Rudy calls out the 'head in the sand' co-Presidents

 
Rudy Giuliani, noting a little-remembered policy mistake of the "co-presidents":

"What Bill Clinton did to you in the 1990's most Americans don't even know. They don't even know the worst thing that he did," said Giuliani.

"The worst thing that he did was not any of the stuff that got all the attention and sometimes exaggeration and who knows what. The worst thing he did was to cut our military and intelligence budgets. That is the worst thing he did."

Noting that Clinton "slashed" both the agencies' budgets, Giuliani charged that the former president had his "head in the sand."

"And now as I said, I don't pretend that he (Clinton) could predict September the 11th. People are not prophets, even presidents," said Giuliani. "But he did have his head in the sand. He was cutting those military budgets and intelligence budgets while Islamic terrorists were killing Americans."

"Over 500 before September 11th. The first attack on America was not September 11th, it was 1993. And then Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia, and then Kenya, and then Tanzania, and then the attack on the USS Cole, to which we didn't even respond. So let's not go back to that."

Ending his Clinton focus, Giuliani noted, "Hillary Clinton really wants to take you in reverse to the 1990's. She thought things were wonderful in the 1990's and there was only one thing missing in the 1990's and it was the socialized medicine she couldn't do for us. So now she wants to take us back to the 1990's and give us the socialized medicine too. Let's not let her do that."

In 1996, Caspar Weinberger and Peter Schweizer warned:

Cuts in military forces have left the United States dangerously unprepared for war.

Six years ago half a million Americans were in the Persian Gulf theater, preparing to unleash Desert Storm. When the sword was finally drawn, Allied aircraft began pounding Iraqi forces, as one air commander noted, "like a tethered goat." And when land forces attacked, large portions of the Iraqi army were wiped out with only minimal Allied casualties in a ground war that lasted 100 hours. It was a devastating display of American power that demonstrated what a difference a decade-long commitment to excellence could make in a country's military prowess. But, as if a town cut the budget of a fire department that doused fires too quickly, America has embarked on a massive disarmament that would make a repeat of that stunning victory nearly impossible.

The Gulf War was fought with 2 Marine divisions, 7 active Army divisions, and combat brigades of 2 additional divisions. Today that commitment alone would exhaust all the army's 10 active divisions, including those now deployed in Europe and Korea... Air power, which proved so critical to victory, is a fraction of what it was. During Desert Storm, the Air Force could draw from 34 fighter wings; that number is being reduced to 21...

Intelligence has often been able to warn us of emerging threats. But the continued change in our intelligence policies will make timely warnings less likely. The intelligence budget has also been cut, and personnel have been shifted to diverse (some might say bizarre) tasks that have little to do with national security as it is traditionally understood. In 1993 the CIA had only 9 analysts left watching the Russian military -- down from 125 only a few years earlier. Other resources designed to detect potential threats to America have been cut...

...So what exactly is the CIA spending its time monitoring? The bulk of its resources have been shifted to "global issues" including pollution, health, natural resources, and endangered species. Senior Clinton Administration official J. Brian Atwood recently noted with pride that the Defense Intelligence Agency was spending considerable resources examining the ecological deterioration of Lake Victoria in East Africa...

It is the height of hypocrisy for Hillary Clinton and the Democratic leadership to bray that our military is strained and stretched.

They, in fact, were the instigators and architects of a horrifically flawed strategy of weakness and appeasement.

Hat tips: PrairiePundit and Larwyn. Bald Clintons postcard image from RarePostcard.com.