I'm an Obama supporter, right? But read this account of a 2007 raid that failed because Osama didn't show up. Same people involved, I'm sure. So the only difference is luck. You know the old saying, "I'd rather be lucky than good?" In this case Obama and our military were good. They were also lucky. We all should be glad they were, stop carping about petty details and, yes, acknowlege it could easily have happened under Bush and give him some credit for having fostered the military and intelligence assets that made Monday's raid successful. I don't like most things Bush did, but on this one I've got to say, "Thanks Dubya!"
My feelings are a bit more Draconian & black & white about the GWB-9/11 connection. 6 weeks before 9/11 ( as I've stated many times previously ) GWB ignored memo that stated "OBL determined to strike in U.S." ( I believe that planes were mentioned as weapons ). To the operative who gave him the memo he said : "forget about it; I guess that covers your ass".
All this brings up school of thought which I ascribe to : if GWB wasn't such an incompetent slacker, 9/11 WOULDN'T HAVE HAPPENED ! So any "intelligence gains" that were credited to his administration, are negated by idea that he could have possibly have prevented the catastrophe.
But, then again , I don't cut slack for POTUS's I consider "worthless". "Revisionist pussies" will give credit to LBJ & Carter for "accomplishments", but their Presidencies were ruined by Viet-Nam ( & In, Carter's case ) by Iranian hostage crisis & awful economy.
Now, watch board righties agree w/ me on Carter & LBJ & disagree on GWB-------LOL !
-- Modified on 5/6/2011 7:24:15 AM
I think most reasonable people give Bush some blame for ignoring the warnings. Rice, too. She was National Security Advisor then and was the one who received the report from her then-deputy, Richard Clarke, with the warning you quote. Still, it's a reasonable question to wonder whether, even if they had acted, the 9/11 plot would have worked. But I don't think you can assume it would never have happened either. I just think it's too simple to assert that, because of the lapse, Bush deserves no credit for what came later.
So lets play hypotheticals. It is Aug of 2001, Pri, and you are Bush. You've just been briefed that bin Laden is determined to attack us. Now, you are already aware of this, have been aware of it for some time now. The memo mentions the fact that many airports have had a high failure rate for security inspections. It also mentions the belief that bin Laden may try to use airplanes to attack us. The report is long on speculation, and void of specifics.
Now Pri, what do YOU do? You don't have a time frame of when an attack may occur, you don't have a target, and you don't have any identified suspects that may or may not be involved. We know from hindsight that you have 1 month to figure it out, but you don't know that when you get the briefing. So what exactly do you do?
racial profiling for those of "Middle Eastern" background" since that's the demographic makeup
of Al-Qeda, for indefinite amount of time. He also could have alerted the media about the memo, but that might have been construed as "tipping his hand".
Stacy, lemme reiterate--for those POTUS's I deem worthless, NOTHING can redeeem them. LBJ is lauded for "great society" programs; I regard him as utter failure because he ruined this country w/ Viet-Nam; Jimmy Carter is lauded for "Camp David", but was utter failure because of Iran & awful economy.
Stacy, my thinking may be considered too black & white in this regard,but I stand by my opinions.
-- Modified on 5/6/2011 10:39:47 AM
so you think bush should have racially profiled at airports PREEMPTIVELY? Interesting.
What then should Obama be doing that he isn't to prevent THE NEXT attack? Or is there not going to be one...Just trying to understand just how precient you expect these guys to be.
IOW, was the fort hood shooting obama's fault?
But GWB did get advance warning ( of sorts ) with
"OBL memo"
Preemptive racial profiling to prevent future terror attacks ? I'm all for it ! And if the ACLU starts whining about it, they can go fuck themselves.
understood,
lemme ask you another question then,
Iranian leadership and much of the arab world has made the destruction of isreal and the US a life's mission.
that seems to be a warning, (of sorts)
what should we be doing?
I would keep using diplomacy and sanctions, but also have plans for a pre-emptive military strike. Might not work (the Iranians are not fools and have dispersed and hidden their nuclear facilities), but you can be sure the Israelis have plans of their own. We should support them.
