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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