From The Cole To The Towers
For all the hoopla stirred up about the ABC miniseries The Path To 9/11, I didn't think about tuning it in last night until there was fifteen or so minutes left in the three hour Part I. Once I get planted on my couch watching NFL football, it's difficult to get myself off of it for (just about) anything. Mrs. HS could corroborate what that exception is, if she discussed such things in mixed company. Anyway, I had the "Manning Bowl" tuned in all evening without really even thinking about Path, probably because I still had it lodged in my brain that it was running on Monday and Tuesday instead of Sunday-Monday.
At any rate, I did tune it in tonight, and it was indeed gripping drama. It also insufferably glorified its two main protagonists, FBI agent John O'Neill and Clintonoid counter-terrorism czar Dick Clarke. O'Neill suffers the bitterest possible irony of getting essentially bums-rushed out of the Bureau for taking Islamist terrorism seriously and into a job as head of security....at the World Trade Center. His secretary even brings in a new laptop and asks him if he wants the IT guys to set it up, a toe-curling parallel with the Zaccarias Moussoui laptop his people weren't allowed to peak into. But at least O'Neill "goes down with the ship," as it were. Clarke is made to look like a prophet who gets honored in his own country as opposed to Condi Rice, whose scene "redefining" Clarke's anti-terrorism job sets up the ensuing one where she turns to him to bail out the entire Bush Administration after the first Islamikaze hits as if she were a PhD'd Penelope Pitstop.
At least the actress playing Rice actually looked somewhat like her. Dick Cheney is depicted as being ninety years older then Allah, senile, almost smacking his lips together absently to hold his dentures in his mouth, and looking a lot more like Vermont Democrat Senator Pat Leahy than the real-life veep.
The swipes at President Bush are more subtle, but still glaring. They didn't get an actor to portray Dubya, but ABC managed to get its licks in. As the Secret Service is hussling Cheney out of the White House "to a secure location," the camera slows down to show the door to the Oval Office ajar, the big chair behind Old Resolute empty, as though the President had gone AWOL. Cheney insists that the President "must alter his itinerary," as though he considered any interruption of reading to Florida school children about baby goats to be "a victory for the terrorists." And when they finally get hold of GDub, Cheney gives the impression that Bush has locked himself in the toilet of Air Force One and refuses to come out until "the boogeymen are gone." Makes me wish I'd been watching last night to see how "objectively" they depicted Sick Willie.
Lastly, after the 9/11 attacks take place everything slows down again, dust enshrouds the suddenly quiet, surreal Gotham streets, and the 9/11 Commission clucking begins. Lotsa "D"s and "F"s and only one "A" - for the SWIFT terrorist finance tracking program, which the New York Times helpfully exposed a few months ago. As though the body that included Richard Ben-Viniste, who was in the forefront of Clintonoids trying to abort this docudrama, and Jamie Gorelick, the architect of the infamous "wall of separation" between the FBI and CIA preventing the intelligence-sharing that could have prevented 9/11, has the magic beans that if planted in the right place will grow the impregnable anti-terror stalk. As though a blue-ribbon panel of bureaucrats who only know how to tinker with organization charts, half of which was out to get George Bush during his re-election campaign and the other half of which was happy to let the first half indulge themselves, were mystically inspired to write the blueprint for getting inside Osama bin Laden's head without getting any of the devil juice on them.
Still, it was gripping. I don't know if I'd go so far as to say "riveting." Whatever treatment Clinton got in Part I, his foreign policy flunkies are shown in all their glory after the Cole attack, coming up with every feeble excuse in the proverbial book for avoiding any retaliation against al Qaeda, including the fact that doing so "could affect the [Bush-Gore] election in three weeks." And they do get the Bushies moving on dealing with the al Qaeda threat after the famous August 2001 presidential intelligence briefing.
There was an oddly frustrating aspect to the program as a viewer. Since I knew the ultimate outcome, it left me with a vaguely helpless feeling, as I was (kinda sorta) reliving the whole thing only paying better attention this time. If only somebody, ANYbody, had listened to the heroic Jeremiahs (O'Neill and Clarke), a mass tragedy could have been prevented, thousand of lives saved, and the course of history altered.
