September 11, 2001 didn’t happen because Al-Qaeda had bases in Afghanistan, it happened because the Bush administration wasn’t paying attention. A similar planned attack on the July 2001 G-8 Summit in Genoa, intending to use hijacked airliners as missiles (with G.W. Bush as the target!) was foiled, so it should have taken no great leap of imagination to at least recognize the domestic threat.
The Bush administration was, however, obsessed with Iraqi leader Sadam Hussein going into Afghanistan. Sadam, Sadam, Sadam! No domestic plot or great conspiracy, just incompetence and a lack of vision. This was my spoken assessment to my spouse, and others, within moments of the very first video reports that morning on the “Today Show” “that a small plane may have hit the World Trade Center”. The scale of the “gash” in the building said it all to me! I said immediately “that it was no light plane, it was an airliner and it was intentional, and if there’s one, there are more!”. In my next breadth, I telephoned my son, who was working downtown at the time, to warn him- the second plane hit while we were speaking and he had to hang up and flee. And I’m just some guy who reads the newspapers.
The rank revisionism and fork-tongued finger pointing begins, led by none other than the daughter of the man whose vision failed the nation so miserably, Liz Cheney, and Trumplican functionaries who helped broker, and bragged about “the deal” made with the Taliban. Twenty years on, anyone urging an ongoing American military effort in Afghanistan is just urging the ongoing effort to paper over the intelligence and leadership failures that led to that September horror. Enough Already!
Eric Cashdan
Sands Point
