RUTHFULLY YOURS

“I will begin by saying what everybody would like to ignore or forget but which must nevertheless be stated, namely, that we have sustained a total and unmitigated defeat.” — That was Winston Churchill’s description of Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s surrender to Hitler in the Munich Agreement of 1938.

Yet Churchill’s words also apply to where the United States is today.

Our men and women in uniform have been heroic.

Many have signed up to serve again even after being wounded.

Our tactical units remain the best in the world.

Our intelligence officers and diplomats have risked their lives in service to the country.

The problem is not with the sincerity, the courage, the energy or the effort of individual Americans.

The problem has been the approach of a bipartisan Washington political elite that has squandered 15 years, thousands of lives, many thousands wounded, and trillions of dollars with no coherent strategy, no honest assessment of the challenge, and no willingness to learn from failure and develop new strategies and new institutions.

Since September 11, 2001, we have moved from righteous anger and clarity of purpose against the forces of terrorism in the immediate aftermath of the attacks to now sending $1,700,000,000 in cash to the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism.

We have watched our efforts in Iraq collapse while our efforts in Afghanistan decay.

We have seen the Middle East grow more violent, more chaotic, and more ungovernable despite 15 years of American and allied effort.

Fifteen years ago this week, terrorists killed 2,977 Americans in the worst surprise attack on our homeland since Pearl Harbor, 70 years earlier. In fact, 574 more Americans were killed on 9/11 than on December 7, 1941.

It was a huge, tragic, and deeply emotional shock. And yet the 9/11 attack was not the beginning of our war with Islamic supremacism.

By 2001, we had been at war with the Iranian dictatorship (still to this day listed by the State Department as the leading state sponsor of terrorism) for 32 years, when Iranians seized the American embassy in Tehran. Mark Bowden described the event appropriately in the title of his book, “Guests of the Ayatollah: The First Battle in America’s War with Militant Islam.”

From an American perspective, that war had continued in Lebanon in the 1980s and in Saudi Arabia, East Africa and Yemen in the 1990s.

In 2001, the terrorist war came to American soil with shocking results.

American anger was vivid and deep. President Bush reacted with powerful, clear, morally defining words.

In his address to the Joint Session of Congress, just nine days after the 9/11 attack, President Bush asserted “on September 11th, enemies of freedom committed an act of war against our country.”

President Bush described a huge goal. “Our war on terror begins with Al Qaeda, but it does not end there. It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped, and defeated,” he said.

President Bush described the scale of the challenge, saying, “Americans are asking: How will we fight and win this war? We will direct every resource at our command–every means of diplomacy, every tool of intelligence, every instrument of law enforcement, every financial influence, and every necessary weapon of war– to the disruption and to the defeat of the global terror network.”

Bush went on to warn that “Americans should not expect one battle, but a lengthy campaign, unlike any other we have seen. …Every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make. Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists. From this day forward, any nation that continues to harbor or support terrorism will be regarded by the United States as a hostile regime.”

President Bush wisely warned that “the only way to defeat terrorism as a threat to our way of life is to stop it, eliminate it, and destroy it where it grows.”

Four months later, in his 2002 State of the Union Address, President Bush described North Korea, Iran and Iraq as an “Axis of Evil”.

Bush warned that “the United States of America will not permit the world’s most dangerous regimes to threaten us with the world’s most destructive weapons.” The Congress applauded.

And that was the high water mark of the response to 9/11.

Just this week, North Korea had its fifth nuclear test. Last week North Korea launched three missiles in direct violation of United Nations Resolutions.

We now know that while deceiving the Congress and the American people, the Obama Administration has sent $1,700,000,000 to what even the State Department says is the world’s leading sponsor of terrorism, the Iranian dictatorship.

Iraq, at great cost in American lives, wounds and money, has degenerated into a mess dominated by Iran and by ISIS.

How did we go from brave words to defeat, dishonesty, and humiliation?

Tragically, after heroic leadership in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 (who can forget President Bush in New York standing next to the fireman and promising that the people who attacked New York would hear from all of us?) and after delivering exactly the right words to Congress, the Bush administration failed to plan for how big, how hard, and how long the fight with Islamic supremacists would be.

Almost immediately, the lawyers began imposing rules and regulations.

It was decided not to declare war even though President Bush had described 9/11 “as an act of war” in his congressional address.

The State Department began pushing back against an honest, clear statement of who was attacking us.

The two nuclear bombs dropped on Japan were known as “Little Boy” and “Fat Man”. The world today has two new nuclear bombs.

