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From: Jasper
Date: 9/22/01
Time: 12:39:12 PM
The nightmare began for me a long time ago. That's why I wrote The Invisible Warriors and sent copies to several people at NPR, one copy to Colen Powell and a copy to Bill Clinton.
Clinton was the only one I heard from - but the only thing he seems to have taken from it were a few catch phases for a speech announcing that he was going to send troops to Bosnia AFTER years of letting the terrorists there get away with wholesale slaughter. I say in the book that these kinds of attacks on civilians (as opposed to the inevitable killing of civilians when military targets are attacked) are attacks on civilization (see Chapter 7/ search "The struggle"). NOW we're hearing similar words from top American officials and foreign leaders as though the latest attacks in The United States were the first indication that we had to fight back, economically, diplomatically AND militarily.
I know damn well that I couldn't have been the only one who saw the writing on the wall in 1979. It was a big wall and the letters where written in blood a mile high. When Jimmy Carter allowed our embassy to be taken over in Iran without declaring war and Ronald Reagan made a deal with the people who took our people hostage to get them back, I knew right then that the entire Free World was in big trouble (Chapter 3/search "hindsight").
It was Margaret Thatcher, not the first George Bush, who pushed for the half-assed action that later became known as the Gulf War ("Don't go wobbly on me now, George") and it was the French (of all people) who intervened in Rwanda. The targeting of civilians in both of these "local" conflicts were acts of war against civilization. Soldiers are supposed to protect civilians, even at the cost of their lives. That's the only legitimate reason for having them.
Bill Clinton missed the point entirely when he decided that the bombing of our embassies in Kenya and Tanzania were not acts of war, but something less when he learned that the body count of American soldiers would have been too high to take out the perpetrators.
In case anyone else misses the point, let me say that this is not a mater of left/right politics. I'm a Liberal. Charlie is a Conservative and our Presidents who allowed the terrorist to have things their way for so long came from the left and the right. This is not about war or peace. This is about survival. --Jasper