Bush, Biden, Bibi, and the Lessons of 9/11

"After 9/11, we were enraged in the United States," Biden said. "And while we sought justice and got justice, we also made mistakes."

On a cold, wet, miserable Saturday in January 2001, 39 days after the Supreme Court’s controversial 5-4 decision that awarded him the White House on a technicality, George W. Bush was sworn in as the 43rd President of the United States. There were plenty of protestors among the 300,000 who turned out for the event. Three were arrested, one for hurling an egg at Bush’s passing limousine. It would not be the last time a projectile was thrown at him.

Right around that time—it may even have been the same Saturday—my now-wife and I went to see Thirteen Days, a film about the Cuban Missile Crisis, starring Kevin Costner and Bruce Greenwood. Watching the movie, we understood just how close the country had come to all-out war with the Soviet Union, and just how many mountains JFK, RFK, and special assistant Kenneth O’Donnell had to move to prevent nuclear annihilation. A feeling of dread came over me. As the credits rolled, I said to her, “I really hope something like that doesn’t happen while Bush is president.”

Needless to say, something like that did happen while Bush was president. At the behest of a tall, filthy rich, America-hating zealot living in a cave in Afghanistan, 19 terrorists hijacked four commercial airliners. One of the planes crashed in Pennsylvania. One hit the Pentagon. The other two smashed into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center. Two thousand nine hundred seventy seven victims died, along with all 19 terrorists. It was the worst attack on American soil since Pearl Harbor.

For most of the day of September 11, 2001, President Bush was off the grid, zipping around the country aboard Air Force One. That evening, he addressed a nation in shock, in mourning, in rage, and in doubt that this punchline of a president could rise to the occasion. Bush began:

Today, our fellow citizens, our way of life, our very freedom came under attack in a series of deliberate and deadly terrorist acts. The victims were in airplanes, or in their offices; secretaries, businessmen and women, military and federal workers; moms and dads, friends and neighbors. Thousands of lives were suddenly ended by evil, despicable acts of terror.

The pictures of airplanes flying into buildings, fires burning, huge structures collapsing, have filled us with disbelief, terrible sadness, and a quiet, unyielding anger. These acts of mass murder were intended to frighten our nation into chaos and retreat. But they have failed; our country is strong.

So far, so good. Then, after lauding the day’s heroes and assuring Americans that the government would continue to function, Bush brought up the subject of our response. “The search is underway for those who are behind these evil acts,” he declared. “I’ve directed the full resources of our intelligence and law enforcement communities to find those responsible and to bring them to justice.”

And then, two sentences that articulated what would become U.S. policy in the years ahead: “We will make no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbor them.” And, “America and our friends and allies join with all those who want peace and security in the world, and we stand together to win the war against terrorism.”

Of the 19 al-Qaeda operatives who carried out the attacks, two were from the UAE, one was Egyptian, and one Lebanese. The other 15 were Saudi nationals. Bin Laden, too, was from the Kingdom; his father had made his vast fortune running the construction company used by the royal family. But the countries that produced the terrorists faced no repercussions. Nor did we simply hunt down Bin Laden and blow him to smithereens.

Instead, a month after the attacks, the U.S and its allies hit Afghanistan, where Bin Laden was holing up, and took down the Taliban government that was providing him safe harbor. Because there existed no viable alternative to govern that ungovernable place, the U.S. and its allies were forced to set up shop there and engage in nation-building. While there was some limited success, ultimately the project proved futile. Joe Biden finally withdrew our troops from the country, 20 years later. The Afghan president fled, and the Taliban is once again in power in Kabul.

As if that wasn’t bad enough, Bush then made the decision to attack Iraq. Saddam Hussein was a repulsive human, a cruel dictator, and a big-time thief. But he had nothing whatsoever to do with 9/11. Even in real time, this seemed like a terrible idea. Removing Saddam was easy. Establishing an alternative government? Not so much. The destabilization of Iraq led to the destabilization of Syria, and the birth of ISIS, a sort of al Qaeda 2.0.

Topping it off, at the moment when he was waging not one but two separate wars on the other side of the world, Bush cut taxes. As I wrote earlier this year:

The combined price tag of Afghanistan ($2.3 trillion), Iraq ($1.7 trillion), and the tax cut ($1.7 trillion) was a whopping $5,700,000,000,000. (And that’s a conservative estimate.) To put that in perspective: $5.7 trillion is enough to pay off every student loan ($1.75 trillion) and every consumer credit card balance ($930 billion) in the country, with enough left over to write a $9,000 check to every single U.S. citizen. It is a staggering, mind-boggling investment of resources.

The ultimate failure of those two expensive endeavors left the U.S. reluctant to engage in further military activity. Obama did not intervene in Syria, even after the “red line” was crossed, nor did he do much of anything when Putin took Crimea in 2014. (He did, however, accomplish what Bush could not: eliminate Bin Laden.) Trump, meanwhile, invited the Taliban to Camp David. Washington remains so traumatized by the losses in Afghanistan and Iraq that when faced with the prospect of investing in arms for Ukraine to defeat Russia—our longtime enemy, the hostile foreign power that helped install Trump and helps sow chaos here and abroad—our politicians hesitate. So Bush’s response to 9/11 had far-reaching consequences.

I bring this up because, as I am hardly the first to point out, the government of Israel is in a similar situation to what the U.S. faced in 2001. The heinous, barbaric Hamas attacks of October 7 have been, as President Biden said in his statement at the embassy in Tel Aviv last week, “described as Israel’s 9/11. But for a nation the size of Israel, it was like fifteen 9/11s.”

