Logic Times
Don't Blame the Clinton Administration
Commentary by Aslan, 9/11/06, 7:26pm. Comments (0)
The Path to 9/11 concluding tonight on ABC is riveting, a superb visceral presentation of the root causes of September 11th. Conservatives everywhere are giddy with excitement that a member of the Mainstream Media chose not to whitewash the Clinton Administration’s confused and ineffectual response to terrorism. The actual record of the Clinton Administration – the disaster in Mogadishu, multiple opportunities to kill or capture bin Laden missed, the Gorelick Wall between justice and intelligence – is profoundly worse than portrayed in The Path to 9/11, but the movie nonetheless makes it crystal clear that the Clinton Administration was criminally incompetent in handling terrorism.
But Conservatives need to be cautious in their euphoria; the takeaway from the movie is not that the Clinton Administration was responsible for 9/11, because emphatically they were not. The events, if not the date, of September 11, 2001 were inevitable. The United States with Ronald Reagan as the perpetual President, a young Theodore Roosevelt as Secretary of War, Hoover at the FBI and a fully funded, fully effective CIA would have eventually fallen prey to a cataclysmic attack at the hands of Islamofascists. Without the lesson of 9/11, the American people would never tolerate the draconian measures necessary to prevent the tragedy.
The Path to 9/11 has two important takeaways unrelated to blaming the Clinton Administration:
- The first stems from the recognition that pre-9/11 American society was structurally vulnerable; that the people of that society – petulant, prosperous, and deluded by soft years of a pseudo-peace – would never permit the measures necessary to stop a determined, suicidal enemy. Perhaps the September 11th plot of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed could have been foiled, but the mixture of Islamofascism, Western freedom and technology was destined to violently explode on American soil. Recognizing this, it is clear that neither the Clinton Administration nor the Bush Administration was responsible for 9/11, debunking once and for all the hysterical attempt by the Left to blame Bush on the heels of Richard Clarke's duplicitous 9/11 Commission testimony.
- The second takeaway is that Democrats, being creatures of moral relativism and globalism, are incapable of decisive, wartime leadership. The first three hours of the Path to 9/11 gives a breathtaking glimpse into minds paralyzed by the inability to make judgments. This movie unequivocally demonstrates why the country owes a debt of gratitude to the determination of George W. Bush, and why it should never, ever place the defense of this country into the hands of people like the hacks in the Clinton Administration, hacks who are still out there, hovering, eager to return for a third Clinton Administration in 2008.
{Editor’s Note: I wish I had watched the second half of The Path to 9/11 before posting this commentary. I assumed that the second half would mirror the honesty of the first half, but two areas I found appalling. First, the glorification of Richard Clarke. Did he write this? I no more believe that Richard Clarke had a serious role in government action immediately after 9/11 than I believe Clinton did before 9/11. I certainly don’t believe Cheney and Rice – known entities as confident, solid decision-makers – were indecisive and deferential to the masterful Clarke, a know publicity hound and dissembler. Second, the assumption the 9/11 Commission recommendations were worth the paper they were written on is a more humorous joke. That commission was a whitewash job by the very same people who were exposed in the first segment – the Clinton Administration. I think a grade of NO ATTACKS should be slightly heavier in weight than a grade of what anyone on that commission thinks should be done. That said, there is room for improvement, but I don’t need Jamie Gorelick and Richard Ben Veniste to offer recommendations.}
Copyright © 2006 Dan Hallagan. All Rights Reserved.