Some skeptical readers have written in to ask us, in effect, what Gore would have done any differently than Dubya in advance of the terrorist atrocities of September 11. “You keep saying that since Bush knew so much he should have acted,” one critic writes. “Well, just what should he have done?”
Fair questions – questions that we imagine many MWO readers are either asking or having asked of them.
So here is a brief pocket guide to just a few of the things that President Gore would almost certainly have done differently than George W. Bush did.
– President Gore would not have appointed John Ashcroft as Attorney-General – the man who backed off from the Clinton Administration’s counter-terrorist efforts right up until September 10, preferring small-time efforts like his crusade against the medical use of marijuana. The same Ashcroft who, when warned by outgoing F.B.I. chief Louis Freeh about the terrorist threat, brushed him off.
– President Gore would not have appointed Donald Rumsfeld as Secretary of Defense – the man who, before September 11, actually called for slighting counter-terrorism spending in favor of his pet project, the discredited updated Star Wars program.
– President Gore would not have appointed Condoleezza Rice as chief of the National Security Agency – the woman who Sandy Berger told would be spending most of her time dealing with Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda, but who failed to follow up.
– President Gore would have tried to implement the recommendations of the 1996-97 commission on airline security that he himself chaired, but which the Bush White House and the G.O.P., heavily funded by the airline industry, dissed and dismissed. Had those recommendations been followed up, it is highly unlikely that the attacks of 9/11 could have occurred.
– President Gore would not have been on vacation for the whole month of August 2001.
– President Gore’s foreign policy would not have been geared to placating the oil families in Saudi Arabia (including the old Bush family friends and business partners, the bin Ladens). Nor would it have envisaged securing an oil-line to the Caspian Sea as the major American policy priority in the Afghanistan region.
– President Gore, a veteran of an Administration that tried to kill Osama bin Laden, would have continued Predator drone tracking of bin Laden, which the Bush regime abandoned.
– President Gore, a veteran of an Administration that tried to kill Osama bin Laden, would have immediately understood the importance of the August 9 C.I.A. briefing entitled ‘‘Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.’’ and would have ordered an urgent intelligence review and coordination of all current leads and materials on bin Laden and Al Qaeda operations in the United States. Under a continuation of Clinton-Gore policy, such a review and coordination would have been automatic. Based on what we know now the F.B.I. and other federal officials knew, this would have led to the prompt apprehension of the September 11 terrorists (or at least their ringleaders) – roughly a month BEFORE they were to strike.
– Members of President Gore’s Administration would not have lied shamefacedly – as Condi Rice and others in the Bush Administration have lied – about what their boss knew and didn’t know before September 11. Why? They, unlike the Bush Administration, would have had nothing to hide.
And that’s just for starters.
What has become clearer and clearer is that events never should have reached the pass that the United States was as vulnerable as it proved to be. And while many hands were responsible for this horror, Bush’s attempts to palm off responsibility and play the hapless victim are, well, outrageously irresponsible.
Without question, President Gore would have been far more active than Bush was in protecting the national interest from Al Qaeda terrorism. And although, thanks to the Scalia 5, we will never know with absolute certainty whether his Administration could have prevented the terrorist attacks of September 11, or some other similar enormity, it is perfectly clear that, under President Gore, the success of those attacks would have been far less certain than they proved to be.
