April 02, 2004, 3:32 p.m.
What Would FDR Do?
Bush’s mistake was to indulge his enemies’ finger-pointing fun.

What were the 9/11h hearings supposed to accomplish? Their formal purpose was to establish how al Qaeda's terrorist attacks happened, to establish why the U.S. government failed to prevent them, and to suggest how our intelligence, police, and military services should prevent such attacks in future.

But these questions — though they were discussed in the hearings — were not really the focus of media coverage and popular attention unless they happened to have a bearing on either partisan politics or cultural fashion. For instance, there was relatively little interest in al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden — and, not coincidentally, very little patriotic anger directed at them — in the hearings. Almost all the emphasis was on American failures and, in particular, on the Bush administration. Al Qaeda's attacks were treated like natural catastrophes — as if they had been earthquakes that simply happened. (And if they succeeded in destroying our homes, then the fault was ours, for not installing anti-earthquake technology in time.)

Thus former anti-terrorism advisor Richard Clarke is widely praised for apologizing for the failure to prevent 9/11. Yet 9/11 was an act committed by radical Islamist terrorists who deliberately sought out the weak links in our defenses. Clarke had tried valiantly to prevent it — that was the theme of his testimony — but he admitted that his proposals would not have succeeded. So the net effect of his apology was to shift the blame from al Qaeda to others in government who might have been negligent in averting the terrorist threat. And the fickle finger of suspicion pointed to President Bush and everyone in his national-security team — except Clarke.

To see how significant that is, try to imagine hearings on Pearl Harbor in which Imperial Japan's aggression was passed over lightly and America's anger was directed at President Roosevelt for not warding off the attack. Roosevelt avoided any such danger, as the Stratfor research institute points out, through two decisive actions: He postponed an inquiry into the war until it was won, and he dismissed the commander of the Pacific fleet on the grounds that Pearl Harbor was his responsibility in the chain of command, if not in fact.

These were both ruthless acts of political self-preservation, but they were also statesmanlike decisions. They directed the American people, including FDR's political opponents, toward concentrating on defeating a ruthless and resourceful foreign enemy. But they succeeded in part because the American people were already united against that enemy. What the 9/11 hearings suggest is that many people in Washington are reluctant to face the fact that America faces such an enemy today. Maybe that enemy is not ultimately as powerful as Imperial Japan, but it has succeeded in striking a harder blow at the American mainland than Japan ever managed. And it continues to strike blows around the world.

If Osama is not the enemy, then who is? Like Richard Clarke, many in the media would plainly like to pin the blame for 9/11 on the Bush administration. Understandably the Democrats are tempted to go along with this theory. Nor has Mr. Bush protected himself against it, FDR-style, by firing the director of central intelligence or anyone else who might be held responsible. So, for a short time last week, Richard Clarke was a media celebrity because his testimony seemed likely to damage the president. Yet this charge was never going to stick, for a very simple reason: President Bush had been in office only eight months when al Qaeda struck, whereas President Clinton had been in office for a full eight years — during which the USS Cole and the World Trade Center were both bombed. It strained credulity to suggest that Bush should have worked up a plan to destroy al Qaeda in less than a year when Clinton had failed to produce one in almost a decade. There was an ingenious but brief attempt to suggest that Clinton had handed Bush "A Plan" to do just that, which Bush then cast aside negligently. If that had been true, it would have shown Clinton in a worse light than Bush — postponing courageous action until the very moment when his successor arrived, to let him risk the consequences.

To be fair to Clinton, however, it was not true. As far as one can reasonably judge, there was no U.S. plan to attack al Qaeda in safe havens such as Afghanistan — merely a set of lesser anti-terrorist policies that the Bush administration then faithfully followed. All this became clear as last week wore on, and as the fine print in Clarke's testimony exonerated the Bush administration from advance culpability for September 11. The attack then switched to the president's post-9/11 supposed obsession with Iraq that diverted him from the real task of fighting al Qaeda.

Clarke's little vignette — in which the president darkly suggested that his advisor might try finding out if Iraq had a hand in 9/11 — was held by the media to be especially damning. Clarke seemed to think he was dealing with a president who couldn't walk and chew gum at the same time. If he had Saddam Hussein on his mind, then he couldn't possibly be focusing on al Qaeda. He must have dropped the ball. Yet recall what actually happened after 9/11: The U.S. invaded Afghanistan, overturned the Taliban regime, killed or captured large numbers of al Qaeda terrorists, and sent Osama bin Laden on his underground travels.

That was two years ago. Iraq came later — last year. If Clarke had difficulty recalling the correct sequence of events after so short an interval, he was perhaps not well positioned to sneer at Bush's misconceptions. Not that they are necessarily misconceptions: Suspicion of an Iraqi involvement in 9/11 was perfectly reasonable, since Saddam Hussein had sought to assassinate a previous President Bush. And, incidentally, the pursuit and capture of al Qaeda terrorists worldwide continued throughout the Iraq campaign — and continues still in Iraq today. How can we explain this eager suspicion of Bush against the evidence — this drive to blame hidden enemies at home rather than declared ones abroad for the Pearl Harbors of our day? Since Pearl Harbor, many Americans — especially in the cultural elites and in the lumpenintelligentsia of the Left — have overcome patriotism. They like to think of themselves as citizens of the world, above petty national prejudices. But in practice they are merely inverted patriots (think Archie Bunker's son-in-law) who are no more dispassionate than their fellow citizens, but who tend to take the opposite side in any foreign quarrel.

They cannot, of course, take bin Laden's side over 9/11; their alienation does not bite quite that deep. So they react in two other ways: They side with France and Germany over how to handle the War on Terror, and they seek reasons to blame the U.S. for attacks upon itself. Their ire is especially excited by a U.S. administration — like Bush's — that strikes a patriotic note. But they are a greater danger to the Democrats, who, if they go along with the inverted patriots in their ranks, will discover in November just how few voters they really represent.

— John O'Sullivan is editor-in-chief of The National Interest. This piece first appeared in the Chicago Sun-Times and is reprinted with permission. O'Sullivan can be reached through Benador Associates