I can't stand President Bush. I think he is a disgrace to the office. There are so many legitimate things to criticize him for that we do not need to make up issues. The latest great controversy in the 9/11 saga is over what the administration saw as the primary threat to US security before the 9/11 attacks.

Richard Clarke, an advisor to President Bush (and Clinton) on terrorism issues, has made damning accusations that the administration ignored or downplayed terrorism in its first months. Furthermore, Clarke claims that discussions involving the president and his advisors immediately after 9/11 were already bringing up Iraq as a possible target for US military action. National Security Advisor Dr. Condoleezza Rice recently testified that the administration had many issues to confront before 9/11 ("I have to say there were other priorities"), and conceded the possibility that Iraq was mentioned as a possible link to 9/11.

If we ignore obvious subjective considerations (e.g., Clarke's ability to read body language), are these two people really saying anything all that different? No. They are spinning the same points different ways. What it comes down to is that there were many issues on the national security agenda prior to 9/11, al Qaida not being the top item on the list, and that a possible connection between 9/11 and Iraq was brought up early in discussions of responses. The media have been hammering the president on both points, especially the former.

The truth of the former point should be obvious. Anyone paying attention to national security issues in the spring and summer of 2001 will remember the main issue of the day: ballistic missles. The president was making a big show of reviving some version of Reagan's Star Wars defense. He was enraging leaders all over the world by withdrawing the US from the ABM treaty. Clearly, the president's perception of the top threat to US security was ballistic missles, not box cutters used to hijack air planes. The president would do himself a favor by simply admitting the obvious, rather than trying to spin his way out of it, which just keeps the controversy circulating in the media. "Yes, before 9/11 my priority in national security was missile defense. I now recognize that was a mistake."

The question we have to ask is, was it unreasonable before 9/11 that there would be higher priority items on the security list than al Qaida? I think the answer is no. To that point in history, how many times had Islamic terrorists hit inside the US? One, the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center. (I've seen this attack described as "devastating" in the media. It blew a big hole in a parking garage and killed 6 people. The trade center was back in business 3 days later. I do not wish to minimize the 1993 attack, but if that's devastating, what adjective do you use for 9/11?) The only large domestic terror attack had been carried out by Timothy McVeigh in Oklahoma City. While al Qaida had attacked US targets numerous times, it was always abroad: Africa, the Middle East, etc. While al Qaida had, perhaps, attempted several other attacks in the US, they had always been disrupted by security forces operating in the more restrictive pre-9/11 rules. If the president had tried to heighten airport security to the levels we see today, he would have been universally villified for unnecessarily inconveniencing travellers. Few people would have put Islamic terrorism at the top of their list of threats to the US on 9/10/2001. Americans felt safe from terrorism, before 9/11.

That is the heart of the drive to get officials like Dr. Rice to apologize for 9/11. We Americans revel in our national strength, both military and economic. It gives us a sense of security, no matter how illusory. The 9/11 attacks changed that. They showed that, with all our strength, we were still not safe and secure. But, if we can pin the blame on human errors by those in leadership, then we can restore the illusion of security. The prevailing thought is that we were attacked, not because we are vulnerable, but because someone did not do his or her job. Some people are desperate to restore that pre-9/11 illusion of being safe.

What about raising Iraq in security discussions shortly after 9/11? Is it not the job of the president to consider all the possibilities, no matter how remote? If there were any slight chance that Iraq was involved, Iraq would have had to be discussed. Anything less would have been dereliction of duty by the president. To the president's credit, both Clarke and Rice again agree on what happened: the issue was raised, no one was able to connect the two, the issue was tabled. This is exactly how it should have happened.

It should be obvious, then, that criticizing the president for not having al Qaida as his number 1 security issue on Sept. 10, 2001 is unfair to the president. It is also unfair to criticize him for mentioning Iraq in connection with the 9/11 attacks. Now, let's get back to real issues.

Last updated 04/09/2004 09:44 AM