Cheney slams Clinton as 'soft' on terrorists

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Vice President Dick Cheney yesterday said terrorists struck American targets throughout Bill Clinton's presidency "with little cost or consequence," but that the Bush administration's invasion of Iraq has made the United States and the world safer.

The vice president lashed Mr. Clinton for his administration's weak responses to terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in 1993, an Air Force compound in Saudi Arabia, U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, and the USS Cole in the waters off Yemen.

Those attacks killed 74 Americans and left hundreds more wounded. In one retaliation, Mr. Clinton bombed sites in Sudan and Afghanistan that later turned out to have little or no value.

"Repeatedly, [terrorists] had struck America with little cost or consequence," the vice president told 600 supporters at the National D-Day Museum in New Orleans. "In none of these cases did the United States respond very forcefully."

But all that has changed since President Bush took office, he said.

"Under President Bush's leadership, we answered that challenge with decisive and relentless action. We did not fire million-dollar cruise missiles into empty tents, or drop bombs from 30,000 feet on abandoned obstacle courses. Instead, America launched a broad and sustained war on terrorist networks around the globe."

Responding to Mr. Cheney's speech, Democratic presidential candidate Sen. John Kerry's campaign spokesman, Phil Singer, said, "Clearly, the American people are making up their minds about the president's handling of the war on terrorism and the Bush administration is running scared.

"In the nine months before September 11, Bush did not hold a single Cabinet meeting on terrorism."

The vice president, in one of his strongest attacks yet on Democrats, said the nearly decade-long string of weak responses to attacks against Americans emboldened terrorist organizations around the world.

"Our enemies took lessons from this experience. They concluded that our country was soft. They grew to believe that if they hit us hard enough, if they inflicted sufficient casualties, the United States could be forced to retreat and withdraw," he said, referring to Mr. Clinton's decision to pull U.S. troops out of Somalia in 1993 just weeks after rebels shot down several Black Hawk helicopters.