One is named “Fat Bill”. The other is named “Little Hillary.”

The “Bill Clinton” bomb is the one getting the most headlines as North Korea continues testing its nuclear weapons. The Communist dictatorship is on its fifth test already and achieved an explosion almost at the level of “Little Boy” which was dropped on Hiroshima.

North Korea has let it be known that this test has allowed it to produce standardized nuclear warheads “able to be mounted on strategic ballistic rockets” so that it can “produce at will and as many as it wants a variety of smaller, lighter and diversified nuclear warheads of higher strike power.”

Kim doesn’t just want a nuke. He wants a lot of nukes. And at the rate he’s going, he will have them.

And the man to thank for all that is Bill Clinton.

In the fall of ’94, Clinton told the American people that his deal with North Korea would help bring “an end to the threat of nuclear proliferation on the Korean Peninsula”.

“After 16 months of intense and difficult negotiations with North Korea, we have completed an agreement that will make the United States, the Korean Peninsula, and the world safer. Under the agreement, North Korea has agreed to freeze its existing nuclear program and to accept international inspection of all existing facilities,” Bill Clinton assured the country.

He lied.

The North Korean Deal was as worthless as his wife’s Iran deal. North Korea never kept its agreement. Like the Iran Deal, the North Korean Deal was never ratified by the Senate. Named the “Agreed Framework”, it amounted to as little as its name implied. Clinton’s people knew that North Korea had a uranium enrichment program going but chose to look away from its violations of the agreement because it would have been a political embarrassment for their boss and his diplomatic achievement.

The already worthless deal quickly became even more worthless once it was implemented. Like the Iran Deal there were secret deals within the deal, some of which still remain secret, likely because they reveal the scope of the Clinton sellout to the Communist dictatorship.

Inspections were delayed indefinitely. North Korea’s nuclear program had become known when it had previously delayed IAEA inspections for seven years. This time around it refused to resume inspections until we built them a nuclear power plant. Seven years after the deal, the IAEA was still trying to get access. Toward the end, the projected timeline for full inspections had been pushed to 2009.

On January 2003, North Korea announced that “We have no intention of producing nuclear weapons and our nuclear activities at this stage will be confined only to peaceful purposes such as the production of electricity.” In April, it announced that it had nuclear weapons.

ARLINGTON, Va. — President Obama said the U.S. has delivered “devastating blows” to al-Qaeda and stressed that America needs to lean on “our patchwork heritage” to resist terrorists’ attempts make Americans turn on each other.

Delivering remarks at the Pentagon to mark the 15th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, Obama paid tribute to “the nearly 3,000 beautiful lives taken from us so cruelly — including 184 men, women and children here, the youngest just 3 years old.”

“We honor the courage of those who put themselves in harm’s way to save people they never knew. We come together in prayer and in gratitude for the strength that has fortified us across these 15 years. And we renew the love and the faith that binds us together as one American family,” he said.

“…The question before us, as always, is: How do we preserve the legacy of those we lost? How do we live up to their example? And how do we keep their spirit alive in our own hearts?”

Obama said “we have seen the answer in a generation of Americans — our men and women in uniform, diplomats, intelligence, homeland security and law enforcement professionals — all who have stepped forward to serve and who have risked and given their lives to help keep us safe.”

“Thanks to their extraordinary service, we’ve dealt devastating blows to al-Qaeda. We’ve delivered justice to Osama bin Laden. We’ve strengthened our homeland security. We’ve prevented attacks. We’ve saved lives. We resolve to continue doing everything in our power to protect this country that we love,” he said.

The president emphasized a need to “stay true to the spirit of this day by defending not only our country, but also our ideals.”

“Fifteen years into this fight, the threat has evolved. With our stronger defenses, terrorists often attempt attacks on a smaller, but still deadly, scale. Hateful ideologies urge people in their own country to commit unspeakable violence. We’ve mourned the loss of innocents from Boston to San Bernardino to Orlando,” he continued.

“Groups like al-Qaeda, like ISIL, know that we will never be able — they will never be able to defeat a nation as great and as strong as America. So, instead, they’ve tried to terrorize in the hopes that they can stoke enough fear that we turn on each other and that we change who we are or how we live. And that’s why it is so important today that we reaffirm our character as a nation — a people drawn from every corner of the world, every color, every religion, every background — bound by a creed as old as our founding, e pluribus unum. Out of many, we are one. For we know that our diversity — our patchwork heritage — is not a weakness; it is still, and always will be, one of our greatest strengths. This is the America that was attacked that September morning. This is the America that we must remain true to.”