"OBL memo"
Preemptive racial profiling to prevent future terror attacks ? I'm all for it ! And if the ACLU starts whining about it, they can go fuck themselves.
considering the fact this briefing was the result of intel from a previous administration, should'nt THAT admin have jumped into action and put your measures into place as the result of the intel that lead to the conclusion?
if bush "did nothing", were'nt the measure in place at that time there as the result of the author of the breifing reacting to that intel?
just trying to understand the thinking..
Thank you for your answer. Now here are some of the problems with your hypotheticals:
Racial profiling. I concur! We absolutely should employ racial profiling as a security tool. Even today, after 9/11 though, we still can't get that dog to hunt. What do you think the chances were that we could have employed this strategy without the impetus of 9/11? Somewhere between nil and none.
Heightened airport security. Ask Clinton how well that worked. He tried on two separate occasions to implement tighter security at airports. His proposals were quite similar to what we have today actually. Both times, Republicans in Congress, allied with airline lobbies shot his proposals down. Absolutely no way could we have put airports on heightened alert, and stayed that way for an entire month or longer - particularly when the only justification was a non-specific threat with no timeline, no target, no details at all. Furthermore, if we had gone into an alert mode, that also would surely have tipped our hand. Then, more likely, we just look like a bunch of chicken littles when nothing happens. Of course, this is all second guessing. We have no way of predicting how things might have gone if we had put airports on an alert status.
Alerting the media. This would only have tipped Al Qaida off, and prompted claims that the Bush administration was fear mongering.
When people talk about Bush doing nothing, I don't think they quite realize how very different the world we lived in pre-9/11 was. Today, no candidate can run for office without being prepared to answer tough questions about their attitude and preparation to deal with terrorism. In 2000, "terrorism" didn't even make the top 10 issues that voters listed as being important. Top 10! We as a nation, did not give the threat of terrorism the attention it deserved. What do you suppose the odds were, in an atmosphere of such pervasive indifference to the threat of terror, that Bush could have implemented even a fraction of the policies that have been implemented since 9/11? The Patriot Act? Absolutely no way. Dept of Homeland Security? Fat chance (sidenote: DHS is wildly redundant, but we'll save that discussion for another day). Profiling at airports? Again, total non-starter even after 9/11. Tighter screening and greater power to TSA officials? Tried and failed, and today we are seeing more and more of a push to roll back security at airports.
I'm not arguing that Bush is blameless. While seemingly obvious steps such as heightened security would not have been effective, Bush should have been listening to Richard Clarke rather than demote him. From the day he took office, there should have been regular meetings focused on counter-terrorism, but only a few such meetings took place. Bush should have continued Clinton's efforts to put an end to turf wars between security agencies, and remove protocols that prevented information sharing. He made no such attempts. And we should have invaded Afghanistan in retaliation for the attack on the USS Cole. Plans were drawn up before Clinton left office, but were never acted on.
The truth is, even if Bush had done all of these things, 9/11 would likely still have happened. Or, if we did beat the clock and uncover the plot before it was acted on, some other 9/11 scale event would have happened eventually. There would have been a 3/12 day, or a 7/18 day. Remember, we have to get it right 100% of the time to prevent an attack - terrorists only have to be successful once.
I stated in another post a few days ago, that I give Clinton the highest marks on terrorism because Clinton did in fact pay a great deal of attention to terrorism, and did not have the motivation of 9/11 to do so. Bush was in fact extremely and inexcusably lax in his attitude toward terrorism prior to 9/11. His efforts after 9/11 however, were tremendous and kept us free from further attacks. Please tell me you aren't silly enough to think the terrorists have all been on vacation and simply haven't felt the urge to attack us on our home soil for nearly 10 years now. The fact that even today we have not experienced another attack on US soil is not an accident.
So what it really comes down it is, its not that Bush doesn't deserve to be blamed, its that his failures are not the fact that he did take the steps most people think he should have taken. We the people wouldn't have allowed it. We ourselves have a share of the blame for not taking terrorism seriously. Or perhaps more accurately, we have the media to blame for keeping us occupied by enough minutiae so that terrorism was swept off our radar. Before 9/11, terrorism was something that happened in countries whose name we couldn't pronounce, not something we expected to see here.
9/11 was an inevitability. Bush fully deserves to be criticized for his failings, and I don't overlook the fact that he could have done things differently. I am not naive enough to assume that anything he might have done differently though, would have actually prevented a 9/11 scale attack. It wouldn't have.