Naaaah, probably not. I wrote often during the Clinton detour that you couldn't outsource US foreign policy to the UN, recklessly downsize the military and subvert its internal martial culture, and subordinate American national security interests to domestic political machinations and not inevitably suffer drastic consequences. The Clintonoids were all about making threats go away by either trying to buy them off (Red China, North Korea and its nukes) or simply impacting their collective head in their collective hindquarters and pretending they didn't exist (al Qaeda, Iran). Anything to kick those cans down the road and beyond Mr. Bill's watch so that he could escape the blame for letting them metastasize and hog all the credit for the false "peace" that preceded their ultimate eruption.
Seen in that context, some sort of major national security disaster was inevitable. The only question was who, how, where, and when. Disrupt 9/11 and there'd simply have been another attack later - maybe a sarin attack in the New York subway system, or a radiological attack on Chicago. The pre-9/11 Bushies were taking the al Qaeda threat a lot more seriously than their cowardly, incompetent predecessors, but even they were contemplating measures a lot more restrained than an all out invasion of Afghanistan. Absent the abject example of 9/11 it's doubtful there'd have been the public, to say nothing of political, support for even that much. And forget liberating Iraq and gaining the geostrategic positioning to liberate Iran and Syria as well and clear the "Arab crescent." C'mon, the Democrats giving such a free hand to the "illegitimate," "selected, not elected" president who "stole" the 2000 election? Please.
Sounds a lot like....well, today, doesn't it? If anything, the Donks are even crazier now than they were post-Florida-2K precisely because of the popularity boost Bush's heroic post-9/11 leadership gave him (Let's face it, without 9/11 and his response to it, Bush probably doesn't win a second term) and the political capital that gave him to so dramatically (if only temporarily) reshape America's foreign policy/national defense paradigm from reaction to pre-emption. Even more than that, though, is that 9/11 proved the utter failure of liberal foreign policy nostrums. It turned out you really can't disarm, demobilize, demoralize, and diploappease in a dangerous, America-hating world and usher in an acid-trip utopia. There really are enemies out there that want to destroy us and everything we stand for, and it really isn't our fault, and we really do have to fight and crush them before they can butcher us in even greater numbers. And, worst of all, it was George Bush who realized these things and acted upon them - and there hasn't been another such attack inside our country in the five years since.
And it hasn't been for lack of trying on the enemy's part.
But here's where I worry: sooner or later, sheer statistical probability guarantees that, absent the toppling of the remaining terror masters in Tehran and Damascus and whereever else the al Qaeda brand sets up shop (i.e. Mogadishu, ironically enough), another attack will get through. We can prevent 999 terror plots, but if the thousandth gets through, we've still failed, and they've succeeded. It's simply the nature of assymmetrical warfare. If/when that happens, given the existent state of the American political landscape - full-scale political civil war approaching the level of open, outright political violence (the first inklings of which we saw in the closing days of the 2004 campaign) - it is an equal certainty that the Democrats will cite the attack as "proof" that resisting Islamic terrorism "doesn't work," is a "mistake," has been a "neocon cover" for "imposing a fascist police state" and "launching imperialist wars of aggression" (i.e. Iraq and Afghanistan) all along, and that we must return to Clinton-style appeasement and prostration and "engagement" at all costs to "save America." If they win Congress in November it would become the lead justification for impeaching Bush AND Cheney and installing President Pelosi. And I have to wonder whether Republicans would have the testicular fortitude to fight this retreat into suicidal fantasy, AND whether or not a terrified and "war-weary" public at large wouldn't be swayed by such pacifist dem-ogoguery.
Every war is a battle of wills, but none moreso than this one because our will to resist Islamic imperialism is the sole target of the enemy. None of them - not Wahhabist al Qaeda, not Ba'athist Syria, not Shiite Iran or its Hezbollah proxy - can hope to survive us on the conventional battlefield. But inflict enough assymmetrical casualties where we are "forwardly engaged" (Afghanistan, Iraq) to feed the mania of our domestic DisLoyalists and Enemy Media long enough, infiltrate our country at will like a mist and unleash repeated, seemingly unstoppable mayhem and carnage and havoc, let Islamist Iran - Terror Central - secure a nuclear arsenal and subject us to nuclear blackmail, and that helpless feeling I alluded to earlier would come back with a vengeance.
