Mary Mostert
Did Todd Beamer die to save the White House for a coward like Howard Dean?
By Mary Mostert
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld in a “Press Availability” session said in response to a questions on Monday about the $87 billion price tag for this year’s Operation Iraqi Freedom, “What we saw on September 11th was something in the neighborhood of 3,000 Americans killed and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars of economic loss in addition to these human losses.”
Why is it we have such short memories? When the World Trade Center’s twin skyscrapers came crashing down, just two years ago, most of the media reports concentrated on the human losses. Was it going to be, as first reported, up to 25,000 people dead? Or was it merely 10,000? Then, was it 6,000? The figure finally settled on was an amazingly low number — 3,000. Still more than the number that died in the December 7, 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor, an event that brought American into World War II which cost than 50 million lives worldwide and devastated the world’s economy. Out of a population base of 131.7 million people in 1940, more than 16 million men served in the Armed Forces during WW II. More than 1 million of those 16 million were either killed or wounded. In last year of the war the Roosevelt administration spent 3 times the amount of money it collected in taxes. But, at the time, we all thought it was worth it.
In Operation Iraqi Freedom to date there have been 185 combat deaths and another 100 non-combat deaths in a current population base of 281 million people in a six month period. During the same period of time, there were approximately 1,000 homicide deaths in California that have not even been mentioned in the national news.
Those who remember the casualty figures of World War II, as does such as Donald Rumsfeld ,are having a hard time trying to relate to the moaning, groaning, hand-wringing and whining among some of our politicians who, to be frank, come across as simply cowards. They refuse to recognize the change that took place in our wishful thinking prior to 9-11when a handful of podunk terrorists attacked and demolished the world trade center and tried to take out the Pentagon itself while a fourth airplane winged its way to Washington, DC with its apparent goal being the White House.
Had that fourth plane been successful, considering the hole it left in a Pennsylvania farm, there would be a big hole in the ground on Pennsylvania Avenue where the White House once stood.
To think that the “hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of billions” of dollars in lost revenues and lost jobs and personal fears had nothing to do with what happened the following year with the economy, considering how much American business was transacted out of the World Trade Center is like saying the terrorist attacks in Iraq and Kuwait blowing up oil wells and oil pipelines didn’t affect Iraq’s or Kuwait’s economy.
Yet, today we have, as a front runner for the Democratic Presidential campaign, a man who said on April 17, 2003, “We have taken decades of consensus on the conduct of foreign policy — bipartisan consensus in the United States and consensus among our allies in the world community — and turned it on its head. It could well take decades to repair the damage this President and his cohort of right-wing ideological advisors have done to our standing in the international community.
“(Bush’s) unilateral approach to foreign policy is a disaster. All of the challenges facing the United States — from winning the war on terror and containing weapons of mass destruction to building an open world economy and protecting the global environment — can only be met by working with our allies.” Between now and November 2004, voters of America are going to have to make a fairly simple decision: Do you want America and its foreign policy run by people you elect, or by people in the United Nations over whom you have NO control whatever and who simply cannot or will not lead when staring terrorism in the face? What IS the “consensus” between freedom and control by terrorists? It simply doesn’t exist.
By his own words, Howard Dean has promised, “On day one of a Dean Presidency, I will reverse this attitude. I will tear up the Bush Doctrine. And I will steer us back into the company of the community of nations where we will exercise moral leadership once again.”
When has “moral leadership” without firm military action ever reversed a reign of terror? The best response to Howard Dean’s fuzzy and, frankly, cowardly thinking, is in President Bush’s own words on Monday night, “For a generation leading up to September the 11th, 2001, terrorists and their radical allies attacked innocent people in the Middle East and beyond, without facing a sustained and serious response. The terrorists became convinced that free nations were decadent and weak. And they grew bolder, believing that history was on their side. Since America put out the fires of September the 11th, and mourned our dead, and went to war, history has taken a different turn. We have carried the fight to the enemy. We are rolling back the terrorist threat to civilization, not on the fringes of its influence, but at the heart of its power.”
Do we turn the White House over to Howard Dean, who plans to be a caretaker government for the United Nations control of America’s foreign policy, or do we continue with George W. Bush who still believes America should control its foreign policy.
After the 2004 election I hope for the sake of Todd Beamer and his helpers on Flight 93 who courageously died to protect the White House that we don’t find it occupied by a caretaker American president taking his orders from the United Nations building in New York, which is what Howard Dean is telling us he is planning.
