6. His duplicity was appalling: three times prior to 9/11 President Bush had rejected a standing offer from the Taliban to surrender bin Laden. Immediately after the attacks he would do so twice more.
a. Conjecture: had President Bush accepted custody of bin Laden early in 2001 the terrorist events might never have occurred.
b. Certainty: had President Bush accepted custody after 9/11, bin Laden could have been brought to justice immediately. A "war on terror" could not have
been seriously proposed.
Four Determined Men and a Retrograde Ideology
For ten years four powerful and influential men, episodically holding office at the highest levels of government, were obsessed with the military invasion of Iraq and the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. In 1992 they were at home in the Defense Department of the George H.W. Bush Administration. Richard Cheney was Secretary of Defense,
Paul Wolfowitz was Undersecretary for Policy, and top staffers were Lewis Libby and Zalmay Khalilzad.
Wolfowitz, Libby, and Khalilzad authored for Cheney's signature a 46-page document entitled Draft Defense Planning Guidance, to establish the global strategic posture of the United States. [i] It would be used by the Defense Department in planning force levels and budgetary needs.
The document represented a radical departure from the status quo of U.S. foreign policy. It was unequivocal in advocating:
> the assertion of lone superpower status
> the prevention of the emergence of any competitor on the world stage
> the forsaking of multilateralism if it didn't suit U.S. interests
> the intervening in disputes anywhere in the world
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