The Tail of the Chimera: A Reflection on the 9/11 Attacks & George W. Bush
As we slouch toward to the sixth anniversary of the 9/11 terror attacks, the real story of that awful day and its aftermath is now well known.
While the attacks were the darkest day for the world’s remaining superpower since Pearl Harbor, astoundingly they were leveraged by President George W. Bush into the greatest foreign policy disaster in American history — the Iraq war.
This American flag-draped act of hubris and deceit is so colossal that its bloody consequences have brought the Republican hegemony in Washington to a crashing end and assured Bush’s place in history as a manipulated mediocrity who squandered America’s world standing in the service of a fool’s mission. No matter when or how the Iraq war ends, his actions will reverberate for many years to come.
In the eight months that Bush held office prior to the 9/11 attacks, the intelligence community that he pledged to reinvigorate slept the sleep of the complacent, rousing itself only when there were turf battles to be fought.
This despite the fact that:
* The CIA, NSA and FBI had detailed intelligence that Al Qaeda was plotting an attack on the homeland and so informed Condoleezza Rice, Bush’s national security advisor, and possibly Vice President Cheney, as well.
* Knew the terrorists’ modus operandi if not their exact targets.
* Knew the identities of some of the terrorists and their whereabouts in country.
But Rice, by her own subsequent admission, still was fighting a Cold War that had been over for a decade. Cheney, of course, isn’t talking.
Today Rice is secretary of state, while the nation’s spymaster on 9/11 and two of the architects of the Iraq war and occupation were awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor, for what the commander in chief proclaimed was “their pivotal roles in great events,” but was nothing less than a reflection of and payback for the sycophantic loyalty that he demands.
Could the 9/11 attacks have been stopped?
I have been reluctant to conclude that they could have, but the growing mountain of evidence showing what key U.S. intelligence operatives, Rice and others knew but did not feel compelled to act on has convinced me that there was a reasonable chance that the terrorists could have been intercepted at airports in Boston, Newark and Washington on that deceptively beautiful September morning, if not before.
Could the Iraq war have been stopped?
That’s an easy one. With a compliant Congress and somnambulant news media, Bush’s neoconservative coven was going to get a war that they had long lusted for even if it was in the wrong place at the wrong time and would divert precious resources from the nascent GWOT in general and Afghanistan in particular.
While we will never know how the war in Afghanistan might have turned out if it hadn’t been starved of resources, there is no question that the Bush administration’s pushback against Al Qaeda has not been anywhere near the triumph that it claims. The White House’s own intelligence mavens say that much of the leadership cadre of the terrorist group remains intact, including Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, and they have rebuilt this incubus to its pre-9/11 strength. Meanwhile, the neocons’ built-to-order war in Iraq has become a graduate school where jihadists can hone their skills before exporting them elsewhere.
That Al Qaeda has been able to reconstitute itself so successfully can be traced back to a single event:
In the most ignominious chapter in a presidential tenure littered with bad judgments, the fires at Ground Zero were still burning when the decision was made not to throw the full weight of America’s might at Al Qaeda and its leadership but to instead go after Saddam Hussein, a has-been of a brutal dictator who had long been in the neocon crosshairs but of course had only a tangential connection to the jihad against the U.S. and the West.
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10 Responses to “The Tail of the Chimera: A Reflection on the 9/11 Attacks & George W. Bush”
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Shaun – The Afghan war would have the same results, it’s new model came from the Cheney’s privatization of DoD and Rummy’s implementation of Shinnseki’s new “lean mean” Army. Using the warlords as proxies, instead of a Powell Doctrine, guaranteed the outcome. Afghanistan and Iraq weren’t Grenada or Panama, not even GW1 or Bosnia.
Rudi,
Perhaps, but the Powell doctrine doesn’t translate well into insurgencies and occupations. A basis of the Powell doctrine, with it’s roots in Vietnam, is that the US should not fight fight such wars to begin with. It also explains why the military was not, except for specialized units like SF, prepared to fight an insurgent war. The regular Army had dated doctrine, no training, the wrong equipment and mindset for this kind of conflict. Of course, the Army is trying to adjust, but as SECDEF snowflake once opined, “You go to war with the Army you have.”
Afghanistan is a land locked country. No military power can ever really get involved in a land locked country and especially one that has such limited infrastructure. When the military is flying all of its food and fuel in, there is a limit to what it can do.
If it was not for Iraq, the left in the U. S. would be screaming to get out of Afghanistan. However, to make themselves look reasonable, the left supports Afghanistan to get more credibility in their desire to get out of Iraq.
I find it disgraceful to use an image of a wounded soldier as a protest against the war, unless that soldier would wish to use his injuries to make a political statement.
I googled Sgt. Joseph Mosner and found this article:
http://www.riley.army.mil/newspaper/Archive/031204%20Post.pdf
(scroll to page 4)
I think it’s only fair to let his own words speak for him, rather than using his image to say what others want it to say.
C Stanley:
Please climb down off your high horse. Altitude sickness is bad fer ya.
I used the Mosner photograph with due deliberation and after reading about him at length.
I neither state, suggest or otherwise imply that Mosner is anything but a hero –which he of course is. I do not for a moment believe that your attack is anything but a thinly veiled pushback on the contents of my post, and that you are using the photograph as an excuse.
It is regretable that a consequence of the president’s Forever War is what happened to Mosner and thousands of other men and women who have returned home alive but horribly maimed and disfigured.
Note further that I put up a link to a story and slideshow on Nina Berman’s images at the end of the post.
My intentions — as well as Berman’s — are straightforward.
Note further a fairly recent post on what I believe constitutes a hero.
Hmmm, perhaps it might have something to do with who was in charge of the relevant agencies? Oh yeah, they were Clinton’s boys! Is it really surprising the overall analysis of the terrorism picture didn’t change much?
Are you really trying to lay the blame for 9/11 at the feet of GWB? I would think the record clearly shows that in addition to our current Presidents, blame can be distributed going back to the Carter administration.
Additionally one could make an argument that of all the Clinton appointees that should have been replaced when GWB took office, the ones he actually kept should have been at the top of the list for removal. More evidence of incompetence I suppose. So not only did we get tools like Rumsfeld, we also get Clark and Tenet.
Entropy:
Shaun,
I am now eating some well deserved crow pie for not adequately reading your entire post. My apologies.
Shaun,
I’m not sure what you think my intentions are, but the use of soldier’s images in the context of an anti-war rant absolutely makes me ill. The very least we owe these guys is to not use them as political pawns, and no matter how much you attempt to turn this back on me by telling me to get off my high horse, you own your actions. You say that you thought this through; well, if so, then I think you should have thought a bit more. Without his express permission to use his image in this context, it’s just plain indecent to do so.