LESSONS OF 9/11

Howard Phillips
Washington, DC
Sep. 15, 2001

1. Our only safety is in the Lord. If God withdraws His hand of protection, no human precaution can save us from impending disaster.
2. We must pray that God will be merciful, and we must ourselves repent and rid ourselves of conduct and beliefs which are offensive to God.
3. We are still paying the price for Jimmy Carter's destruction of human intelligence capabilities at the Central Intelligence Agency in the 1970's and bad decisions by Bill Clinton in the 1990's. It takes decades to build the kinds of relationships which enable us to penetrate the immediate circles of those committed to our destruction. Even if we were doing everything possible today, it could well be many years before we are able in advance to know as well as needed the particular intentions of terrorists determined to destroy us.
4. Several Presidential administration, after having promised to take decisive action against terrorists, failed to comprehensively and thoroughly do so. Think how many thousands of lives would have been saved if Osama bin Laden and his ilk had been taken out during the Clinton Administration.
5. The events of September 11 were not, as high officials have suggested, an attack on freedom and democracy, rather, they were a manifestation of Islamic fanaticism. Unconstitutional interventionism on the part of the government of the United States, over many decades, has made America a target of hostility in many places all over the world. U.S. participation in U.N. interventions in the Balkans and our effort to play "power broker" in the Middle East have exacted a price.
6. The Executive Order prohibiting assassination should be revoked by President Bush. It is never moral to make innocent non-combatants a primary target. It would have been much more just, for example, for the U.S. military, to have assassinated Suddam Hussein and his immediate cohorts than to have placed at risk the Iraqi civilian population, U.S. military personnel, or even politically disengaged Iraqi soldiers.
7. Even if it is conclusively determined that Osama bin Laden is primarily responsible for the murderous attacks which our nation suffered, we must remember that, to some degree at least, he is merely the glove on the hand of regimes which regard us as their enemy. Action must be taken against every one of those regimes which have facilitated assaults on America.
8. In addition to being unconstitutional, foreign aid is ineffective and counterproductive. How chilling it was to read of Egyptians, for example, dancing in the streets, rejoicing in America's calamity, at a time when U.S. taxpayers annually provide their government with some $2 billion of foreign aid.
9. President Bush, in his brief Oval Office remarks on September 11, unfortunately failed to mobilize the nation behind the need for extraordinary additional expenditures on our own national security. In the same vein, we should stop misdirecting our scarce defense dollars on the placement of 72,000 U.S. troops in Western Europe and on the countless resources we have unwisely assigned to Kofi Annan and his New World Order armies of intervention.
10. Life will never be the same again in America. It is amazing that, thus far, we have been free of nuclear explosions on our territory, the poisoning of our water supply, or the spreading of disease in the context of chemical and biological warfare. If you prepared for a Y2K emergency, the preparations then taken may serve you well on future occasions.
11. It is essential that, as we deal with the fact that we are at war with an invisible foe, we not surrender the Constitutional boundaries, principles, and liberties with which we have been blessed.
12. We must repudiate the Bush Administration's notion that we need permission from the U.N. or consultations with NATO to defend the United States of America.