Try again Red the Cole was bombed Oct 12 2000 3 weeks before the election and months before W took office. See the Wikipedia cite http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Cole_bombing Now if you follow the same logic path you tried on W the Billy C is responsible for not taking action. You may also try to remember W took office in the middle of a recession (mild) and domestic affairs were at the forefront of everyone's mind. Finally when the supreme terrorist act of the time took place on 9/11 W took decisive action and went into Afghanistan. Careful with your facts sport as you like to tell everyone else mind you do the same.
try to pay better attention to what I said. It took three months for the investigation to determine who was responsible. By that time Bush was president. Clinton could not act until a culprit was found. Fact Bush did not take action until after 9/11. Fact. Heed your own advice, Sport.
It was pretty well known that AQ was behind the Cole as it was after the embassy bombings of 1998. Clinton could have acted FACT. However I think he did the right thing as it was a time of election and transition. Bush took office 3 months after the bombings when the culprits had gone to ground. Weaponized drones did not exist and we had no bases to launch them from. We couldn't bomb them with the tools we had...we couldn't send in special forces in the environment of the time. We couldn't do anything effective. AQ wasn't a country we could sanction or embargo. Who were we going to take revenge on? The families or homes of the leaders? We aren't barbarians who inflict war on innocents because we can't touch the criminals....oops maybe we do today as how many innocents have drones killed? As with Ukraine today there was no way to project the power required to get AQ except the invasion of Afghanistan. As much as I honor the brave sailors of the Cole, it wasn't a sufficient cause for war then as 9/11 was after. It was also after a extremely contentious election...remember the hanging chads and Supreme Court and in the middle of a recession. It wasn't a time to use a foreign affair to distract from the domestic. Sometimes there is no viable action and the window if there was one was before W was elected not after. So yes I know you like to shade the facts to make your point but not this time.
Can you at least hold Clinton responsible for setting the climate that emboldened al quaeda to attack a US Navy ship? Read Dereliction of Duty if you don't know what I mean.
Nonsense. Clinton had already hit Al Qaeda twice with cruise missile attacks on their bases in Afghanistan. Not women and children--training bases with militants. B-52's can hit anywhere in the world including Afghanistan and Bush himself proved it after 9/11. The idea that the United States of America was helpless to attack Al Qaeda is simply untrue. This statement is at odds with your first statement. Clinton was a lame duck and he quite rightly allowed the new President to make the call on a military response. But half a dozen radical groups had claimed responsibility. We had to do the investigation and be sure that it was Al Qaeda. The window was open and Bush failed to act. I give him much credit for acting quickly and decisively after 9/11. But until then his entire focus was on Saddam, not Osama bin Ladin. Setting the climate? How? Clinton tried to kill bin Ladin twice! I'm not going to debate a book. Make your case if they think you have one. If you want something to read try Richard Clark's book Against All Enemies and his testimony before the 9/11 commission. He was head of the White House special anti-terrorism team. He meticulously documents how the Bush administration ignored all warnings about Al Qaeda including one report titled Al Qaeda determined to attack the United States, a month before 9/11.
And whiffed twice. If you give Bush no passes for his failures, why should I give Clinton a pass for his? I'm not going to debate your book either. Patterson - the frakkin' nuclear bag-man for Clinton - meticulously documented the absolute frat house atmosphere Bill created in the White House and the undermining of the military by both Bill and Hillary. He was there on a daily basis and watched it happen. Bush inherited a security situation that left us totally ripe for what came next.
What failures, amigo? How did he "set the climate" for Al Qaeda? The "climate" had set off bin Ladin was the presence of US troops in Saudi Arabia in 1991 by Bush 41. Before that he has been a US ally against the Soviets in Afghanistan. Clinton retaliated for the embassy bombings. He got bin Ladin indicted. He authorized the CIA to capture or kill bin Ladin in writing, something the intelligence community describes as a "watershed moment." I give Bush 41 and Clinton a pass because, until the embassy bombings, bin Ladin was just a domestic problem for Saudi Arabia. All of the middle eastern radicals had local agenda's. Eliminating Israel for the PLO, Hamas, and Hezbollah. Eliminating the Saudi Monarchy for bin Ladin. Dozens of local islamists trying to get Sharia law from their own strongman governments in Iraq, Syria, Egypt, Libya, Pakistan and all the sheikdoms. Even the anti-American Iranian radicals only operated inside Iran. But when Bush 43 was in office. Bin Ladin and Al Qaeda had been recognized as a new threat by American intelligence and they had already bombed two American embassies in Africa and a US Navy warship in Yemen. His own White House terrorism experts were falling to get his attention about bin Ladin. He was slow in wising up. I have always given Bush credit for waking up instantly on 9/11 and responding with speed and authority in immediately taking on Al Qaeda in Afghanistan. Sadly he let himself be distracted by the Iraqi misadventure after bin Ladin's escape from Tora Bora and did not finish it properly. I have always thought that Dubya was honest, likable, and sincere and had the virtue of resolve. He was just kind of incompetent and picked advisors dreadfully. Darth Cheney and Condi rice served him poorly and he failed to heed Colin Powell and eventually ran him off.
What exactly did he inherit? Not some author's opinion, but what actual Clinton policies "left us ripe" for Al Qaeda to attack us? Obama inherited a finical and a security situation when he took office--the biggest crash since the Great depression and two unfinished foreign wars. Bush inherited a booming economy and no wars at all. Are you trying to tell me that allowing women in more combat roles and "Don't ask-don't tell" encouraged Al Qaeda to attack? Because that is the principal criticism of Clinton from military sources.
Agreed. . It's not imagination. Every now and then, a person knows what they know. I absolutely believe the Republicans want to keep this alive in the hopes of making it an issue in the next election and to hold HRC responsible for her role in it. And yet, again, that still doesn't make it a manufactured scandal.
Point 1 Clinton hitting AQ obviously had no effect. B-52s and cruise missiles are ineffective in this type of operation. The time lag from actionable intelligence to strike was too long and the weapons not accurate enough. That is why weaponized drones were being developed in the early 2000s. There was little to choose from between doing nothing and hitting a flea with a 500lb bomb. My point was that you were trying to hold W to those standards and ignoring outside influences yet gave Clinton a pass. I also said Clinton was correct not to act due to the transition. I believe W deserves the same pass due to the points I made about the state of the economy and political situation when he took office. Red 9/11 happened 8 months after he took office at a time there was division in the country and he was dealing with an economic turndown. I was pointing out you were holding W to a different standard than Clinton.
