As I mentioned last week, I’ve started a new tradition here at The Carpetbagger Report where I share some of my favorite email correspondence from the week. Yes, I’ve stolen this idea from Eric Alterman. (Note to Eric: please don’t sue me.)
This week’s featured email comes from Carpetbagger regular Joe Fitzpatrick, who argued very persuasively that there was a clear path the Bush White House could have chosen to deal effectively with the controversy surrounding its preparedness for 9/11. For reasons that confuse us all, Bush did not chose wisely.
Personally, I think that the debate of what was and wasn’t done before 9/11 could have been politically defused long ago. It is important to analyze the failures, but there are enough of them to go around. Instead of lying and denying, the administration could have simply said, “Our priorities and assessments were wrong. We did not believe that these extremists represented this level of threat. But no matter when these seeds were planted, no matter how many administrations watched them fester and grow, this tragedy happened on our watch. Ultimately, the people of this great country will have to decide how much of the blame for this lies on our shoulders, but there is one thing that no one should be able to say, and that is that we will ever underestimate this threat again, or fail to do everything in our power to thwart it….”
End of subject, really. How many of us really did lie awake at night and worry about Islamic Radicals, even after the Cole, prior to 9/11? Even Condi could always fend off tough questions, “Look, whether we could or could not have predicted this, the fact remains that we did not. The President has admitted that before 9/11 we did not consider this an imminent threat. We can’t change that, all we can do is focus on what we are doing about terrorism now…”
The ‘buck stops here’ kind of talk would have fit nicely with a ‘born again’ President-with-a-mission image. Relentlessly pursue anti-terror, make a token roll-back of some uber-rich pandering policies in the name of ‘sharing the pain’, and even a total failure in domestic policy would probably never have become a political liability.
But, and this seems the real issue to me, aside from a half-hearted detour to Afghanistan, it seems that the administration never changed direction at all. We are mired down in Iraq (something Condi admits was already an administration focus; if it wasn’t, why would it have been “put aside”?), and we are about to spend billions on a missile defense system that does not work and is absolutely of no use against terrorists with WMDs. I’d like to see the Kerry campaign focus on the now, ‘why are we doing this instead of fighting terrorism now?’ Let Clarke and the Republicans focus on the past.