A blast from the ghastly past
Reader Gary Comer provides some helpful follow-up to my post last night about attempts by the anti-Bush forces to parse the foreign policy address Condoleezza Rice didn't give on 9/11. Mr. Comer writes:
In your commentary on the criticism of Condi Rice’s planned 9-11 speech, I think you hit the nail on the head when you note the absence of Clinton administration rhetoric on the terrorist threat. In fact, in Clinton’s last State of the Union in 2000 he sounded a very cheery note: "Never before has our nation enjoyed, at once, so much prosperity and social progress with so little internal crisis and so few external threats."That does not sound to me like a man who believes there existed any great threat to the US at that time. Notice the phrase..."so few external threats"---during this time, Al Qaeda was plotting and preparing for the 9-11 attack and the attack on the USS Cole, and of course we had suffered previous attacks at their hand, such as the 1998 embassy bombings. To his credit, about 75% of the way through the speech, Clinton does discuss the terrorist threat: "A third challenge we have is to keep this inexorable march of technology from giving terrorists and potentially hostile nations the means to undermine our defenses.
"I predict to you, when most of us are long gone, but some time in the next 10 to 20 years, the major security threat this country will face will come from the enemies of the nation state: the narco-traffickers and the terrorists and the organized criminals, who will be organized together, working together, with increasing access to ever-more sophisticated chemical and biological weapons."
However, even here, buried deep into the speech, Clinton seems to hardly recognize any imminent danger, and even suggests the real terrorist threat is about 10 to 20 years away. Notice how he also lumps terrorists in with "narco-traffickers" and "organized criminals"…once again, indicating the mindset that plagued his administration: that fighting terrorism should be more of a law enforcement exercise than a war. Also, one has to go back to his opening remarks. In any speech the opening statement frames and summarizes the main ideas of the body of the speech itself. Clearly, Clinton was trying to communicate to Americans that the US had never had it so good and had never had so few problems and threats. This was hardly the speech of a man who believed terrorism was his highest priority and an imminent danger.
Mr. Comer even provides a link to Clinton's 2000 State of the Union speech. Thanks, but no thanks on that one, Gary.
