TW: I find myself so frustrated with this POTUS that I am reduced to mere spluttering.
Why? Because he represents to me the worst of America. He took our country backward, for the first time in my life I could feel our nation truly regressing: economically, culturally and certainly internationally. Bush's final press conference focused primarily on 9/11 and appropriately so as Bush used 9/11 as an excuse to foul our political system.
From Vanity Fair:
"Jack Goldsmith, legal adviser at the Department of Defense and later head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel: After 9/11 the administration faced two sharply conflicting imperatives. The first was fear of another attack. This permeated the administration. Everyone felt it. And it led to the doctrine of pre-emption, which has many guises, but basically means that you can’t wait for the usual amounts of information before acting on a threat because it may be too late. They were really scared. They were afraid of what they didn’t know. They were very afraid they didn’t have the tools to meet the threat. And they had this extraordinary sense of responsibility—that they would be responsible for the next attack. They really thought of it as having blood on their hands, and that they’d be forgiven once but not twice. On the other hand, there was a countervailing imperative, and that was the law, because there had grown up since the 70s—for a lot of good reasons—some extraordinary restrictions on presidential power and presidential war power, many of them embodied in criminal laws, many of them vague or uncertain, never having been applied before, certainly none of them ever applied in this new context. And there was enormous legal uncertainty about how far we could go."
TW: When 9/11 happened someone remarked that I must be happy we have such a strong leader in the White House amidst the turmoil. My response was that 9/11 was exactly why the election of Bush was so detrimental. Having John Ashcroft as Attorney General, Dick Cheney as VP and Bush as POTUS amidst a disorienting crisis was a recipe for disaster, and those cooks certainly wrecked the kitchen.
From Economist 9/15/2001 issue, the first post 9/11:
"...This week has changed America, and with it the world, once again.
In the immediate aftermath, the United States showed signs of what makes it great. In so many ways, and for understandable reasons, it had been unprepared to face such evil...At home, Americans felt safe, in a way they never will again: it made this week’s enormity all the more terrible. Despite everything, the country rallied. Across the United States, people have queued to give blood, to offer help. Airports and stock markets have been closed, but there is an urgent desire to return to normality, to carry on and not be cowed. In the country at large there is nothing of hysteria or panic. The mood is grief, purpose, unity, and anger under control. That is admirable...
The testing, however, has barely begun...in circumstances hardly conducive to rational analysis, an adequate response to the atrocities must be framed. That is the greatest challenge of all. It must not be a task that the United States undertakes alone...a new balance between liberty and security may have to be struck more broadly...Just where this balance will be struck, or should be struck in a liberal democracy, remains unclear...
...Lastly comes the question which is uppermost in most minds, the most treacherous question of all—that of retaliation. The problem is not merely that the American authorities still seem unsure who is to blame...
America and the West—again, in their own interests—must recognise and reflect upon the hostility they face in parts of the world. Scenes of Palestinians and other Muslims celebrating this week’s horrors may seem an unendurable provocation, but America must take care in the coming days that it does not create more would-be martyrs than, through military action, it can destroy. The strategy—easier said than done, to put it mildly—must be to make friends with opponents who are capable of reason, while moving firmly against those who are both incapable of it and willing to resort to, or assist in, acts such as those seen this week. The response of America and its allies should not be timid, but it should be measured..."
TW: We as a nation over-reacted to 9/11 turning a huge tragedy into an existential event driving us toward unfortunate, irrational and ultimately ineffective decisions. The Economist detected after only a few months of the Bush presidency the "inclusiveness" they had hoped for in Bush was in fact going to be tossed aside not only domestically but internationally in the aftermath of 9/11, they were spot on. Economist surfaced the risks of merely flailing in anger or incompetence at supposed enemies in the Middle East.
Bush/Cheney/Rove et al. used 9/11 as a carte blanche to trample liberties and embark upon the neo-con agenda of spreading "American democracy" with a religious zeal doomed to failure. Regardless of their motives, this approach has led the U.S. down a path of ineffectiveness the costs of which will resonate for decades.
There was always a fundamental dissonance in the Bush reaction to 9/11, on one hand it was existential requiring diminished liberties and pre-emptive war, while on the other no direct economic or national sacrifice. We spent hundreds of billions (ultimately likely $2+ trillion) invading Iraq and on massive homeland security initiatives, whilst cutting taxes (primarily for the wealthy) and urging Americans to go on with their lives as if little had changed.
There is a cost to wrongly invading countries, wrongly torturing folks while borrowing the funds to do so. There is a moral cost and their is an economic cost.
One can imagine alternative scenarios whereby the U.S. either exercised restraint or acted multi-laterally or actually faced up to the challenges and demanded sacrifice either financially or through a draft (a subject for a different post but I have no doubt that Iraq would have never happened with a draftee force which should make one pause).
One can also imagine scenarios whereby instead of waving the bloody shirt of 9/11 at every turn, our leaders had taken the path moving on. Terror takes two to be effective- the perpetrator and the victim. The Bush approach fed America's victimization mentality while feeding the terrorists yearning for psychological impact. To the extent 9/11 would have been absorbed without altering massive aspects of our lives, the impact of the crime would have been minimized and more importantly the future probability of another attack reduced.
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