MADER'S RANTS The War On Terror April 9, 2004 - Condoleezza Rice gave her testimony Thursday in front of the 9/11 investigative commission. Earlier, Ted Kennedy called Iraq George Bush’s Vietnam. Strangely appropriate, since it was his older brother that helped get us entangled in ‘Nam in the first place. You remember his brother, JFK? The one with the permanent sun roof installed in his head in Dallas in ’63? Actually, it was Eisenhower who started the Vietnam ball rolling, but if everyone else can muddy the facts why can’t I? Ya see, that’s my irritation. I can’t tolerate the constant bending of facts and information to suit other peoples needs. This warping of reality is only made worse by the fact it’s an election year. Both parties are looking to blame the other while the actual problems fail to get resolved. I don’t feel any safer. Do you? Here are some stats... Terrorists acts against the U.S. (these are the biggies and don’t comprise night club bombings, kidnappings and the always popular failed car bombings) include: World Trade Center, 1993 Khobar Towers, June 1996 Two US Embassies, Kenya & Tanzania, 1998 USS Cole, October 2000 World Trade Center, 2001 Notice that all these, except for one, occurred during the Clinton administration/ Do you recall anything being done about them? I don’t. Sure, we bombed an aspirin factory in Africa and did some noncommittal lobbing of a cruise missile into Afghanistan. Sure, Clinton’s NSA Sandy Berger once stated after 9/11 that Clinton considered having Bin Laden assassinated as early as 96 after the Khobar Towers, but he decided not to. In short when it came to stopping terrorism on his watch and avoiding 9/11, Clinton was impotent - not “important.” I said impotent, as in limp-dicked. I’ll be honest with you. I don’t trust Bush as far as I can throw him. At the same time, I hate seeing someone blamed for something they didn’t do. Bush had only been in office 233 days at the time the World Trade Center was attacked. That’s a little over 7 months. When you start a new job, you have to prioritize things. You also assume that the person you replaced left things in some kind of order. It takes me a while to settle into a new place of employment, and all I’ve gotta worry about is excessive drooling. This poor sod has an entire nation to run, and people are giving him grief because he wasn’t clairvoyant enough to guess that some zealot was going to fly a passenger plane into two of the tallest buildings on the planet?! Ohhh, come on!!!!!! Then there’s the war. If you had the responsibility to protect 280 million people, and have already been attacked on your soil once at the cost of 2700 lives, and someone tells you there is a 50/50 chance that nation X, which has a history of belligerence, may or may not have weapons that might be used against your population. What do you do? If Bush had done nothing and a few years down the road there had been a VX gas attack in a major metropolitan area, people would want to know why hadn’t he done something to stop it. Why was there a failure in the intelligence community? Blah blah blah…. Can’t say it’s not true because that’s what’s happening now. So, we invade and subdue two large, inhospitable countries that have had ties to terrorist that have committed acts of aggression toward our people for years (remember the 1993 bombing) and we lose less than a thousand troops in three years of active combat. Sad, and tragic, yes. But a reality of life. I grew up in the Army. My father was wounded twice in ‘Nam. To say I have respect for their sacrifice is an understatement. However, never in the history of the world has this kind of thing been accomplished with so few lost on either side. To put it into perspective, in 2003 in Chicago roughly 600 people died from violent crimes. That’s just one city in the U.S.! 50,000 people die every year in car accidents! Think about it. Our troops are some place where people are trying to kill them and statistically speaking, they are safer in the combat zone than they are at home! The following questions aren’t for the current administration. I don’t care about Bush’s party. He got a shitty deal the moment he took over the office. My questions are: 1) Why isn’t Bill Clinton being charged as an accomplice to mass murder? 2) Why did the American people watch for 8 years while hundreds of people died, demanding nothing to prevent it from happening again? Weren’t the lives of 17 sailors enough in 2000? Wasn’t 223 dead in 1998 enough? Wasn’t 19 dead in 1996 enough? The failure wasn’t in the government. The failure was in our own individual apathy. Later, Mader