Did Candidate Bush Invite a Terror Attack?

By: Michael Gabriel

The national media has chosen to completely blow past what must be considered a critical factor in the rise of aggression against the United States. All through his presidential campaign, candidate George W. Bush repeatedly harped on the fact that our military was ill-prepared for a national emergency. He said our military was saddled with out-of-date equipment, was understaffed, and had been reduced in effectiveness by Clinton Administration policies, a charge that was ridiculous, considering his own conservative power base insisted on shrinking the size of the federal government, which included closing military bases and reducing troop numbers. It was called an end-of-the-cold-war military transition.

Bush even went so far as to trot out Colin Powell and Norman Schwarzkopf at a campaign stop to reiterate this message. It was just after a campaign speech where he again spouted off about our weak military that the U.S.S. Cole was attacked. Bush was intending to scare the public into supporting him with his false depiction of the state of the U.S. military, but what he really did was send a nice clear message to the rest of the world: The U.S. military is too weak to respond in the event of an attack. And Osama bin Laden heard that message loud and clear. And attack he did.

Why hasn't the national media taken Bush to task for practically inviting a terrorist attack on our soil? Does Fox News have the guts to go back and collect every one of Bush's stump speeches and catalog every line he ever spoke about our weak military, and then ask the question: Did the lies George W. Bush told about the U.S. military on the campaign trail serve as an invitation to terror attacks? Of course not, Rupert Murdoch would never agree to getting to the bottom of the truth if it meant making his fellow conservatives look bad.

And the irony of all this? After the terrorist attacks, a somber Bush stood in front of the American people and told us that our military was the the best in the world and was prepared to meet any challenge. Funny how much of difference one year and a partisan Supreme Court decision makes. We always had the greatest military in the world. It just took Bush 6,000 lives and billions and billions of dollars in damages to speak the truth.