Discover the GOPUSA Forum!

Discover the GOPUSA Forum! GOPUSA is a great place for news and commentary. It is also a great place for discussions! Have an issue on your mind? Want to discuss and debate it? Want to share thoughts on current events in a friendly atmosphere? The GOPUSA Forum is the place for you!

Other Columns by David Horowitz
David Horowitz Bio

Printer-Friendly Version

It's been an interesting couple of weeks for looking at the war against the Islamo-fascists and other enemies of the United States. North Korea attempted to launch an Intercontinental Ballistic missile capable of reaching American shores and one day carrying a nuclear warhead. Both technologies were made available to the North Koreans -- to put the best possible face on it -- by lax security controls and diplomatic follies during the Clinton Administration. To allay public distress over the missile launch President Bush announced that anti-ballistic systems the United States was developing provided us with a good chance of intercepting the Korean missiles. Perhaps by the time the North Koreans achieve this capability our anti-ballistic missile shield will be in place.

But this is also no thanks to Democrats who have waged a ferocious 25- year war against the building of an anti-ballistic missile defense. The entire liberal arsenal was launched against this program, right at the outset with the mockery of Reagan's "star wars" initiative and reached a crescendo when the Democrats supported Soviet objections to scrapping the Salt II agreements which would have prevented us from finishing the program. Left to Democrats, in other words, America would have no defense against the maniac in Pyongyang, Kim Jong Il.

But this was only one story of the week. In another, FBI agents listening in on an Internet chat room -- thus invading Americans' privacy and "destroying" their constitutional liberties -- managed to prevent a new 9/11 attack by radical Islam on the tunnel under the Hudson River that carries millions of commuters to New York to work. The object of the attack was not just to kill innocents, but to destroy the economy and sow panic in the streets of America and the world. The plotters said they were inspired by the economic damage done by Hurricane Katrina, but they might as well have been inspired by the damage done on 9/11 when $600 billion was taken out of the US economy in a single attack. A series of attacks could have thrown the entire world into economic chaos and tip the political scales in a nuclear Muslim country like Pakistan.

Nonetheless, a recently released best-selling book by Ron Susskind -- fed his classified information by rogue elements in the US intelligence community -- mocks Vice President Cheney's "One Percent Doctrine" which holds that a one percent chance that terrorists may have the means to inflict massive damage is enough to warrant preventive action. Meanwhile the New York Times and apparently now the New York Daily News, egged on by American radicals posing as civil liberties activitists, are busily leaking national security secrets. The secrets are being provided by government agents, disgruntled with national policy, who are expressing their "dissent" by violating America's espionage laws and endangering its citizens.

This is the situation we find ourselves in. And in this situation, the defense of those abetting elements in the government who are willing to betray us to our enemies is what? We are protecting the Constitution. We're helping to win the war on terror by defending Americans' liberties, which is what this country is all about. We cannot prevail in the war on terror if we cease to be who we are in the process. That is the argument. That is the defense. Tell it to Lincoln who suspended habeas corpus to defend the union and would have put the publisher and editor of the New York Times in jail long before this.

>> Continued -- Page 1 2 3