Jonathan Chait wrote a terrific column yesterday on a point that most of us recognize, but it goes unmentioned most of the time.
It’s worth briefly refreshing our memories as to why Bin Laden and his closest friends are hiding out in Pakistan. In 2002, we had them surrounded near Tora Bora in Afghanistan, but Gen. Tommy Franks, the former head of U.S. Central Command, persuaded our commander-in-chief to rely on poorly equipped, ill-trained Afghan mercenaries of dubious loyalty, rather than U.S. soldiers, to finish the job. (Apparently the operating theory was, if you can’t trust mercenaries, who can you trust?) Shockingly, as Peter Bergen reported in 2004 in the Atlantic Monthly, Bin Laden paid off the mercenaries, who let him escape to Pakistan. And now the Pakistanis, who were at least nominally trying to hunt him down, have thrown in the towel.
In related news, the Bush administration has decided to stake the 2006 elections on Bush’s record of fighting terrorism. It sounds like a joke, but it isn’t. He let our worst enemies escape; he is on the verge of creating a terrorist haven in Iraq where none existed before; and this is the issue he picks to highlight. Why not run on his record of evacuating New Orleans?
It is, as Chait explained, a question of “image.” The president’s conduct doesn’t matter, it’s what people perceive of his conduct that matters. That’s especially true when it comes to the attacks of 9/11.
Chait pointed to a Showtime docudrama from 2003, written by a conservative Bush admirer, in which viewers see “an implausibly heroic Bush ordering around Dick Cheney and daring the terrorists to come get him.” As Will Bunch noted we’re probably going to be seeing a lot of this tonight — but that won’t make it true.
George W. Bush is a man on a mission today: To remind the American people how they felt five years ago, when the public was understandably frightened by the killing of nearly 3,000 fellow citizens, and when the president briefly gained acceptance as a bullhorn-wielding leader.
Of course, the truth was anything but. Even on Day One, some of us — too gently, in hindsight — wondered about Bush’s strange behavior on the actual 9/11, flying from remote airbase to remote airbase while Dick Cheney was running the show. Quickly, it because clear that any doubts about our commander-in-chief were flat-out forbidden. At least two journalists were fired for writing such stories. […]
On the second anniversary of 9/11, in 2003, I wrote a story in the Daily News that, among other things, mentioned that Bush had spent at least five minutes reading “The Pet Goat” in that Sarasota classroom. It was an indisputable fact, and yet I received hundreds of emails from readers, many asking if I would be fired for reporting such a simple and inconvenient truth.
OK, so Bush’s leadership on 9/11 was underwhelming. Some would prefer that we not mention it, and many will complain when we do, but history can be stubborn that way.
Of course, that was just one day. It was an important day, but it was the start of something bigger. The real test of his presidency wasn’t whether he dropped the children’s book, or whether he was able to comfort the nation, or whether he spent the day flying from one base to another five years ago; it was his follow-through after that fateful day.
Unfortunately, all the work on Bush’s “image” can’t do much to improve his 9/12 record, either.