beachbuzz,
You may have convinced yourself that you are safer as a result of Bush and Cheney's illegal unilateral invasion of Iraq and their Soviet-style practice of illegal indefinite detentions and torture - but it is a position that can, at most be weakly defended, if at all.
Had Bush and Cheney actually carried out their promises after 9/11, they would have committed the entire U.S. military resources when they had Osama bin Laden and his senior al-Qaeda advisors and fighters in the caves of Tora Bora at the end of 2001 instead of losing interest and merely using Afghanistan and al-Qaeda as a pretext for invading Saddam Hussein. There are several reasons that are most likely responsible for al-Qaeda having not attacked the United States again since 9/11 and none of them is due to any positive actions taken by the Bush administration.
1) According to bin Laden's own fatwas, he attack was primarily to coerce the U.S. into removing American troops from the Islamic 'holy' soil of Saudi Arabia. Bush very quietly bowed to Osama's demand and withdrew all American troops from Saudi Arabia just before his Mission Accomplished debacle.
Terrorists 1, Bush/Cheney 0
2) In an interview with London's Al Quds Al Aribi some time before 9/11, bin Laden stated that his twin goals in attacking the United States were to force Bush to withdraw American troops from Saudi Arabia (he succeeded - see above) and to provoke the U.S. into getting engaged in an indefinite war in the Muslim world where the mujahideen could do to the U.S. what they had done to the Russians - tie up our forces for years, bleed our treasury, turn our troops into a shooting and bombing gallery, and use U.S. military presence in the Muslim world as a recruiting poster. In all of these, he was successful.
Terrorists 2, Bush/Cheney 0
3) It was much to the advantage of the jihadis to have America send our young troops over to their own home territory to be killed than for the terrorists to have to breach our security again to kill them here in America. As far as they are concerned, killing an American in Afghanistan or Iraq is no different than killing an American in the World Trade Center or the Pentagon. Since the number of American deaths in Afghanistan and Iraq are approximately 5,089 as opposed to 2,993 in the 9/11 attacks. That means that since 9/11, Muslim jihadis have killed more than 2,000 more Americans than they did in 9/11 - an increase of almost 60%.
So, the total Americans killed by Islamic terrorists since the Bush administration failed to detect, deter, or avenge 9/11 is now 8,082, a rather staggering number for a President who claims to have kept Americans safe during his administration.
Terrorists 3, Bush/Cheney 0
4) The Bush administration's response to 9/11, by staging an inadequate and short-lived attack on Afghanistan as a pretext to invade Iraq (which had no involvement in 9/11 and had no weapons of mass destruction that threatened us) resulted in Osama bin-Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri, and al-Qaeda itself to flourish in the intervening years, recruiting heavily, and building up a world-wide distributed organization even larger and more powerful than it was in 2001.
Terrorists 4, Bush/Cheney 0
5) Had we gone in with full forces in 2001 and destroyed bin Laden and al Qaeda when we had them trapped in the caves of Tora Bora, our lesson to the surviving terrorist organizations is that attacking America and Americans inevitably brings swift and sure retaliation, not just against the young, brainwashed 'martyrs,' but against the entire leadership of the organization. This would have been the most powerful discouragement of future attacks we could have delivered.
Terrorists 5 Bush/Cheney 0
cont...
