Dangers of Appeasement!

Philip Klein has a good piece about 'appeasement' -

In recent weeks, both President Bush and Donald Rumsfeld have warned against making the same mistake Nazi appeasers made during the 1930s by not taking the words of our enemies seriously. While it is certainly tempting to compare the attitudes of Nazi appeasers to those held by today's Left, there is, unfortunately, a much more recent, and more relevant, example of the danger of underestimating evil.
[...]
In a well-known fatwa issued on Feb. 23, 1998, Osama bin Laden declared that: "The ruling to kill the Americans and their allies -- civilians and military -- is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it..." A few months later, he told ABC's John Miller that: "We do not have to differentiate between military or civilian. As far as we are concerned, they are all targets..."
[...]
Two weeks later, when President Clinton ordered cruise missile strikes against a pharmaceutical plant in Sudan and al Qaeda camps in Afghanistan, he told the American people that this would not be the end of the struggle against terrorism. "We must be prepared to do all that we can for as long as we must," he said. He declared that, "there are no expendable American targets" and vowed that, "there will be no sanctuary for terrorists..."

But despite Clinton's tough talk, that was, in fact, the end of his struggle against terrorism as far as military action was concerned...

Technorati Tags: appeasement, terrorism