Peggy Noonan on how George Bush kept us safe

Not so long ago, Peggy Noonan, writing in the Wall Street Journal suggested that whatever faults George W. Bush may have, at least he kept America safe.

"...the one big thing he had to do after 9/11, the single thing he absolutely had to do, was keep it from happening again. And so far he has. ...

"We have not been attacked since 9/11. Someone--someones--did something right."


Noonan's comments are old news and, ultimately, what Noonan thinks is not appropos about anything, much less George W. Bush.

But people do read what she says, even though, in this case, she lost her way somewhere out in the proverbial left field.

As Blue Texan said, writing at Firedoglake, Yeah, Bush kept us "safe," "Unless you lived in New Orleans after Katrina. . . or were killed by anthrax. . . or were shipped off to Iraq or Afghanistan."

Noonan neglects to mention that Bush and Company failed utterly to protect the country on 9/11/2001. And it wasn't because they had not been informed such attacks were imminent. As Blue Texan points out, "the 9/11 Commission concluded that 6 of the 10 major missed opportunities to prevent 9/11 occurred under Mr. Kept Us Safe's watch." Bush and Company were advised specifically in the summer of 2001 that bin Laden might use airplanes to attack the U.S., and they blew off the warnings!


However those facts work themselves out historically and however the characters involved are called to account for their perfidy, the pressing questions now are: What's the situation in 2008/2009? How "safe" are we?

George and the neocons continue to blather about how they brought "democracy" to Iraq and helped stabilize that country and got rid of the evil Saddam Hussein, and the Middle East is a much better place and isn't it wonderful!

Thus they try to soothe our anxieties by muttering platitudes as to how we're so much safer now than we were pre-9/11 and pre-war in Iraq.

The truth is the opposite.


Ron Suskind, in his book, The One Percent Doctrine, tells how, as American tanks rolled through Baghdad, Americans had identified an important al Qaeda operative, Yusef al-Ayeri. Not only was al-Ayeri "behind a Web site, al-Nida, that U.S. investigators had long felt carried some of the most specialized analysis and coded directives about al Qaeda's motives and plans,

"He was also the anonymous author of two extraordinary pieces of writing--short books, really, that had recently moved through cyberspace, about al-Qaeda's underlying strategies. The Future of Iraq and the Arabian Peninsula After the Fall of Baghdad, written as the United States prepared its attack, said that an American invasion of Iraq would be the best possible outcome for al Qaeda, stoking extremism throughout the Persian Gulf and South Asia, and achieving precisely the radicalizing quagmire that bin Laden had hoped would occur in Afghanistan.

"A second book, Crusader's War, outlined a tactical model for fighting the American forces in Iraq, including 'assassination and poisoning the enemy's food and drink,' remotely triggered explosives, suicide bombings, and lightning strike ambushes. It was the playbook."


The neocon dream began to fall apart soon after the invasion of Iraq. Bush and the neocons never considered seriously the possible negative consequences of their military exploits in the Middle East. While some of them, namely Cheney and Rumsfeld, had spent time in the Middle East, even cozying up to Saddam Hussein when it was to our advantage, they seemed to have been so blinded by ideology that they simply ignored the probable outgrowth of the seeds they planted, or they didn't care.

Then there are those who argue it was all about the oil, anyway. None of them gave a damn about democracy! None of them give a damn about the Middle East!

Whatever the motivation, the invasion of Iraq produced the reverse of what they had dreamed; it became their worse nightmare. It will, as historians write of this period, mark them as the creators of nightmares in which morning never comes!

While Saddam and bin Laden eyed each other from afar with undisguised hatred, the United States, under George W. Bush, proceeded to answer bin Laden's prayers.


Suskind puts it this way:

"One hundred fifty thousand U.S. troops in the center of the Arab world was a jihadist recruiting tool of almost unfathomable magnetism. Terrorist recruitment was on the rise, visibly and markedly, across the Arab world. CIA reports indicated that the madrassas in Yemen, Saudi Arabia, and Iran were overflowing, as were contributions to radical clerics and their operations. Images flashed to millions each day by Al Jazeera of U.S. tanks in Baghdad and Tikrit, and the carnage that was now Iraq, were dissuading young Arab men--in Iraq and across the Gulf--from standing on the sidelines. They were joining the global fight against the 'crusader' Bush and his infidel army as the cause of their generation."

Bush had lied to the American people about Saddam's WMDs, his nuclear program, his threat to the United States, and his relationship to terrorists.

But now - again from Suskind, "there was, finally, a connection between Iraq and the broader 'war on terror.' It was a catalytic relationship, like gasoline on a fire."


Unfortunately for the U.S. and the Iraqis, it's not over yet. And Peggy Noonan, you were and are so very wrong!

In 2008, as Bush prepares to crawl back to Texas, leaving behind the smoking remains of what was once a powerful and prosperous civilization, we, the people of the United States, hunker down, knowing that we are more vulnerable, as a nation, than ever before.

For that we can only thank George W. Bush and his friends for whom failure is the name of the game.


Crooks and Liars has an excellent take on Noonan's article and Bush, pre-9/11, here.