of 10 presidents discarded, America’s war aims were expanded far beyond the destruction of al-Qaida. In June 2002, Bush told the cadets of West Point: “The 20th century ended with a single surviving model of human progress [and] the requirements of freedom apply fully . . . to the entire Islamic world.”
America’s Christians may have failed to halt the remorseless march of secularism in our own society, but we were going to change the culture and thinking of tens of millions of people on the other side of the world who have been marinated for 14 cen- turies in a religion whose name is synonymous with “submission.” This is hubris of a high order. In 2002, Bush issued a “National Security Strategy” mandate instruct- ing the world that America would not permit any nation to reach a level of power where it might challenge U.S. predominance in any part of the world we deemed signifi cant to our security.
Foreign policy scholar and former soldier Andrew Bacevich wrote of the NSS that, “its fusion of breathtak- ing utopianism with barely disguised machtpolitik . . . reads as if it were the product not of sober, ostensi- bly conservative Republicans but of an unlikely collaboration between
9/11 BY THE NUMBERS
Authorities have always met threats, especially to air travel, with new security regulations. But the events of 9/11, along with subsequent terror plots, have unleashed an unprecendented wave of restrictions on the traveling public.
c. Record 82 hijackings in 1969
Emerging Threats
First recorded hijacking, Feb. 1931 in Arequipa, Peru
1931 1950S
Security Responses
Rudimentary airport screenings begin in the 1950s
64 9|11: A DECADE LATER / NEWSMAX / SEPTEMBER 2011
Security checks grow to include metal detectors, pat-downs
Anti-Castro rebels blow up Cubana Flight 455, killing 78
1969 1980S
’80s War on Drugs spurs
increased searches, drug-sniffi ng dogs
9/11/01
Woodrow Wilson and the elder Field Marshal von Moltke.”
Bush began preaching a world democratic revolution he would lead to decide the destiny of all mankind. In his second inaugural address, he declared, “the survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands.” Hence, America shall commit her- self to the “ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world.”
Astonishing. With half the United Nation’s 192 nations ruled by auto- crats and dictators, were we to over- throw them all? What had happened to Bush? He lost
sight
Where on earth did Bush get his “axis” idea? Iran and Iraq had fought an eight- year war in the Reagan decade. One was Arab and Sunni-dominated, the other Persian and Shia. North Korea had almost nothing to do with either. Among the most reckless speech- es ever delivered by a U.S. presi- dent, Bush’s “axis-of-evil” State of the Union split his country, split NATO, and forced the Islamic world into opposition against us, only months after 9/11 had brought us the sympa- thy of the world.
of the real war
against al-Qaida, a war in which even Saddam Hussein and the Ayatollah were passive allies. The former, a whiskey-drinking secular despot, was despised by the Islamist fanatic bin Laden. The Ayatollah hated the Taliban, who had murdered his dip- lomats. Instead of cobbling together a global coalition to fi ght al-Qaida, Bush, only weeks after the over- throw of the Taliban, went before the Congress to identify Iran, Iraq, and North Korea as an “axis of evil” that we must never allow to acquire weapons of mass destruction, even if that meant preventive wars by the United States.
His neoconservative acolytes assured Bush that Iraq would be a “cakewalk” war. Moreover, they claimed to have evidence Saddam was behind the anthrax attacks, that Saddam was tied to 9/11, that Saddam was producing chemical and bio- logical weapons, that Saddam was enriching uranium in schools and chicken coops.
To stop the stampede, several of us on the anti-war right launched The American Conservative. In the fi rst issue, September 2002, I pre- dicted what would happen when we invaded: “If Providence does not intrude, we will soon launch an imperial war on Iraq with all the ‘On-to-Berlin!’ bravado with which French poilus and British Tommies
PLANE/EVANS/THREE LIONS/GETTY IMAGES / CASTRO/AP IMAGES / DOG/MARTIN RUEGNER/PHOTOGRAPHER’S CHOICE/GETTY IMAGES 9-11/SPENCER PLATT/GETTY IMAGES
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