As though....history were repeating itself.
Only this time there would be no happy, or even surreally quiet, ending.
At any rate, I did tune it in tonight, and it was indeed gripping drama. It also insufferably glorified its two main protagonists, FBI agent John O'Neill and Clintonoid counter-terrorism czar Dick Clarke. O'Neill suffers the bitterest possible irony of getting essentially bums-rushed out of the Bureau for taking Islamist terrorism seriously and into a job as head of security....at the World Trade Center. His secretary even brings in a new laptop and asks him if he wants the IT guys to set it up, a toe-curling parallel with the Zaccarias Moussoui laptop his people weren't allowed to peak into. But at least O'Neill "goes down with the ship," as it were. Clarke is made to look like a prophet who gets honored in his own country as opposed to Condi Rice, whose scene "redefining" Clarke's anti-terrorism job sets up the ensuing one where she turns to him to bail out the entire Bush Administration after the first Islamikaze hits as if she were a PhD'd Penelope Pitstop.
At least the actress playing Rice actually looked somewhat like her. Dick Cheney is depicted as being ninety years older then Allah, senile, almost smacking his lips together absently to hold his dentures in his mouth, and looking a lot more like Vermont Democrat Senator Pat Leahy than the real-life veep.
The swipes at President Bush are more subtle, but still glaring. They didn't get an actor to portray Dubya, but ABC managed to get its licks in. As the Secret Service is hussling Cheney out of the White House "to a secure location," the camera slows down to show the door to the Oval Office ajar, the big chair behind Old Resolute empty, as though the President had gone AWOL. Cheney insists that the President "must alter his itinerary," as though he considered any interruption of reading to Florida school children about baby goats to be "a victory for the terrorists." And when they finally get hold of GDub, Cheney gives the impression that Bush has locked himself in the toilet of Air Force One and refuses to come out until "the boogeymen are gone." Makes me wish I'd been watching last night to see how "objectively" they depicted Sick Willie.
Lastly, after the 9/11 attacks take place everything slows down again, dust enshrouds the suddenly quiet, surreal Gotham streets, and the 9/11 Commission clucking begins. Lotsa "D"s and "F"s and only one "A" - for the SWIFT terrorist finance tracking program, which the New York Times helpfully exposed a few months ago. As though the body that included Richard Ben-Viniste, who was in the forefront of Clintonoids trying to abort this docudrama, and Jamie Gorelick, the architect of the infamous "wall of separation" between the FBI and CIA preventing the intelligence-sharing that could have prevented 9/11, has the magic beans that if planted in the right place will grow the impregnable anti-terror stalk. As though a blue-ribbon panel of bureaucrats who only know how to tinker with organization charts, half of which was out to get George Bush during his re-election campaign and the other half of which was happy to let the first half indulge themselves, were mystically inspired to write the blueprint for getting inside Osama bin Laden's head without getting any of the devil juice on them.
Still, it was gripping. I don't know if I'd go so far as to say "riveting." Whatever treatment Clinton got in Part I, his foreign policy flunkies are shown in all their glory after the Cole attack, coming up with every feeble excuse in the proverbial book for avoiding any retaliation against al Qaeda, including the fact that doing so "could affect the [Bush-Gore] election in three weeks." And they do get the Bushies moving on dealing with the al Qaeda threat after the famous August 2001 presidential intelligence briefing.
There was an oddly frustrating aspect to the program as a viewer. Since I knew the ultimate outcome, it left me with a vaguely helpless feeling, as I was (kinda sorta) reliving the whole thing only paying better attention this time. If only somebody, ANYbody, had listened to the heroic Jeremiahs (O'Neill and Clarke), a mass tragedy could have been prevented, thousand of lives saved, and the course of history altered.
