The Secretary General of the United Nations recently reminded me why America should pull out of the United Nations.

He was asked by a reporter if he thought America was safer today than it was three years ago.

With a smirk on his face, he said, &uot;no.&uot;

What is he running – the United Nations, the United Kingdom or Fantasy Land?

Whether you agree with the decision to go to war or not, whether you like George W. Bush or not is totally irrelevant.

The United States of America is not immune from terrorism, but it has been inoculated. It is, by far, safer today than it was three years ago.

How can anyone say that we are not safer today than we were three years ago?

Two-thirds of the al-Qaida Network have been captured.

The world’s modern-day Hitler, Saddam Hussein, has been captured and imprisoned (and by the U.S. military I might add).

And his sons – the dynamic duo of Uday and Kusay – will never kill anyone again.

The pundits say the president and our military did not find one weapon of mass destruction.

I say in actuality, they found three:

Saddam, Uday and Kusay. They were weapons of mass destruction – killing hundreds of people and terrorizing nations.

In addition, most of the efforts in accomplishing the positive things mentioned above have been attributed to the efforts and sacrifices of only one nation – not the United Nations – the United States.

Again, not the United Nations. Most of those nations have been no where to be found, except at the dinner table so to speak.

They let someone else (America) provide for their safety and security, occupy the combat zones, liberate an entire country – do all the work of planting, providing, harvesting and preparing the &uot;foods of freedom.&uot;

Then they show up just in time to sit down at the dinner table we prepared and eat from it.

Then they get up, their bellies full and leave the dishes from the &uot;foods of freedom&uot; unwashed, the floor unswept and actually have the nerve to ask for the leftovers.

Better yet, they don’t even say thank you.

Not very friendly neighbors, are they?

People can say anything they want to say about 9-11.

But reality is that no matter who had been president at the time, it would have still happened. There has always, since the beginning of time, been a war between good and evil and sadly, but surely, there always will be.

9-11 was inevitable and took years to plan. And why blame President Bush for it?

He is only the second president in the course of history to walk into office with both a war and a recession. George W. Bush only had eight months to deal with the threat of terrorism; Bill Clinton had eight years.

And why wasn’t more done to prevent 9-11? It wasn’t like the terrorists sent us a game day plan with their plays carefully laid out for all to see.

Intelligence agents knowing that something was going to happen – somewhere, sometime, some place in America, which has fifty states and hundreds of landmarks and heavily populated areas – now, there’s something to go on, isn’t it?

The odds of figuring that one out are not as good as the proverbial analogy of finding a needle in a haystack – without the haystack.

Besides, how can you possibly plan for something that has never happened before in the history of the world?

You cannot prepare for what you don’t know is going to happen – not something that tremendous and disastrous anyway.

If our president had known what was going to happen, he would have stopped it and gone down in the history books as the greatest leader to ever live, and there would be no need to have an election in November because no one would dare run against him.

It is really quite simple – if anyone in this country had known what was going to happen on 9-11, it simply would not have happened.

Either way you choose to look at it – no one can deny that many things have been done since then to ensure that America is definitely safer today than it was three years ago.

We’re not immune, but thanks to God, President Bush and our own military, we’ve been inoculated.

Beth Chapman serves as state auditor in Alabama. She resides with her husband, James, and two children, Taylor and Thatcher, in North Shelby County