We all know there was/is a lot of bad blood between George Sr. and some of the Arab states. Since George W. was elected, was 9/11 at least partially motivated by revenge towards George Sr.?
The operation obviously took several years to plan, and was preceded in 1993 by an attempt to bomb the towers down. Add to this the Embassy bombings and the attack on USS Cole and there seems no reason why any administration would be favoured.
Whether Bush’s obsession with Iraq took his eye off AQ to the extent that Gore might have prevented 9/11 is a different proposition. My own feeling is that only some fortuitous discovery or tip-off would have prevented 9/11.
9/11 was motivated by some bizarre mixture of evil and insanity. It is difficult to analyze logically because what’s logical about saying, “I hate your father, therefore I’m going to murder thousands of people from 150 nations”? Although it is true that if your grandmother had balls she’d be your grandfather, it doesn’t mean much.
Like someone fortuitously discovering the June 20 2001 edition of Time magazine, which discusses Bin Laden’s intention to hit the US, or some tip off like the one that the FBI apparently received in April 2001:
The motivation for 9/11 wouldnt’ have changed one iota. Whether or not Gore could have prevented it is a different argument.
My feeling is that the same anti-terror people would have been in place from the Clinton administration, including Richard Clarke. These are the people that allowed AQ to continue to brew since the 1993 WTC bombing. See Richard Clarkes own quotes from a couple of years ago before he didn’t get his promotion and wanted to sell books. Clarke himself said that the Bush administration cranked up the effort against AQ. With Gore in place, the efforts would have remained the same. 9/11 would have still happened and we would have been genuflecting to the United Nations for a few months before going after the Taliban.
Of course we’ll never know. My feeling is yes. These mass murderers don’t care who is in office, and unless steps had been taken prior to 9/11 (such as making the cockpit impregnable), the same would have happened. Gore would have done much the same in Afghanistan, but would not have invaded Iraq.
Here is a fatwah issued by Bin Laden in 1998
Note that there is no mention of George Bush (Sr.). The Gulf War is cited as the main reason for the holy war but since Al Gore voted for the Gulf War I fail to see how his election would have assuaged the terrorists.
The Gore administration would have had two potential advantages over the Bush administration with respect to preventing/avoiding the tragic/obscene events of 9/11.
1.) Continuity If Sandy Berger, Richard Clarke, George Tenet, etc, continue with the existing system of interactions as under the Clinton administration (as described by Clarke) it is possible that the greater interagency cooperation/communication demanded by that system could have allowed preventative action be taken. It is certainly understandable that the new administration would do things in its own way, especially given its opinion of the previous administration. Given that the anti Al-Qaeda plan settled on by the Bush administration is effectively Clarke’s plan, having a president who had a voice (or at least an ear) in the development of the plan could have advanced the timetable somewhat. There is no guarantee that Gore would have kept the structure developed over the course of the Clinton administration intact. It is certainly possible that he would have reprioritized things as well.
2.) Sense of Priorities Gore, as part of the Clinton administration, would most likely have shared the pain and frustration of dealing with non-state threats in general as well as Al-Qaeda in particular. While it is unquestionable that the Clinton administration could have done more wrt homeland security the accusations in 2000 were more that he had Bin Laden on the brain. The Bush adminstration was more concerned with other priorities (as described by Rice at the time).
None of this necessarily means anything of course.
Evil One: A few questions.
What Clarke demotion are you referring to?
You do realize that the Bush anti-terrorism team were the Clinton anti-terrorism team (most with very long pedigrees of service under Reagan and G H W Bush) until many left in frustration, dont you?
Did you know that the timing of Clarke’s book was set by the time it took the White House to vet it rather than by Clarke?
Assuaging the terrorists is not the issue at hand. The issue is whether an alternate administration could have/would have prevented the occurences of 9/11 from coming to pass. You are aware that all terrorist attacks do not succeed, aren’t you? Both the Clinton and Bush adminstrations have prevented terrorist plans from coming to fruition, regardless of the status of Bin Laden’s fatwah.
I think it would have happened either way. A lot of the terrorists and planning had already been in place during the Clinton administration. The best chance the government has of catching a terrorist is when they enter the country. Once they have entered there are some 300m people they blend in with. And millions of other arabs.
Unless someone who was high up in the A-Q hierarchy leaked key information about 9/11 I find it very doubtful any administration would have been able to stop it. And since the war against al-Qaeda was not being sufficiently carried out by the Clinton Administration or the pre-9/11 Bush administration I doubt very seriously we would have ever gotten that big lead we needed.
