Bush's dismal record on terrorism

Michael Glitz, guestblogging at Americablog, outlines what a miserable failure Bush has been on terrorism:

A thousand different issues are contained in making our country safer and it wouldn't be surprising if something fell through the cracks. But our ports have been front and center as a vital and vulnerable area of our borders. Our coastlines and shipping have been front and center too.

And the Coast Guard issue didn't fall through the cracks. Bush focused in on it. He looked at an aging fleet among the oldest in the world, one around when we were still in Vietnam. He saw plans developed three years BEFORE 9-11 to upgrade the Coast Guard in 20 years at about $20 billion. With the war on terror at full blast, with the 9-11 Commission highlighting the vulnerability of the ports (one of the Coast Guard's duties), with Republican Senator Olympia Snowe calling for the plan to be accomplished in 10-15 years, what did Bush do? He decided to DELAY the upgrading of our Coast Guard until 2030 to save a few bucks.

[snip]

A real Commander in Chief would look at the Coast Guard in the light of 9-11 and say $20 billion to upgrade it in 20 years? How fast can we upgrade it? How much to do everything in two years? $30 billion? $40 billion? Do it.

Would any American question that expenditure or think it a poor decision? Of course not. Bush's failure to make our country safer is a sign of weakness and incompetence.

It's been 4 years since 9-11 and we STILL don't have a combined list of terrorists that can be checked against people coming into our country by plane, car or boat. It was crazy we didn't have this before 9-11. It's criminal that we don't have it now.

It's been 4 years and Bush has failed to strengthen security around our highly vulnerable chemical and nuclear energy plants. Why? Because big business doesn't want to pay for increased security and Bush is putting their concerns ahead of the safety of America.

It's been 4 years and Bush is delaying the strengthening of our coastlines and ports to two and a half DECADES. Any reasonable person would speed up the strengthening of our coastlines and ports. Why isn't Bush?

It's been 4 years and Bush has failed to hunt down and kill Osama Bin Laden.

It's been 4 years and Bush can't even ferret out a felon in the White House.

It may be that the only honest remark Bush has made about his self-styled "war on terror" is "I don't think you can win it." But if that's the case, then let him come out and tell us so. Because mortgaging our future as we continue to indiscriminately kill people in the Middle East, including our own soldiers; eroding our freedoms by putting Americans on no-fly lists and talking about embedding microchips in people to track everything they do to make sure they're not terrorists, pulling aside elderly people with hip or knee replacements at airports for extra security checks -- none of it is going to prevent a determined terrorist with an axe to grind and a dirty bomb, or snippet of plastic explosive, from doing what he's going to do.

Islamic terrorists do NOT "hate our freedom"; and even if they do, the way to address the problem is not to do what they want and take it away. Yes, there are elements of "kill the infidel", but how do the wingnuts propose to eliminate that? By eliminating all Muslims? Gee whiz, then Bush DOES become a second Hitler. Fundamentalist Islam is here to stay, just the way Fundamentalist Christianity is here to stay. Our task is to prevent EITHER of them from forming the state in its entirety, and the way to do that is not to depose secular Islamic leaders and create a vacuum so that theocrats can take power.

What they hate is us cozying up to the likes of the House of Saud. What they hate is what we've done to Iraq, in what they believe to be our quest for oil and empire. What they hate is THEIR perception (right or wrong) that we are assisting Israel with genocide against Palestinians. Israel/Palestine is going to have to be dealt with sooner or later; the solution is not going to make either party happy, but it's going to be necessary for peace.

Yes, there are elements of Islamofascism who want to annihilate the west, and those elements must be dealt with. But what we're doing isn't working, and it's just putting us in an even bigger hole, and when you find yourself in a hole, don't you think it makes sense to stop digging and find out how to get out of it?