Yesterday, in an address to Marines at Camp Lejeune, Vice President Cheney stated that the lesson of the last two decades is not that the U.S. responded too aggressively to terrorist attacks but that it didn’t “hit back hard enough.”
Although we’ve been in the struggle against terrorism for four years now, the terrorists were actually at war with this country even before 2001. But for a long time, they were the ones on offense. And they grew bolder in their belief that if they killed Americans, they could change American policy. In Beirut in 1983, terrorists killed 241 Americans — and you’re well aware of that attack because most of those men were Marines from Camp Lejeune, members of the First Battalion, Eighth Marine Regiment. Following that attack, the United States forces were withdrawn from Beirut. Time and time again, for the remainder of the 20th century, the terrorists hit America and America did not hit back hard enough. In 1993 we had the killing of American soldiers in Mogadishu, and the bombing of the World Trade Center in New York. We had the murders at the Saudi National Guard Training Center in Riyadh in 1995, the killings at Khobar Towers in 1996, the destruction of two American embassies in East Africa in 1998, and the attack on the USS Cole in 2000. The terrorists came to believe that they could strike America without paying any price. And so they continued to wage those attacks, making the world less safe and eventually striking the United States on 9/11. Now they are making a stand in Iraq, testing our resolve, and trying to shake our commitment to democracy in that country. If the terrorists were to succeed, they would return Iraq to the rule of tyrants, make it a source of instability in the Middle East, and use it as a staging area for ever greater attacks against America and other civilized nations. As President Bush has said, the only way the terrorists can win is if we lose our nerve and abandon our mission. But this nation has made a decision: We will stand by our friends. We will help Iraqis build a nation that is free and secure, able to defend itself. We will confront our enemies on this and every other front in the war on terror. With good allies at our side, we will prevail, we will destroy the enemy.