Naaaah, probably not. I wrote often during the Clinton detour that you couldn't outsource US foreign policy to the UN, recklessly downsize the military and subvert its internal martial culture, and subordinate American national security interests to domestic political machinations and not inevitably suffer drastic consequences. The Clintonoids were all about making threats go away by either trying to buy them off (Red China, North Korea and its nukes) or simply impacting their collective head in their collective hindquarters and pretending they didn't exist (al Qaeda, Iran). Anything to kick those cans down the road and beyond Mr. Bill's watch so that he could escape the blame for letting them metastasize and hog all the credit for the false "peace" that preceded their ultimate eruption.
Seen in that context, some sort of major national security disaster was inevitable. The only question was who, how, where, and when. Disrupt 9/11 and there'd simply have been another attack later - maybe a sarin attack in the New York subway system, or a radiological attack on Chicago. The pre-9/11 Bushies were taking the al Qaeda threat a lot more seriously than their cowardly, incompetent predecessors, but even they were contemplating measures a lot more restrained than an all out invasion of Afghanistan. Absent the abject example of 9/11 it's doubtful there'd have been the public, to say nothing of political, support for even that much. And forget liberating Iraq and gaining the geostrategic positioning to liberate Iran and Syria as well and clear the "Arab crescent." C'mon, the Democrats giving such a free hand to the "illegitimate," "selected, not elected" president who "stole" the 2000 election? Please.
Sounds a lot like....well, today, doesn't it? If anything, the Donks are even crazier now than they were post-Florida-2K precisely because of the popularity boost Bush's heroic post-9/11 leadership gave him (Let's face it, without 9/11 and his response to it, Bush probably doesn't win a second term) and the political capital that gave him to so dramatically (if only temporarily) reshape America's foreign policy/national defense paradigm from reaction to pre-emption. Even more than that, though, is that 9/11 proved the utter failure of liberal foreign policy nostrums. It turned out you really can't disarm, demobilize, demoralize, and diploappease in a dangerous, America-hating world and usher in an acid-trip utopia. There really are enemies out there that want to destroy us and everything we stand for, and it really isn't our fault, and we really do have to fight and crush them before they can butcher us in even greater numbers. And, worst of all, it was George Bush who realized these things and acted upon them - and there hasn't been another such attack inside our country in the five years since.
And it hasn't been for lack of trying on the enemy's part.
But here's where I worry: sooner or later, sheer statistical probability guarantees that, absent the toppling of the remaining terror masters in Tehran and Damascus and whereever else the al Qaeda brand sets up shop (i.e. Mogadishu, ironically enough), another attack will get through. We can prevent 999 terror plots, but if the thousandth gets through, we've still failed, and they've succeeded. It's simply the nature of assymmetrical warfare. If/when that happens, given the existent state of the American political landscape - full-scale political civil war approaching the level of open, outright political violence (the first inklings of which we saw in the closing days of the 2004 campaign) - it is an equal certainty that the Democrats will cite the attack as "proof" that resisting Islamic terrorism "doesn't work," is a "mistake," has been a "neocon cover" for "imposing a fascist police state" and "launching imperialist wars of aggression" (i.e. Iraq and Afghanistan) all along, and that we must return to Clinton-style appeasement and prostration and "engagement" at all costs to "save America." If they win Congress in November it would become the lead justification for impeaching Bush AND Cheney and installing President Pelosi. And I have to wonder whether Republicans would have the testicular fortitude to fight this retreat into suicidal fantasy, AND whether or not a terrified and "war-weary" public at large wouldn't be swayed by such pacifist dem-ogoguery.
Every war is a battle of wills, but none moreso than this one because our will to resist Islamic imperialism is the sole target of the enemy. None of them - not Wahhabist al Qaeda, not Ba'athist Syria, not Shiite Iran or its Hezbollah proxy - can hope to survive us on the conventional battlefield. But inflict enough assymmetrical casualties where we are "forwardly engaged" (Afghanistan, Iraq) to feed the mania of our domestic DisLoyalists and Enemy Media long enough, infiltrate our country at will like a mist and unleash repeated, seemingly unstoppable mayhem and carnage and havoc, let Islamist Iran - Terror Central - secure a nuclear arsenal and subject us to nuclear blackmail, and that helpless feeling I alluded to earlier would come back with a vengeance.
As though....history were repeating itself.
Only this time there would be no happy, or even surreally quiet, ending.
posted by JASmius at 10:32 PM
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