Another Reason to wish Bill Clinton Were Still President

I'm reading Against All Enemies by Richard Clark (next on the nightstand is Frank Rich's new book).

Let me just quote Mr. Clinton giving an address on terrorism at George Washington University April 1996:

This will be a long, hard struggle. There will be setbacks along the way. But just as no enemy could drive us from the fight to meet our challenges and protect our values in World War II and the Cold War, we will not be driven from the tought fight against terrorism today. Terrorism is the the enemy of our generation, and we must prevail...But I want to make it clear to the American people that while we can defeat terrorists, it will be a long time before we defeat terrorism. American will remain a target because we are uniquely present in the world, because we act to advance peace and democracy, because we have taken a tougher stand against terrorism, and because we are the most open society on earth. But to change any of that, to pull our troops back from the world's trouble spots, to turn our backs on those taking risks for peace, to weaken our opposition against terrorism, to curtail the freedom that is our birthright would be to give terrorism the victory it must not and will not have.

That's right. To take away our freedoms is to give the terrorist a victory. To bug my phone calls, to give the president the "freedom" to detain me for any reason, to suspend habious corpus, to torture detainees is to give the terrorist a victory.

I was listening to NPR yesterday on my big drive from Florida to the Outer Banks of North Carolina. They had a story about the Blitz in London. Those people didn't give in to fear. They worked around it. They believed they would prevail and with that wonderful British still upper lip, they did.

What are we willing to give up to be free? If, as Mr. Bush says, the terrorist hate our freedoms, his policy of taking them away should make us less of a target.