Amusement of the Year

So, ABC is doing a miniseries about 9/11 and the causes... and they're actually doing it from an honest approach! Rather than saying "hey, 9/11 happened, and it's all Bush's fault, since he was there for eight months before it happened", they're saying, hm, let's look at this, logic says that the causes leading up to a major event like that might go back further than eight months!!!

OK. Sarcasm meter off. The Clinton administration's record on terrorism is entirely an FBI-centric, law-enforcement-centric approach: you attack us, and we hit you back with... subpeonas. And arrest warrants ... that any thinking person knows won't amount to a hill of beans, since they're unenforceable, since the targets of those warrants are terrorists who aren't exactly going to be scared by a bunch of arrest warrants! Oh, and we'll fire missiles at an aspirin factory in Africa, calling it a chemical-weapons plant used by terrorists even though, per classified documents since released, we know now that they (the Clinton administration) knew that the factory wasn't a chemical-weapons plant and wasn't used by terrorists.

Osama Bin Laden is on record as having stated that he tested the United States repeatedly throughout the 1990s -- which he did. We were attacked a dozen times, and each time our response was nonsensical and ineffective. Why ineffective? Because had anything we'd done been effective, future attacks would have been prevented, for one. And instead, we got attack followed by attack followed by... more attacks. The original World Trade Center bombings. The U.S. embassy in the middle east. The navy vessel in the middle east... hm, the list goes on. Bin Laden told us in the 1990s that he was testing us, and that the results of those tests convinced him that the U.S. was a "paper tiger" which would do, and I quote, "nothing to protect its own people"... because that was the lesson he'd been taught. The lesson he'd been taught, chronologically speaking, from the tests he conducted (his own words) during the 1990s. I don't recall a "Bush" being President during those tests, those attacks, and the ineffectual responses that taught Bin Laden (again in his own words) "that he could strike the U.S. anywhere, anytime, and it would do nothing about it". 9/11 happened because Osama Bin Laden tested the U.S. repeatedly through the 1990s and found that the U.S. government, then led by the Clinton administration, in Bin Laden's words, "did nothing about his attacks".

I'll disagree partly. They did do things. They erected barriers between intelligence agencies, making it harder for them to share information (FACT: look it up; the Intelligence Committee Report on 9/11 makes that abundantly clear). They issued arrest warrants that were more embarrassing than anything else (ooh, that'll scare them). What they did NOT do was anything that Bin Laden would ever regard as "effective" -- they did NOTHING that would convince him that attacking the U.S. or its citizens would cost him anything. They taught him quite the opposite -- and, again in his own words, he launched 9/11 "precisely because he could; that's what we (the US) had taught him".

So along comes ABC, and they evidently are laying this out - spelling out how Bin Laden tested the U.S. through repeated attacks during the 1990s, how our responses were, to put it politely, ineffective, how Bin Laden learned from those utterly ineffective responses... and how those lessons directly led to the planning and execution of the 9/11 attack.

And up sprout the Clinton Administration figures, complaining that... they're coming off looking bad, ineffectual. Here's a clue, guys: you were utterly ineffectual. Not one thing you did taught Bin Laden anything other than what he himself says were the lessons you taught him: that he could attack us with impugnity, because your policies and reactions meant nothing to him, because they didn't harm him at all.

The worst? That the Taliban of all people offered to serve up Bin Laden on a platter to the Clinton Administration during the 1990s -- and they turned them down, because they didn't want to do business with the Taliban.

So, to ABC, I say, stick to your guns, report what happened. It takes years to create the circumstances and lessons that culminate in something like 9/11 -- not eight months. That doesn't absolve the Bush administration from not moving faster to dismantle the ineffective policies the Clinton administration had put in place (FACT: when your enemy says he's utterly unaffected by your policies, and he keeps attacking you, and you keep not catching him... that's the definition of ineffective)... but it does place the blame, logically, where it belongs: on those who taught Bin Laden that he could attack us and that we wouldn't respond with anything resembling force, or anything effective. We'd just throw more arrest warrants his way.