The link I attached is a Gallup poll taken before the 2000 elections. Interesting look back at us, the electorate, and what we were paying attention to. The poll lists 13 issues and ranks them by importance. Terrorism isn't even on the list.
( very well thought out thread,btw ); HOWEVER, my point of contention is that GWB & his adminstration did NOTHING following the Clarke memo. Had they tried to do SOMETHING & failed, then they couldn't have been faulted.( at least by reasonable people. )
I suppose we agree to disagree, but the perception ( shared by many ) is that GWB was an incompetent slacker, an anti-intellectual with a lax, uncurious attitude, resulting in one of the most disastrous Presidencies this country has suffered through.
My ire has similarly been raised against LBJ & Carter so, hopefully, I won't be regarded as an inflexible ,rigid partisan that I despise. ( Think I succeeded ?--------LOL ! )
-- Modified on 5/6/2011 12:08:43 PM
Had Bush captured or killed bin Laden, then he would have been given credit for it. But ultimately, had he done so, he would just be fixing his own fuck up. Since he didn't capture bin Laden, then it's Obama who fixed his fuck up. 9/11 didn't have to happen. The only reason it did happen is because the guy in charge was an incompetent dry drunk with the spine of a lemming and the intellectual prowess of Terri Schiavo. 9/11 also benefited that cretin directly, since it changed the national dialog from him being an illegitimate president to being "a war president".
is that they will NOT admit that GWB was a DREADFUL POTUS.It violates their "lockstep solidarity conservative orthodoxy." To put it more simply, they're inflexible rigid partisans.
Hell-------my politics are left of center, but I thought LBJ & Carter were DREADFUL----try to get a board conservative to admit that about GWB----------you'll be waiting a fucking long time.
I assume you, willy and others consider me a "rightie", probably because of my views on money. I'm OK with that. I actually voted for Bush for my own self interest. Most people do vote for their own interest. Was I happy with his performance? How can I say this diplomatically....FUCK NO. You know that old saying, "are you better off than 4 years ago, or even 8 years ago for that matter? Not when I looked at my portfolio in late 2008.
I give Obama a lot of credit for having the balls to authorize the raid. I'm sure he thought about the Iran and Somalia failures. I'm sure he thought that if this raid failed for whatever reason, his reelection was toast. Even if the raid failed, I still would have applauded his efforts, but just like sports or business, you are defined by winning or losing. And right after the raid, there was another drone strike in Pakistan. Damn, how can you not like his "don't fuck with me attitude." And he probably knew he was going to take some shit from some whiny European uber liberals, and various corners of the U.N.
You happy now?
If this menas anything to you, I consider you among the board's "thoughtful conservatives", along with phil, GaG, SOTF, etc.
As for Europe whining about OBL "hit", I agree w/ you 100%; that's why that misbegotten continent is going down the loo , err toilet.
Clinton told Bush the same thing as he walked out and said I have the best people in place to tracking him down but Bush didn't pay any attention. Both Dick and Bush would not meet with Richard Clark even when he repeatedly asked for meeting and even went to the White House. Bush did not meet the National Security Team even once before 9/11 and he was on ego trip at the time. 9/11 humbled him.
One reason our leaders get away with what they do is due to our collective memory, it is very very short. Years of spin washes away everything we ever knew.
People are saying Water Boarding and Torture gave us the intelligence to get OBL. If you think about it, it is ridiculous. If you had the intelligence, why didn't you get him.
According to Pakistani press today, OBL lived for two years in another small city near to where he was killed for two years when his house was being built. This is according to hie three wives captured. US asking to interview them, Pakistan is refusing for the moment but they don't have a choice.
Both Mushraff and the current Pakistanis dispensation knew all along where OBL is but misled Bush and Co. Unfortunately, Bush and Co put way too much emphasis on Pakistani cooperation. Obama on the other hand took action knowing well Pakistan does not have an option but cooperate because without US, UK, French and Japanese aid money, Pakistan will become a failed state. That's strategy.
Stay tuned, only one other person was killed. Pakistan have all the rest in custody. They are not giving access to US now because they are afraid what they will say. But, it will not be forever, we will squeeze Pakistan and get access. Stay tuned more to come.
Anyone interested to read more, follow the link and take a read.