Biden continued:

Since this terrorist attack took place, we have seen it The scale may be different, but I’m sure those horrors have tapped into some kind of primal feeling in Israel, just like it did and felt in the United States. Shock, pain, rage—an all-consuming rage. I understand, and many Americans understand.

You can’t look at what has happened here to your mothers, your fathers, your grandparents, sons, daughters, children—even babies—and not scream out for justice. Justice must be done.

But I caution this: While you feel that rage, don’t be consumed by it.

After 9/11, we were enraged in the United States. And while we sought justice and got justice, we also made mistakes.

He cautioned the Israelis to not rush into something they would later regret, and make the same mistakes the U.S. made:

[I]t requires being deliberate. It requires asking very hard questions. It requires clarity about the objectives and an honest assessment about whether the path you are on will achieve those objectives.

The vast majority of Palestinians are not Hamas. Hamas does not represent the Palestinian people.

The subtext here is: Do not invade Gaza unless you have a clear exit strategy.

The misinformation, disinformation, and propaganda coming out of Gaza has been highly effective. The heartfelt sympathy expressed by much of the world in the immediate wake of the attacks—Germany, for example, projected the Israeli flag onto the Brandenburg Gates (which, by the way, is a few blocks from Berlin’s Holocaust Memorial)—was dampened by a single false news headline—planted by Hamas, amplified by blue-check chaos agents on Elon Musk’s X, and advanced by legit news operations like the AP and the New York Times—suggesting that the Israelis had bombed a hospital in Gaza. Protests erupted in front of Israeli embassies and consulates around the world. Arab leaders canceled their scheduled meetings with Biden. U.S. members of Congress disseminated lies. Anti-Semitic attacks escalated; in Detroit, the president of a local synagogue was stabbed to death outside her house.

And this was after Israel was falsely accused of something it did not do. How would the media—broadcast, print, and social—react if a full-scale invasion of Gaza took place, and Hamas started releasing carefully curated images and footage from a war zone most reporters could not access?

The former Village Voice journalist Lucian Truscott IV, no stranger to war zones, explained the stakes of what Israel is now contemplating:

The calculus for any sort of military action such as that which Israel is contemplating is grim in the extreme. If Israel launches an all-out invasion of Gaza on the ground, complete with infantry, tanks, artillery, and air support, thousands will die, both Hamas fighters and Palestinian civilians, while Israel’s military losses will be limited.  If instead Israel were to decide on a limited invasion of some kind —say, leaving its tanks out of Gaza and using small units of infantry to move house-to-house looking for hostages and killing Hamas fighters—they know the number of Israeli military casualties will be much higher, while fewer Hamas militants would be killed. The number of civilian Palestinian dead would also be lower.   

Every military action is a trade-off. The savage reality of war is that you trade the dead bodies of your own soldiers for a greater toll on the enemy, creating what is called a kill-ratio. This is just a blind estimate, but in any Gaza invasion, Israel would probably be looking for a 10 to 1 kill ratio, losing one Israeli soldier for every ten Hamas dead. But no matter the size of the invasion, Israel will lose hundreds if not thousands of its soldiers.

Truscott then asks the critical question: “[I]n return for what?”

In other words, would the ultimate outcome of a Gaza invasion be worth it? Judging by the U.S. experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan, the answer is no. Sure, Israel would win, but then what?

The Hamas attacks are similar to 9/11 in another way: just as the U.S. was led by the hapless and overmatched George W. Bush, Israel has the worst possible person as prime minister right now. Bibi Netanyahu is a crook, a Trump-like figure steeped in corruption. He has aligned himself with a hateful far-right party. His primary concern is staying in power to avoid conviction and possible prison time. The Israeli people engaged in mass protests all summer, demanding his resignation—and that was before the epic security failure that happened on his watch. Now? Bibi has no business doing that job. Reports say that he intends to step down when the war is over; that gives him tremendous incentive to make the war last as long as possible, which worries me.

So far, Biden and Secretary of State Blinken have managed to convince Bibi to hold off. Diplomacy is working. Hostages are being released—and shouldn’t the release of the hostages be the primary objective here?

In Tel Aviv, Biden reiterated unwavering U.S. support for Israel:

The State of Israel was born to be a safe place for the Jewish people of the world. That’s why it was born. I have long said: If Israel didn’t exist, we would have to invent it.

And while it may not feel that way today, Israel must again be a safe place for the Jewish people. And I promise you: We’re going to do everything in our power to make sure that it will be.

Biden is right. This is how it should be. And the best way to ensure that Israel is a safe place for the Jewish people, it seems to me, is to lend our financial, technical, diplomatic, and intelligence support—whatever our Israeli allies need—and also to convince Bibi not to go through with the full-scale invasion of Gaza. Making no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbor them—Bush’s policy—is a recipe for disaster. Yes, eliminate Hamas. Destroy the evildoers (to borrow a Bush term) who committed these atrocities. But do it without invading Gaza. Don’t make the same mistake we made.

As with the titular thirteen days of the Cuban Missile Crisis, the decisions made now are critical to what will happen in the Middle East in the years to come. Peace is unlikely to be achieved by an escalation of hostilities. As the writer Ehad Nehorai put it, “We cannot meet atrocities with atrocities.”

---

Photo credit: U.S. embassy Jerusalem. Vice President Joe Biden visit to Israel, March 2016, meeting with PM Benjamin Netanyahu.