, NOT Ayatollah Khomeini. Reagan knew this, and the NSC tried to deal with it. But Democrats in Congress did everything they could to both ignore the threat and confound the Reagan Administration. Now, let’s move forward a few years. On February 26, 1993, the World Trade Center in New York was bombed. That operation was planned by Ramzi Yousef, who had been trained at Osama bin Laden funded al-Qa’ida camps in Afghanistan, and the bombing operation was funded by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who later masterminded (for bin Laden) the 9/11 attack. In October 1993, two U.S. Black Hawk helicopters were shot down and 18 U.S. servicemen killed in Mogadishu, Somalia. In November 1995, a car bomb exploded outside the Office of Program Management of the (U.S. trained) Saudi Arabian National Guard in Riyadh. Five American servicemen were killed. At the time, the Clinton Administration had no clue as to who was behind these attacks. BUT, the Sudanese government knew exactly who it was – Osama bin Laden – and tried repeatedly to convince Sandy Berger (Clinton’s National Security Advisor) of the nature and degree of the terrorist threat bin Laden (and al-Qa’ida) presented to the United States. The Sudanese even offered to arrest bin Laden and turn him over to us. The Clinton Administration response? “No thanks. Not interested.” (By the way, the Sudanese were also interested in turning over intelligence information detailing the entire global terrorist network operations of Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah and Hamas. Hezbollah, if you’ll recall, was responsible for the bombing of the Marine barracks in Lebanon in 1983. But Clinton wasn’t interested in that either.) Then, in August 1996, bin Laden (now in Afghanistan) made his “Declaration of Holy War on the Americans Occupying the Country of the Two Sacred Places.” (Mecca and Medina in Saudi Arabia.) And a month later the Taliban seized control of Kabul. In early 1998, al-Qa’ida effectively merged with Islamic Jihad and began planning an all-out terrorist campaign against America. On August 7, 1998, al-Qa’ida carried out the near-simultaneous bombings of the American Embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam. This time, we knew immediately who was responsible. And Clinton’s response? Blow up a pharmaceutical plant in Sudan and rain about a billion dollars worth of cruise missiles down on the Afghanistan landscape (which certainly killed a lot of gophers, but did little else). Then, on October 12, 2000 al-Qa’ida again struck against the U.S. by attacking the USS Cole, moored in Aden, Yemen. Again, we knew immediately who was responsible. And, Clinton’s response? Absolutely nothing – he barely raised an eyebrow. President Bush inherited this mess from more than 20 years of Democratic f**k-ups! And now those very same f**k-ups are trying to pin the blame for the whole thing on him. AND, one of those f**k-ups, John Kerry – a man whom I believe to be indirectly responsible for the deaths of 2,801 people on September 11, 2001 – even wants to be President! And the worst thing is, judging from the polls, at least half of our American countrymen and women are so gullible or so stupid that they’re perfectly willing to buy into this Democratic nonsense.
