What would have happened had George Bush done what everyone at the 9/11 Commission and the circling pundits say he should have done: acted pre-emptively against al Quaida to prevent 9/11 based on the sketchy evidence they had before the event? Kathleen Parker speculates in a fictional column taking a “What if” look back:
President-elect John F. Kerry’s rise to the nation’s highest office came as little surprise following almost four years of remonstrations against President George W. Bush for his bizarre attack on the defenseless people of Afghanistan.
Kerry, a decorated Vietnam veteran, was the right man for a nation outraged by the Bush administration’s pre-emptive war, which, it now seems clear, was based on highly speculative intelligence that Saudi Arabian-born terrorist Osama bin Laden was planning an attack on the U.S.
Parker is right on target because what we’ve learned is that the 9/11 commission is not motivated by assessing what we could have done to get enough evidence to stop the 9/11 attacks before they happened. Instead, it’s a political exercise designed to attack the president and turn his decisive action in response to the attacks into a political liability that will get him voted out of office. According to his critics, there is nothing Bush could have done that would have not been excoriated.
And they think Republicans hated Bill Clinton. The hatred for Bush far surpasses that.
