MSNBC has a good interview with Andy Card, Bush's chief of staff on 9/11. He's the guy whispering into Bush's ear in that iconic photograph where Bush is reading to the schoolkids and first hears that planes have hit the WTC and that "America is under attack".
Makes me think.
You know, I was as relieved as anybody to see Bush finally leave office. He turned out to be a disaster as a president. The economy, Iraq, Afghanistan, the DOJ firings, his grating ignorance. But back on 9/11/01, I didn't really have particularly strong feelings about him. He seemed like an affable, somewhat under-qualified, but basically decent guy; and the times didn't seem to call for a great statesman or a military genius. He wasn't the best president we could've elected, but nobody I knew thought we really needed that kind of guy. And like most people, even today, I wasn't really paying attention to politics.
So, 9/11 happened. And as it was happening, and in the days and weeks that followed, I thought Bush did a decent job of handling the situation. I mean, I don't know how I would've handled it as president, but I know it must've been confusing, stressful, frightening, terrifying. And I thought Bush did OK. Whatever mistakes he made that first week or so have to be chalked up to uncertainty and fear: what we know now doesn't matter. Put yourself in his place and imagine how you'd do. We were all waiting for more attacks.
And yeah, he should've been paying more attention to those memos. But in my opinion, that can't be attributed to malice, just ignorance and misplaced focus. 9/11 took everybody by surprise. I know it makes me a bad liberal to say it, but I don't blame Bush for 9/11 (nor do I blame Clinton). As I see things, 9/11 happened because the method of attack was so bold and audacious, so extra-ordinary, that nobody here was anticipating anything like it. It really was a 'failure of imagination'. Train people who want to die to fly commercial airliners, get them on four different planes simultaneously with support crews who probably don't know it's a one-way trip. Make sure they can fight off the passengers and evade any potential military interceptors as they crash the planes into buildings ? That's not exactly an obvious chain of events - if you didn't know it happened 8 years ago.
No, where Bush really failed was after 9/11, when he took the understandable fear and uncertainty that 9/11 caused and he steered it towards an unrelated adventure in Iraq. I was opposed to our invasion of Afghanistan because I didn't think we would do anything but turn an already miserable place into a miserable place full of fresh craters - "no nation building" was one of the memorable phrases from his campaign, after all. But, I could reluctantly see the need to root out some AQ camps and to punish their supporters. So, I wasn't that upset about it. I thought it'd be yet another one of America's stupid and ham-handed wars in a far-away dusty place - and when has the public had the power to stop any war from starting? But Iraq... Once that subject came up, that's when I started paying attention to politics. And that's when I knew Bush was up to no good. When the WMD talk started, and the proof never came, and the AQ links that were never verified much past speculation; and then the talk turned to patriotism and supporting the troops and creating democracies - then I knew it was all bullshit. They were cooking the books on Iraq. And they pushed and pushed, and made it into an election issue, not once but three times - and it worked for two of them. They turned the biggest tragedy in our modern history into a way to further their own political agenda. They took honest fear and pounded it into votes. And that's their biggest failure, in my opinion.
But back on 9/11, I thought Bush did OK.
