The Burden of Hindsight
The former chairman and vice chairman of the 9/11 Commission are concerned that we have become passive about terrorism again:
The U.S. is at great risk for more terrorist attacks because Congress and the White House have failed to enact several strong security measures, members of the former Sept. 11 commission said Sunday.
“It’s not a priority for the government right now,” said the former chairman, Thomas Kean, ahead of the group’s release of a report Monday assessing how well its recommendations have been followed.
“More than four years after 9/11 … people are not paying attention,” the former Republican governor of New Jersey said. “God help us if we have another attack.”
Added Lee Hamilton, the former Democratic vice chairman of the commission: “We believe that another attack will occur. It’s not a question of if. We are not as well-prepared as we should be.”
I don’t fly very often, a couple of times a year, usually, and I always fly Southwest, so I have no clue if this is true for all airlines, or even all Southwest planes, but I noticed, while on the way to the front-end lavatory, that the pilot’s cabin was secured by a keypad lock now (and presumably, the stewards and stewardesses do not know the combination).
Had that precaution existed prior to 9/11, the World Trade Centers would still be standing.
The point: it’s easy to rewrite history, as the Democrats who say President Bush ‘misled’ us into war are doing. It’s much harder to try to anticipate failure points and prevent tragedy from happening in the first place. President Bush is a man, like all of us; he has his flaws, to be sure, and he has not been ‘Lincolnesque’ (as if any other President has). Given what happened to the WTC towers, the history of Saddam, the failure of the U.N. sanctions and Oil-For-Food, the lack of cooperation with inspectors, and the worldwide intelligence belief that Saddam was in possession of WMD stockpiles, the President took the hard, principled stand with a nerve lacking in the two previous administrations and took out the threat.
It really is as simple as that…all else is – well, hindsight…
The statement “Given what happened to the WTC towers, the history of Saddam, the failure of the U.N. sanctions and Oil-For-Food, the lack of cooperation with inspectors, and the worldwide intelligence belief that Saddam was in possession of WMD stockpiles, the President took the hard, principled stand with a nerve lacking in the two previous administrations and took out the threat” is logical only if you equate Iraq with “the threat” (i.e., Al Qaeda).
If, however, you believe that there was a negligible connection between Saddam and Al Qaeda, then the statement falls apart. If you also accept the fact that one of the results of the Iraqi war is that Al Qaeda now has a stronghold in Iraq — where before they were non-existent there — then you would have to accept the complete reverse of the statement.
Well, I don’t agree with that…the threat is not Al Qaeda, but militant Islam. Now, it is certainly true that Saddam was not an jihadist…but we know for a fact that he harbored terrorists, and looked kindly on those who would harm the United States and Israel…and it can’t be stressed enough that he was in a de facto state of war with Israel (the money to the bombers’ families) and that hatred of Israel is the true root of radical Islamic terrorism…
Well, that’s like saying that you want to wage war against the Mafia, but instead of going after the mobsters you go after their lawyers instead. Saddam might be sympathetic to Al Qaeda’s cause — or maybe not — but at most he was tangential to it.
However, there is an irony at work here. The (bi-partisan) 9/11 commission reports that we are unprepared to fight terrorism and it enumerates the ways in which the government has failed to protect us. You can fight terrorism offensively — as you praise Bush for doing — and you can fight it defensively. We disagree about whether Bush is pursuing an offensive strategy which will actually work. However, there does not seem to be much of a dispute regarding our inability to protect homeland security defensively. If, in fact, Bush “took out the threat,” then we would be protected on both flanks.
Okay, took out ‘a’ threat, not ‘the’ threat…