Posted on 09/09/2011 4:12:39 PM PDT by Kaslin
The new conventional wisdom on 9/11: We have created a decade of fear. We overreacted to 9/11 — al-Qaida turned out to be a paper tiger; there never was a second attack — thereby bankrupting the country, destroying our morale and sending us into national decline.
The secretary of defense says that al-Qaida is on the verge of strategic defeat. True. But why? Al-Qaida did not spontaneously combust.
Yet, in a decade Osama bin Laden went from the emir of radical Islam, jihadi hero after whom babies were named all over the Muslim world — to pathetic old recluse, almost incommunicado, watching shades of himself on a cheap TV in a bare room.
What turned the strong horse into the weak horse? Precisely the massive and unrelenting American war on terror, a systematic worldwide campaign carried out with increasing sophistication, efficiency and lethality — now so cheaply denigrated as an "overreaction."
First came the Afghan campaign, once so universally supported that Democrats for years complained that President Bush was not investing enough blood and treasure there. Now, it is reduced to a talking point as one of the "two wars" that bankrupted us.
Al-Qaida Humiliated
Yet Afghanistan was utterly indispensable in defeating the jihadis then and now. We think of Pakistan as the terrorist sanctuary. We fail to see that Afghanistan is our sanctuary, the base from which we have freedom of action to strike Jihad Central in Pakistan and the border regions.
Iraq, too, was decisive, though not in the way we intended. We no more chose it to be the central campaign in the crushing of al-Qaida than Eisenhower chose the Battle of the Bulge as the locus for the final destruction of the German war machine.
(Excerpt) Read more at investors.com ...
That’s like saying we over-reacted to Pearl Harbor.
First thing I’ve read by Krauthammer in a long time that I wholeheartedly agree with.
We totally have to get over this 9/11 sadness so that we can move on to paying reparations for slavery......
I support KRAUTHAMMER questioning his RINOism. And yeh, I’m too lazy to correct the proper upper and lower case.
Sue me...
XXXOOO, peckerheads
Sorry, the Black Velvet is kicking in.
Black Velvet and the slow southern style...
Sue me....
The fact that there was no subsequent attack because of the measures put in place to prevent such an attack, has been used against him by leftists (and some loons on the right) since they saw that they could use it as a political weapon against him.
You are absolutely right, Charles. We most certainly did NOT 'overreact.'
Speaking of President Bush, let’s also keep in mind how he did not overreact domestically when you know his predecessor and successor would most certainly have declared martial law.
Some of the kids from that school in Florida where President Bush was reading to them were on Fox News and said that he did the right thing by staying seven more minutes, instead of jumping up and scaring them like the left practically said he should have done
Yeah, I saw that and thought, “Take that, Michael Moore, and all you liberal idiots, who made such fun of President Bush for not jumping up and running screaming out the classroom!”
The Patriot Act was almost as bad a domestic overreaction as martial law would have been.
See, I belong to the “kill them all an let God sort them out” school of total warfare. That IMHO is what we sheould have done. End of problem.
Bin Laden and AQ didn’t expect us to fight.
The present Administration wants to train us not to. So does the Ikhwan.
We are to submit.
Just ask Bloomberg.
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