Wha’ Happen??? Part 1— 9/11
Terrible policy decisions were made during the Bush Administration. Rather than speculate on what’s going to happen during the Obama Administration in this last week of transition, motivated by Bush’s final presser I’m gonna look back in a multi-part series I’m calling, Wha’ Happen???
I don’t blame President Bush for what happened on September 11th, 2001. Sure he had a report cross his desk that said the events of 9/11 were a possibility thirty six days prior, but he had lots of things come across his desk. And we all know that the President isn’t much of a reader. Stuff happens; planes flying into buildings qualify as stuff. What I do blame the President for is how he handled the aftermath. And not in the obvious, we shouldn’t have invaded Iraq way. Obviously we should not have invaded Iraq. The issue with what happened after 9/11 comes down to the approach of a president who should never have been president in a moment of crisis.
The most telling moment of Bush’s final presser was when he described his motivation for pushing the Patriot Act through Congress:
And in terms of the decisions that I had made to protect the homeland, I wouldn’t worry about popularity. What I would worry about is the Constitution of the United States, and putting plans in place that makes it easier to find out what the enemy is thinking, because all these debates will matter not if there’s another attack on the homeland. The question won’t be, you know, were you critical of this plan or not; the question is going to be, why didn’t you do something?
Do you remember what it was like right after September the 11th around here? In press conferences and opinion pieces and in stories — that sometimes were news stories and sometimes opinion pieces — people were saying, how come they didn’t see it, how come they didn’t connect the dots? Do you remember what the environment was like in Washington? I do. When people were hauled up in front of Congress and members of Congress were asking questions about, how come you didn’t know this, that, or the other? And then we start putting policy in place — legal policy in place to connect the dots, and all of a sudden people were saying, how come you’re connecting the dots?
There is a strange dichotomy here. First he says he cares about the Constitution of the United States. Then he goes off on connecting the dots. Reading into this, it appears that people started getting questioned in front of Congress, and President Bush went into panic mode. Do anything to prevent a second attack. There was no solid intellectual methodology in place for making tough decisions.
So… wha’ happen??? The Constitution became an afterthought. And those around the President with a neoconservative world view pushed their solution, invade Iraq, hard. Bush is not an evil man, but a weak man who did evil things because he didn’t really know any better. He could have gotten lucky, but without any legitimate plan in place to assess strategy, any quality outcome in the aftermath of 9/11 would have been due exclusively to luck. I might not have done better in his position (though I would have surrounded myself with a different cabinet) but I also never ran for President.
When a man who is not a constitutional scholar becomes President, he runs the risk of paying lip service to the most important American document. When a man who is too weak willed to impart his own world view on American policies becomes President, he runs the risk of being manipulated into making bad decisions. Bush was both of these things, so the decisions he made were catastrophic. Obama is a constitutional scholar and a man with a strong sense of self. There is reason to hope that if a similar attack were to occur under his watch, the reaction might be more measured, more reasoned, and better for America’s long-term interests.
Oops, I said I wasn’t going to speculate.
