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.
