Bush was on vacation at his ranch in Texas that month. And nothing happened.
In 2002, Time magazine reported how the Bush administration ignored a plan developed by the Clinton administration to attack al-Qaida in Afghanistan. In the fall of 2000, the Clinton administration prepared a counter-terrorism plan that included freezing financial assets, aiding countries such as Yemen, Uzbekistan and the Philippines in breaking up terrorist cells, and a combined U.S. air and special operations military campaign in Afghanistan with help from the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance.
While the Bush administration eventually did all of these things after 9/11, this plan was already put together - almost a year earlier by the Clinton administration, after the attack on the USS Cole. President Clinton held off on executing the plan in the last days of his presidency because of the impending transition. Unlike President George H.W. Bush, who stuck the incoming Clinton team with the Somalia mess in the closing days of his term, President Clinton apparently didn't want to do something similar as he left office.
The plan languished in the national security bureaucracy. The proposals weren't re-examined by senior administration officials until April 2001, and weren't reconsidered by the top national security department heads until a week before 9/11. There's no guarantee that executing the Clinton plan would have foiled 9/11. But it's now clear that doing something probably would've been better than doing nothing.
Then there is the second part of the road to 9/11 - how the Bush administration used the attack as justification for a war to remake the Middle East.
In 2001, few people had heard of a Washington-based neo-conservative think tank called The Project for a New American Century (PNAC). Few knew then about its plans for a global American empire or knew that its alumni - Cheney, Rumsfeld, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, Cheney's then-chief of staff Lewis Libby and former Defense Policy Board chairman Richard Perle, among them - had considerable power in the White House.
In the fall of 2000, PNAC issued a report entitled "Rebuilding America's Defense: Strategies, Forces and Resources For A New Century." The PNAC report was mostly a rehash of an earlier strategic proposal drawn up for the Pentagon by Libby and Wolfowitz in the early 1990s. Libby and Wolfowitz envisioned a world where the guiding principle of U.S. foreign policy would be establishing permanent U.S. military and economic dominance over the Persian Gulf region and any other part of the world where U.S. interests were.
The PNAC vision of a Pax Americana in the Middle East - starting with the ouster of Saddam Hussein and the establishment of an American protectorate in Iraq - might have remained merely a vision. But in the worst case scenario of what happens when ideologues get an opportunity to put their plans into action, 9/11 gave the neo-conservatives the chance they had been waiting for.
Within hours of the collapse of the World Trade Center, the talk within the inner circle of the Pentagon and the White House was of invading Iraq. Even after the responsibility for 9/11 was squarely placed on bin Laden and al-Qaeda, the focus in the White House remained on Iraq.
When President Bush gave his 2002 State of the Union speech, Iraq was front and center in the "Axis of Evil," and the propaganda campaign to convince people of the need to invade Iraq began in earnest.
There was no way the PNAC crew could have sold us a war based on its vision of "regime change" in Iraq as the first step toward a peaceful, totally transformed Middle East. And so the phrase "weapons of mass destruction" would became ubiquitous in the news media as President Bush and his underlings lied repeatedly and outrageously about Iraq's military capabilities and the threat they posed to the U.S.
While many feared chaos in Iraq, the PNAC crew - which had founded The Committee for the Liberation of Iraq and pushed Iraqi exile Ahmed Chalabi as the eventual replacement for Saddam - maintained that the Iraqis would greet U.S. and British forces with flowers and ecstatic celebration. Iraq would become a beacon of stability and democracy in the Middle East and Iraqis would be forever grateful to the U.S. for the removal of Saddam Hussein.
This was the plan that was set in motion by 9/11. Five years later, we clearly see what happened as a result.
It has been clear for the last five years that the Bush administration did little or nothing about the issue of terrorism. It failed to prevent a catastrophic attack, and then turned around and used that attack to justify an extreme foreign policy agenda that has left us in a quagmire in Iraq and Afghanistan and has weakened our position in the world.
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