The 9/10 Presidency
Anne Applebaum concludes her most recent column at Slate with this sentence:
Ten years after the events, I now find myself asking: Could it be that the planes that hit New York and Washington did less damage to the nation than the cascade of bad decisions that followed?
Could there be any doubt that this is true? No one is doubting that the 9/11 attacks were damaging, much less me. But the attacks represented a culmination of al Qaeda activity against the United States, not the beginning. al Qaeda's bellicosity toward the United States was every bit as potent on September 10th, 2001 as it was on September 12th. The only difference was that the broader American public finally began paying attention.
Any American president to the right of Noam Chomsky would have gone into Afghanistan and uprooted al Qaeda forces there. But aside from the Bush Administration's halfhearted effort in that country, what's striking is how much of his presidency conformed to established Republican Party goals. In economic policy, would things have been different under Bush had it not been for 9/11? Probably not. After all, not even fighting two wars at the same time was enough for the President to favor government revenue increases. The invasion of Iraq, too, had little to do with the attacks other than that the attacks made the invasion politically feasible. Tying Saddam Hussein's secular nationalist regime to al Qaeda represented nothing more than an attempt by the Bush Administration to provide ex post facto justification for the invasion once the weapons of mass destruction proved elusive. But because both Saddam and Osama bin Laden were Arabs hailing from the Middle East, the Bushies figured the American people wouldn't be able to spot the difference. They were right.
What 9/11 changed, albeit temporarily, was the political alignment of the United States. For a brief moment, domestic opposition to the Bush Administration ceased as the country rallied behind its leader. Bush, for his part, used this opportunity to push through a set of policy goals favored by the Republican Party since at least the Reagan years. The Democrats, cowed by accusations of disloyalty, did nothing. The last ten years of American history will be remembered for 9/11 and its aftermath. But what's important to remember is that the situation we find ourselves in today results not from the actions of foreign terrorists but by the deliberate policy choices of the American government. We are now just dealing with the consequences.
