We are paying a dear price for eliminating a bureaucracy.

"In the 1990s, the Clinton Administration and Congress abolished the United States Information Agency, the key agency through which the nation fought its war of ideas with the Soviet Union. In the heady thinking of that decade, the spread of free markets and rising living standards across the globe were supposed to reduce the threats to our well-being from abroad. But while that 'Washington Census' held sway in the West, a rabidly anti-modern, anti-American ideology spread along the rocky terrain of Afghanistan and in mosques and madrassas across the Muslim world, planting the seeds of death and destruction. Thus came the bombings of the U.S. marine barracks in Beirut in 1983, of the World Trade Center in 1993, of Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia in 1996, of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998 and of the USS Cole in 2000, all of which culminated in the flames of 9/11." Lawrence J. Haas, North Star Writers Group, 30 December 2008. All that because USIA was eliminated? And USIA did not disappear until 1999. The writer airbrushes out the fact that the late Senator Jesse Helms (R-NC) was the prime mover in the folding of USIA into the State Department. Posted: 30 Dec 2008 Permalink Print