On the same day we heard reports that the Obama Administration wants to draw down troop levels in Iraq from 45,000 to a dangerously low 3,000 by the end of the year, the Washington Post published an article titled “Al-Qaeda in Iraq, down but hardly out.”
The piece says, “They don’t need training camps like they had in Afghanistan pre-9/11, where they went around on monkey bars. It wasn’t the monkey bar training that allowed them to take down planes on 9/11, it was the ability to sit and think of ways of hijacking an airplane.”
A major strategy of President Bush’s War on Terror was to go on the offense against terrorists and their sponsors. We would take the fight to the terrorists on their turf, disrupt their networks and put them on the run, leaving them without the “ability to sit and think” of new ways to launch attacks here on our homeland.
The situation in Iraq remains fragile and we cannot allow any action that would threaten the bloody, hard-fought gains made there. A troop drawdown risks giving Al-Qaeda an opportunity to regroup and plot their next acts of terror in America, not to mention giving a nuclear-ambitious Iran an open invitation to increase its influence in Iraq.
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President Obama wants to cut and run and play defense. He wants to prosecute it in American courts, even bringing in dangerous terrorists, caught on foreign lands on the field of battle, and giving them the same Constitutional rights as American citizens.
How can we trust the Obama Administration with prosecuting the War on Terror when they can’t even utter the phrase? “War on Terror” has been renamed the “Overseas Contingency Operation.” They have removed “Islamic extremism” and “jihad” from national security strategy documents and proposed replacing the word “terrorism” with “man-caused disasters.”
The Obama Administration’s refusal to name our enemies is the basis for our film America At Risk: The War With No Name. In the film, top terrorism experts, including former Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, former UN Ambassador John Bolton, former CIA Director R. James Woolsey, and 1993 World Trade Center bombing prosecutor Andrew McCarthy, explain the dangers of ignoring jihadists’ explicit threats against America.
The 10th anniversary of the September 11th attacks should remind us of the results of ignoring those threats. We cannot lapse into a pre-September 11th mindset, we have to be able to connect the dots and focus on preventing further attacks. Unfortunately, there has been an effort to obfuscate the events leading up to September 11th. The Clintons’ attempt to bury the historical docudrama The Path To 9/11, the destruction of original classified documents related to terrorism by Clinton National Security Adviser Sandy Berger, and the Clinton Administration’s repeated failure to take out Osama bin Laden are all detailed in our film Blocking The Path To 9/11. These important pieces of history cannot be allowed to be forgotten or we risk repeating the same mistakes in the future.
Just because the Navy SEALs killed Osama bin Laden doesn’t mean the War on Terror is over. Al Qaeda is licking its wounds in Iraq and elsewhere, just waiting for us to turn our backs. This September 11th we must resolve to never turn our backs on the lessons of that day and never allow the sacrifices made over the last ten years go in vain.
Learn more about the current state of the War on Terror in Citizens United Productions’ film America At Risk and the events leading up to September 11th in Blocking The Path To 9/11.