Yeah, I don't know if specifically any policies implemented by W prevented any more significant terrorist activity or just good old intelligence work by the CIA and vigilance by the FBI and local law enforcement agencies have prevented it. Call me a conspiracy nut, but I personally wouldn't put it out of the realm of possibilities that Bush got advanced intelligence about a possible attack on the World Trade Center and ignored it, knowing that a major crisis would improve his ratings and allow him to bolster his power and use more fear mongering tactics on US citizens to get what he wanted. FDR did much the same thing in WWII, knowing about the Japanese intentions with Pearl Harbor prior to it's occurrence, but he ignored it, needing a reason the American people would support to getting involved in WWII, and an attack on a US base would certainly cause enough outrage to justify involvement and aiding the British and preventing them from becoming the last domino in Europe to fall to the Nazi's. FDR's pretend ignorance had a much nobler intention, getting involved in stopping a power hungry dictator that was gobbling up every country in Europe and committing genocide, killing millions of people labeled as useless by the Nazi party. If Bush did receive intelligence about the 9/11 attacks and ignored it in order to give himself the ability to gain more power and pursue personal interests (Iraq and Saddam Hussein, it was an unbelievably weak reason to go in even with 9/11, can you imagine how in hell he'd possibly try and justify doing it without 9/11?). Obama is more intersted in world peace with other nations and ethnicities, as I think the American people are, than Bush was. His policies and opinions only lended to the hatred of our western civilization by fundamentalist Islamic extremists, and with Obama diplomatically representing us in the world stage, it will be harder for Islamic extremists to justify the hatred to people and convince countries to aid their terror groups in attacking us and other European countries who turn to active diplomacy rather than intolerance as their policy. The opinion of the majority of American's is not to systematically topple each middle eastern country like Iraq and install our own approved governments and profit from their oil reserves with our puppets in charge. This was, of course, the opinion of Bush, so it's no wonder why they hated us. With this shift to a president that represents the feelings of this country's citizen's, instead of a Cowboy that literally admitted he could care less what the people thought of what he did (acknowledging that as president, his job was not to represent us and do what we want him to, but to act as an elected dictator for 8 years and do whatever he felt like, public opinion not considered and not influencing any of his policies and actions. We all know this is crap, and that elected officials are supposed to do what WE the PEOPLE want them to do.). While there will always be sources of intolerance and hatred inside and outside the country that will not hesitate to resort to violence and killing innocent people to achieve their goals, I think that the number of people in this position will decline with a gentler, more diplomatic, less evil man in power as the mouthpiece of our nation to the world. Let's hope it's true!Update: I'd have to agree with you, stopping someone eagerly incorporating their own death into an attack is extremely difficult to stop - and I'm not convinced he knew about it, just considering it a possibility. But /nod to the hard to stop a suicide attack, as is proved by the almost daily suicide bombers in the middle east. =/
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