Newsweek: "How 9/11 Changed Bush" - Democratic Underground

Human Torch

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Sun Aug-13-06 11:23 AM
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Newsweek: "How 9/11 Changed Bush"

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/14322936/

On Tuesday, September 11, 2001, while the president was on the road in Florida, I was working at home on a never-delivered speech announcing a long-forgotten initiative called Communities of Character. Warned by my deputy about the first attack, I headed by car toward the White House, neared the Pentagon and saw a plane in abnormally low descent—so low I could see the windows. Turned around by the police on the highway and sent home, I was finally able to call my evacuated staff at (of all places) the D.C. offices of Chrysler. Then came the first speech to the nation, with too much sentiment, not enough resolve and the president stiff and small. On Friday, a quiet motorcade in the rain to the National Cathedral; and the president filling his office completely; and the whole of official Washington singing, "Glory, glory, hallelujah. His truth is marching on." Starting in those days, I felt not merely part of an administration, but part of a story; a noble story, but with a happy ending by no means assured.

From those events, President Bush drew a fixed conclusion: as long as the Middle East remains a bitter and backward mess, America will not be secure. Dictators in that region survive by finding scapegoats for their failures—feeding conspiracy theories about Americans and Jews—and use religious groups to destroy reformers and democrats. Oil money strengthens elites, buys rockets, funds research into weapons of mass destruction, builds radical schools across Africa and Asia and finds its way to terrorist organizations. Terrorist organizers exploit the humiliated and hopeless—channeling their search for meaning into acts of murder—and plot, as London 2006 proves, to surpass the mad ambitions of 9/11.

In the traditional diplomatic view, this chaos can be contained through the skillful management of "favorable" dictators. But what if the status quo in the Middle East that produced Muhammad Atta and his friends and successors cannot be contained, or boxed up, or bought off? What if the false and shallow stability of tyranny is actually producing people and movements that make the whole world less stable? And what if the problem is getting dramatically worse as the technology of weapons of mass destruction becomes more democratically distributed?

On this theory, President Bush set out a series of policy changes from the weeks after 9/11 to his second Inaugural in 2005. Threats would be confronted before they arrive, the sponsors of terror would be held equally accountable for terrorist murders and America would promote democracy as an alternative to Islamic fascism, the exploitation of religion to impose a violent political utopia. Every element of the Bush doctrine was directed toward a vision: a reformed Middle East that joins the world instead of resenting and assaulting it.