NEW ORLEANS, 2 July 2004 — Vice President Dick Cheney said yesterday the Bush administration’s war on terrorism had brought “decisive and relentless action” against extremists and said the world and America were safer because of it.
In a speech meant to build positive election-year momentum from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Cheney implicitly blamed the former administration of Bill Clinton for failing to act against mounting terrorism in the 1990s. “Terrorists were on the offensive around the world, emboldened by many years of attacks,” when he and President George W. Bush took office in January 2001, Cheney said.
But “all that has changed (as) ... we answered that challenge (from Islamic extremists) with decisive and relentless action,” he told Republican supporters at the National D-Day Museum in New Orleans.
“America is safer and the world more secure because Iraq and Afghanistan are now partners in the struggle against terror, instead of sanctuaries for terrorist networks,” he said.
Public opinion polls show Bush lost support among voters with the growth of violence and instability in Iraq after last year’s US-led war.
Cheney spoke three days after the United States restored sovereignty to Iraq and on the day that Saddam appeared in an Iraqi court to face legal charges from his days in power.
The administration hopes such events will turn the page on the US intervention.
In the speech, Cheney repeated his position that Saddam’s regime had “long-established ties with Al-Qaeda,” the radical Islamist group behind the Sept 11, 2001 attacks on America. An independent US investigative panel has said it found no evidence of collaboration between Iraq and Al-Qaeda.
Cheney’s remarks were a new attempt to regain the initiative from critics and persuade American voters that the Bush-Cheney combination is the best team to keep the country secure.
Under Bush’s leadership, “our nation has made dramatic progress in the war on terror,” he said.
Although not mentioning Clinton or the current presumptive Democratic candidate John Kerry by name, Cheney declared that in the 1990s extremists had “struck America with little cost or consequence.”
Among examples cited were the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center, the 1996 attack on Khobar Towers military barracks in Saudi Arabia, the bombing of US embassies in 1998 and the attack on the USS Cole in the port of Yemen in 2000.
“Our enemies took lessons from this experience. They concluded our country was soft,” he said.
But he said there had been “essential victories in the war on terrorism” now that Iraq “has been returned to its rightful owners and ... now joins Afghanistan as a nation transformed from a state sponsor of terror to an ally in the war on terror.”
He also cited a new alliance with Pakistan, Saudi Arabia’s crackdown on extremists and Libya’s decision to abandon its nuclear weapons as other successes.
Cheney acknowledged that despite all this, “terrorists remain determined and dangerous.”
But he said that was why Washington was “taking the war directly to the enemy — engaging them abroad, so that we do not have to face them with armies of medical personnel, police and firefighters on the streets of our own cities.”
