Fighting Terrorism Was the Biggest WEAKNESS of the Bush Administration

[eridani]

http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/33468-focus-fighting-terrorism-was-the-biggest-weakness-of-the-bush-administration

Chris Whipple’s revelations about the CIA’s urgent, ignored pleas to focus on the threat from Al Qaeda before 9/11 flesh out an increasingly consistent portrait drawn by Kurt Eichenwald and other reporters. A broad and consistent body of evidence had persuaded intelligence officials that Al Qaeda was poised to carry out a devastating attack against the United States. It was not just the famous August memo, “Bin Laden determined to strike in U.S.” — the one Bush dismissed at the time as ass-covering — but a much longer and more desperate campaign to wake up Bush’s inner circle. Whipple reports, “Months earlier, starting in the spring of 2001, the CIA repeatedly and urgently began to warn the White House that an attack was coming.”

But the Bush White House was dominated by neoconservatives, who were ideologically fixated on the threat posed by states and dismissed the threat of non-state actors. The administration’s defenders tend to gloss over the wee problem of Bush’s abject failure before the attack by treating it as a passing transitional problem, a matter of getting one’s feet wet, often speaking of the Bush presidency as if did not really begin until September 12. This willfully erases the administration’s gross negligence before the attacks.

It also ignores the reality that Bush and his closest advisers clung to their state-focused neoconservative dogma even after the attacks. That is why the administration began planning to invade Iraq immediately — not because they had some sinister conspiracy to distract the public into going along with their scheme, but because their misguided ideology left them unable to comprehend the power of a threat that did not emanate from a state.

[Xipe Totec]

1. Fighting terrorism was the pretext for taking over the largest reserve of oil in the world. nt

[The Blue Flower]

4. I agree, fighting terrorism had little or nothing to do with their actions

It was always about the oil.

[ladjf]

2. The Bush administration was corrupt from the beginning to the end. nt

[CJCRANE]

3. Well, there's fighting terrorism, then there's doing stuff that creates more terrorism.

Bushco fell into the latter camp.

[Downtown Hound]

5. Bush never fought terrorism

he abandoned the fight against terrorism to pursue his own oil driven agenda and in the process made terrorism much more prolific and powerful.

[Rex]

6. That can never be said enough. History will agree with that claim.

In every textbook on the planet.

[jwirr]

7. At the time I thought that this was not a military concern

but instead a law enforcement problem. Catch the people who did this and protect our country from others who would try to do likewise. I was furious the day everyone was glued to their TV cheering our troops on.

I am still confident that I was right.