Why history will judge Biden right
AS the President’s car raced towards Air Force One, senior adviser Karl Rove noticed something he had never seen before. There were four police cars surrounding the main vehicle, two in the front, two at the back.
He later learned that the secret service were worried about a suicide car bomber ramming the motorcade, and they wanted to put some distance between the explosives and President George W Bush to give him a better chance of surviving the blast. “Sort of a sobering moment,” recalls Rove.
It was one of many featured in Inside the President’s War Room, a documentary marking 20 years since 9/11. To watch Adam Wishart’s brilliant 90-minute film – now available on iplayer – was to be reminded of the madness of that day, when it seemed as though anything could happen.
One is also left wondering how things might have turned out had another President been in charge.
It says something about the West’s relative innocence before 9/11 that the initial reaction to the first plane crashing into one of the Twin Towers was to think it was an accident. That was what President Bush concluded. Pilot error. Had to be. Things like that did not happen outside of novels and movies.
When the second plane hit it was clear that America was under attack. It became equally apparent there was no plan in place for the President to follow. The most powerful leader in the world was reduced to criss-crossing the richest nation on the planet in his plane, trying to get through on a dodgy phone line to the White
House bunker. Air Force One did not even have satellite TV.
What shone through in the documentary’s account of that day was the way initial shock and sorrow crystallised into cold, hard fury on the President’s part.
In the space of a couple of hours, the newly inaugurated leader who had such big plans for reforming education became a wartime commander-in-chief.
He needed a target to hit but there was no conventional one to hand. As Mr Bush says, what was happening here was a new type of war. The enemy had no standing army, no government, it lived in the shadows.
Thus was born the Bush doctrine. Conceived that day and revealed to the world in his address from the Oval Office that evening, the Bush doctrine held that America would make no distinction between terrorists and those who harboured them.
Had he followed his own reasoning America should have gone after Saudi Arabia, home to 15 of the 19 hijackers.
But that would have been unthinkable given the connections between the two countries.
On learning about Afghanistan’s sheltering of Al- Qaeda and Osama bin Laden, Mr Bush found his enemy. “I’m not much of a navel gazer,” he tells the interviewer in Inside the President’s War Room. “I guess you could say I’m a man of action. I acted.”
Or as one aide recalls the President saying, “**** diplomacy, we’re going to war”.
The world was on America’s side that day. It wasn’t just Tony Blair who wanted to stand shoulder to shoulder with America. Even Vladimir Putin knew a line had been crossed. If that fellow feeling had been channelled in another direction where would we be today? Instead the world got a President intent on waging an idiotic and ill-defined “war on terror” and a British Prime Minister, in the creeping form of Tony Blair, who had been itching for years to breeze into other countries and sort them out, for their own and the general good, naturally.
The President wanted to smack something the way the cameras caught him despatching a fly seconds before he addressed the nation on 9/11. It should have been a matter of enter and exit Afghanistan asap.
Instead it turned into a prolonged exercise in “nation building”. From that decision flowed many another horror, from Guantanamo to Iraq to Abu Ghraib to the sickening sight of the Taliban taking back Kabul in recent weeks.
“I think I was right,” Dubya says today. Asked if his actions after 9/11 had made the world a safer place, he says there have not been any other attacks on America. “I’m comfortable with the decisions I made,” he adds.
No acknowledgment of other terrorist attacks elsewhere in the world.
No recognition of what the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq have cost in lives and suffering. A fool to the end.
There is a clear line connecting the events of 9/11, and the wars that came after, to Joe Biden declaring this week that America was getting out of the business of “remaking” other countries by military means.
Some have been shocked and appalled at this Trumpian isolationism. Yet even the most cursory examination of Mr Biden’s personal and political history would have shown that he is not now, nor has he ever been, a liberal “nation builder” like Mr Blair.
While Mr Biden voted for the invasion of Afghanistan after 9/11 he wanted a defined mission with a clear exit strategy. He was always going to withdraw as soon as possible. That others did not see this is a failing on their part. Far from viewing withdrawal as an “imbecilic” idea, in the words of Tony Blair, President Biden had long held it to be in the interests of his country.
The manner of America’s leaving has certainly been disastrous. It could have been handled better. But the basic idea was sound. This was what the American public wanted, part of the platform on which they had elected Mr Biden.
To those who think America should have stayed to protect what gains had been made, particularly among women, those changes could have been brought about in ways other than an invasion and a 20-year occupation. The UN manages to help countries without invading them.
The 20th anniversary of 9/11 should remind us what terrible wrongs can be perpetrated by those who think they are in the right.
Such men start the wars and leave other people’s sons and daughters to fight and die in them. President Biden is honest enough to say he does not want that. He should be commended for saying so, not condemned, and especially not by the likes of Tony Blair.
What shone through was the way shock and sorrow crystallised into cold, hard fury on the President’s part