© Mary Mostert
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld in a “Press Availability” session said in response to a questions on Monday about the $87 billion price tag for this year’s Operation Iraqi Freedom, “What we saw on September 11th was something in the neighborhood of 3,000 Americans killed and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars of economic loss in addition to these human losses.”
Why is it we have such short memories? When the World Trade Center’s twin skyscrapers came crashing down, just two years ago, most of the media reports concentrated on the human losses. Was it going to be, as first reported, up to 25,000 people dead? Or was it merely 10,000? Then, was it 6,000? The figure finally settled on was an amazingly low number — 3,000. Still more than the number that died in the December 7, 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor, an event that brought American into World War II which cost than 50 million lives worldwide and devastated the world’s economy. Out of a population base of 131.7 million people in 1940, more than 16 million men served in the Armed Forces during WW II. More than 1 million of those 16 million were either killed or wounded. In last year of the war the Roosevelt administration spent 3 times the amount of money it collected in taxes. But, at the time, we all thought it was worth it.
In Operation Iraqi Freedom to date there have been 185 combat deaths and another 100 non-combat deaths in a current population base of 281 million people in a six month period. During the same period of time, there were approximately 1,000 homicide deaths in California that have not even been mentioned in the national news.
Those who remember the casualty figures of World War II, as does such as Donald Rumsfeld ,are having a hard time trying to relate to the moaning, groaning, hand-wringing and whining among some of our politicians who, to be frank, come across as simply cowards. They refuse to recognize the change that took place in our wishful thinking prior to 9-11when a handful of podunk terrorists attacked and demolished the world trade center and tried to take out the Pentagon itself while a fourth airplane winged its way to Washington, DC with its apparent goal being the White House.
Had that fourth plane been successful, considering the hole it left in a Pennsylvania farm, there would be a big hole in the ground on Pennsylvania Avenue where the White House once stood.
To think that the “hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of billions” of dollars in lost revenues and lost jobs and personal fears had nothing to do with what happened the following year with the economy, considering how much American business was transacted out of the World Trade Center is like saying the terrorist attacks in Iraq and Kuwait blowing up oil wells and oil pipelines didn’t affect Iraq’s or Kuwait’s economy.
Yet, today we have, as a front runner for the Democratic Presidential campaign, a man who said on April 17, 2003, “We have taken decades of consensus on the conduct of foreign policy — bipartisan consensus in the United States and consensus among our allies in the world community — and turned it on its head. It could well take decades to repair the damage this President and his cohort of right-wing ideological advisors have done to our standing in the international community.
“(Bush’s) unilateral approach to foreign policy is a disaster. All of the challenges facing the United States — from winning the war on terror and containing weapons of mass destruction to building an open world economy and protecting the global environment — can only be met by working with our allies.” Between now and November 2004, voters of America are going to have to make a fairly simple decision: Do you want America and its foreign policy run by people you elect, or by people in the United Nations over whom you have NO control whatever and who simply cannot or will not lead when staring terrorism in the face? What IS the “consensus” between freedom and control by terrorists? It simply doesn’t exist.
By his own words, Howard Dean has promised, “On day one of a Dean Presidency, I will reverse this attitude. I will tear up the Bush Doctrine. And I will steer us back into the company of the community of nations where we will exercise moral leadership once again.”
When has “moral leadership” without firm military action ever reversed a reign of terror? The best response to Howard Dean’s fuzzy and, frankly, cowardly thinking, is in President Bush’s own words on Monday night, “For a generation leading up to September the 11th, 2001, terrorists and their radical allies attacked innocent people in the Middle East and beyond, without facing a sustained and serious response. The terrorists became convinced that free nations were decadent and weak. And they grew bolder, believing that history was on their side. Since America put out the fires of September the 11th, and mourned our dead, and went to war, history has taken a different turn. We have carried the fight to the enemy. We are rolling back the terrorist threat to civilization, not on the fringes of its influence, but at the heart of its power.”
Do we turn the White House over to Howard Dean, who plans to be a caretaker government for the United Nations control of America’s foreign policy, or do we continue with George W. Bush who still believes America should control its foreign policy.
After the 2004 election I hope for the sake of Todd Beamer and his helpers on Flight 93 who courageously died to protect the White House that we don’t find it occupied by a caretaker American president taking his orders from the United Nations building in New York, which is what Howard Dean is telling us he is planning.
© Mary Mostert
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