Personally, I think that it is silly to be treating the 9/11 Commission
like one giant partisan blame game. Rather than tripping over themselves
to try and blame the Bush Administration for 9/11 in an election year and
to utterly absolve the Clinton Administration, the focus should be on
making improvements for the future.
Bush, who had to be forced to name this Commission in the first place, has had 2 1/2 years to make improvements. How many can he point to? He didn't want the Homeland Security department either. He has underfunded the TSA and many other programs. No one at the FBI or CIA has been forced to pay any professional price for their errors. Bush has never called upon the American people to make any sacrifices at all other than waiting a bit at airports - no calls to drive more energy efficient automobiles, to use less imported gas, to seek out true alternatives (other than drilling up the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge to provide 6 months' worth of petroleum). Our seaports are no more secure now than they were on Sept. 10, 2001. The wealthy have not been asked to give up a penny of their tax cuts to make this a more just society or pay for any improvements. We have done a poor job of consolidating change in Afghanistan and mobilizing the rest of the world to fight terrorism (and have alienated most of the rest of the world by our arrogant disdain for things they feel strongly about, such as climate change). We've ignored a country that demonstrably has WMD to launch an unnecessary war against a country that doesn't.
Given these facts and Bush's unwillingness before 9-11 to take Al Qaeda seriously, how can we be asked to trust Bush to make any improvements?
Nobody is absolving the Clinton Administration, which did not do as much as it should have to fight Al Qaeda. But it is clear that before 9-11, the Bush Administration did NOTHING to fight Al Qaeda. And, after a decent initial response following 9-11, the Bush Administration got bored and decided to go after Iraq as it had always wanted to, and also pissed away much of the international sympathy for the US as a result of 9-11. If I had compiled that record, I'd want to focus on anything else myself. It's always the people who screw up who say, But enough about the past, let's concentrate on the future. And maybe, as the investment commercials say, past performance is no guide to the future, but what else do we have to go on?
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Tom Beck
my LiveJournal: http://www.livejournal.com/users/tomfodw/
"I always knew I'd see the first man on the Moon. I never thought I'd see the last." - Dr. Jerry Pournelle
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