It’s not about 9/11

2004.04.10 — Government | War | by Derek Jensen

The recent testimony before the 9/11 commission has refocused attention on the terrorist attacks of September 2001, but that has only diverted attention from the real issue of importance: George W Bush's irresponsible decision to turn the fight against terrorism into a personal revenge on Saddam Hussein.

It's clear that the incoming Bush administration didn't recognize the importance of a global terrorism plan and made it a low priority. They were focused on missile defense which they believed, rightly or wrongly, posed the greater threat. There is little that might have been done by a hypothetical Gore administration beyond raising the general level of alert among domestic law enforcement, and it's unlikely that would have actually stopped the attacks from occurring; we'd been hunting bin Laden for years. The New York Times noted the Clinton administration's efforts in 1999 (two and a half years before the 9/11 attacks):

The United States has aimed cruise missiles, covert operations and criminal investigations against bin Laden. It has arrested men believed to be his political associates. It has thwarted two of his plans to attack more American embassies, U.S. officials say.

But American stratagems to block his access to bank accounts, cut his connections to terrorist cells and sever his links to political supporters have not succeeded. Secure in his redoubts in Afghanistan, bin Laden could strike "at any time" against symbols of American power, CIA Director George Tenet told Congress last week.

But the Bush administration was also focused on getting rid of evil dictators and rogue nations that consider us enemies, especially Iraq, and in a big way. A scandalous way.

It's hard to fault a guy for looking the other way when the thing he should have been looking for was practically microscopic anyway (19 or 20 terrorists in a land of 290 million people, doing nothing more conspicuous than taking flying lessons). But we can fault Bush and his team for relentlessly pushing the US and the UN toward war with Iraq without a realistic grasp of the threat or the risks, and for eventually going to war with no support from the UN itself and scant support from allies.

Now, I don't doubt that they really thought that Iraq still had chemical and biological weapons, but since no such weapons existed anymore, there obviously can't have been any decent evidence of them. Mischaracterizing that fact over and over to the American people, the US Congress, and the UN is a serious breach of public trust. History will judge it harshly, as it has the Gulf of Tonkin resolution and the Maine resolution.

Since Saddam didn't have such terror weapons, he can't have been planning to use them or give them to terrorists... especially since there is also no decent evidence that Saddam had any links to terrorists. Authoritarian regimes are notorious record keepers, and no evidence has been found that shows that Saddam Hussein had anything more than remote links with Osama bin Laden or any other terrorists. Apparently, what link he had were only to pay the terrorists off to keep them from attacking Iraq (which is the same thing the Saudis did).

Worse, the Bush administration grossly underestimated the resistance we would meet in Iraq and the degree to which a large American presence would create insurgents and draw real terrorists into the country. They also grossly underestimated the likelihood of religious zealots rising up to form a fundamentalist state in Iraq. And they underestimated the cost of the war in lives, money, time, and global goodwill.

But worst of all, the war in Iraq distracted the Bush administration and the American military from destroying the Taliban and al-Qaeda terrorists in Afghanistan and setting up a lasting democracy in that country. The chief architect and financier of the 9/11 attacks was Osama bin Laden. He remains at large.

So the buck-passing and blame-laying about who didn't respond quickly enough to which memo and who wasn't forceful enough in which briefing is a useless distraction from the real issue. George W Bush chose to fight the wrong enemy for the wrong reasons and has carried out that fight badly.

We can't leave now; it would be a complete disaster. But if it turns out that Iraq falls into complete disorder for years or under a religious or secular dictator, it will be a disaster anyway. If that's the case, George W Bush's presidency will be judged by history to be a disaster as well.

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