I doubt very seriously though, that if Bush or Gore had received a tip off that “a major attack was imminent” that they would have done absolutely nothing. How much they should do in that case scenario mainly depends on the level of credibility involved with the tip off. A lot of attack threats and rumors of attacks
come in through the intelligence agencies every day, you cannot pursue every single one completely. Partly because Clinton cut into the CIA and other intelligence agencies funding so much, and partly just out of practical concerns.
No, we all don’t. Cite?
You are aware that strings of rhetorical questions come off as pedantic and condescending, aren’t you?
BullCaca. Bush was asleep at the switch. Probably dreaming about stolen elections.
Nice try. What “some of the Arab states”? More than one? Other than Saddam’s Iraq? Specify, please. And you do know that Iraq had nothing to do with 9-11, right? Because everybody here agrees on that, except few “Bush lackeys” like myself.
Clarke was anti-terrorism czar under Clinton. Condi Rice demoted him to Special Advisor for Cyber-Space Security on October 9th of last year. Cite.
Many believe that this is his motivation for writing the book and making the accusations he does. Many of the same people are the ones asking why Clarke didn’t do all the things he says Bush ought to have done during his previous years under Clinton and Bush Sr.
As regards the OP, 9/11 was going to happen no matter who was President. The reaction might have been different, for better or worse.
Regards,
Shodan
Furt Your first quote of me is not a quote of me at all. The cite tolls for ccwaterback, not for me. I agree that vengeance is certainly not one of Al-Qaeda’s more celebrated goals, compared to getting the infidel out of Saudi Arabia, for example.
You may be right. The first question was definitely legitimate - is their an actual demotion in the record (rather than referring to a de-emphasis of terrorism or his requested transfer to the cyberterrorism beat post 9/11). The other questions were stated as questions as much for reasons of parallelism as out of expectation of an answer. Please feel free to correct evil one in the manner of your choosing. 
I don’t see anything in the OP that rules out the issue of assuaging the terrorists. Barring any further clarification, I’d say they’re both pertinent to the question.
That aside, my feeling:
A. Would the terrorists still have TRIED to do a 9/11 attack with Gore in office? Yes. I think Bush winning the election made zero difference to them, and, as others have pointed out, they tried often enough during the Clinton administration.
B. Would the terrorists have SUCCEEDED? Yes. I think there’s a slim chance that continuity of personnel and mission would have helped Gore et al. recognize the presence of Al Qaeda operatives inside the US, and perhaps apprehend them in mid-summer 2001. But, generally, despite what anyone says, once you get inside the country, the attacks were stunningly easy to pull off. If my small group of friends had held an Al Qaeda-style grievance against the US, we could certainly have pulled it off with only a year of planning. (One of my friends is already a pilot; getting 3 to 7 more us schooled to the extent that the hijackers were would be simple enough, and hardly cost untold millions.) The measures in place then, and the attitude of passengers, etc., to any hijacking (then: don’t do anything foolish and you’ll probably get out alive; now: if anyone tries anything, the passengers had better swarm them, or they’re all dead) made it easy enough.
While I hate Bush to pieces, I really don’t think his presence affected the 9/11 attacks one way or the other. I think those lunatics would have done what they did unless they were physically prevented from doing so by armed police or security of some sort.
And they would have done so whether the President in office at that time was Bush, Bush Sr., Bush: The Next Generation, Gore, Clinton, Nixon, or Boinko The Nicotine-Addicted Clown.
According to Clarke, this was at his request. Cyberterrorism had been his pet project for a long time.
So nothing can be done? The terrorists will get through?
My argument is pretty simple.
Consider that 1/2 of the attack did NOT really succeed; 1/2 did. The 1/4 that hit the Pentagon, I should think, did not do nearly the amount of damage that the attackers wanted to do. And 1/4 was thwarted by the passengers.
However, I am willing for the sake of argument to say that 3/4 of the attack succeeded.
Now, had any little thing been different, they might not have succeeded at all. Had the combination of passengers been a little different, the first crash might have been a miss, the government might have been able to take quick action, and the whole thing might have been a failure. The attackers had skill and guts (I will grant them thus much), but they were also extremely lucky.
Had Gore been president, it would have been an entirely different world. Period. With a year to go until the attacks were to happen. Anything that Gore might have done could have prevented that future from happening. In fact, because I see the attacks as so unlikely of success in the first place, I don’t think it’s a stretch to conclude that they almost certainly had not occurred had the environment been so different.
Now this might all beg the question as to whether Gore would have likely done something to prevent such a thing from occuring. My feeling is that the other posters have already said it well: continuity among personnel, plus the BIG differential in competence between an expert administrator like Gore and a fascist idiot chimp like Bush.