Thread: Donald Trump is right that George W. Bush didn't keep us safe, regardless of blame fo

Unsafe By Any Definition
Donald Trump is right that George W. Bush didn't keep us safe, regardless of blame for 9/11.

By Robert Schlesinger
Oct. 19, 2015 | 2:00 p.m. EDT

The "kept us safe" argument is back. Donald Trump and Jeb Bush, the current and former GOP 2016 front-runners, have spent the last several days bickering on Twitter and on television about whether former President George W. Bush, Jeb's brother, "kept us safe" during his time as president.

The "safe" argument has been widely interpreted (in spite of Trump insisting he's not talking about blame) as including the question of culpability – was 9/11 President Bush's fault? The fault question is loaded with partisan resonance, recalling as it does the endless arguments of the latter half of Bush's tenure. But while the question of culpability is related, Trump is right that it's separate – and he is inarguably right on the "safe" question regardless of whether the 43rd president deserves a little, a lot or no blame at all for the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

It's not surprising that the issue of blame gets conflated with the one of safety. Obviously you cannot argue that Bush "kept us safe" whilst simultaneously assigning him any level of culpability for the attacks; and one needn't be a 9/11 truther to believe that W. has some culpability – you can dispute the "safe" argument on the grounds that Bush could have done more to secure the country from a terrorist attack (Peter Beinart makes this case in great detail this morning in The Atlantic) or on the grounds that post-9/11 Bush failed to keep the country safe (see The Atlantic's Conor Friedersdorf when Jeb made the same argument back in 2012). The counter argument seems to be that Bush should not be held culpable for the attacks because they were so unprecedented as to be unimaginable (remember that the 9/11 Commission said that the government's greatest failing was one of "imagination") and so not something for which any president could have prepared any better.

But as I said, the question of blame is distinct from the question of safety. For the sake of argument let's stipulate that Bush is utterly blameless in regard to 9/11 and that given that mulligan his record for the remainder of his administration is spotless – that the days from January 20, 2001 through September 10, 2001 and September 12, 2001 through January 19, 2009 were a time of unblemished national safety. You still can't say that he kept us safe, because regardless of blame 9/11 happened.

Put another way, you can't credit George W. Bush for a state of safety that did not exist.

The fact is that 9/11 was the worst terrorist attack in the country's history, with a death toll that reached 2,977 people. By definition that is an absence of "safe." We can argue about whether and how much blame should accrue to the man who was president that day, but you simply can't describe the country as having been "safe." This would be like Jeb Bush asserting that as president his brother kept the Yankees out of the World Series or kept John Kerry from being the Democratic presidential nominee in 2004 for president or kept a "Lord of the Rings" movie from winning Best Picture – none of these assertions would be true regardless of whether Bush personally had any influence over those events. (Maybe Jeb Bush – who tweeted out a picture of his brother standing on the site where thousands of people had died days earlier – has a different definition of safe?)

The smarmy certitude with which Jeb Bush makes such an obviously false statement is irritating; and the desperate applause it tends to elicit from Republican audiences is telling, as if this one supposed accomplishment of their last president can be used as a shield against the rest of the wreck that was his presidency.

But what's particularly galling about the "kept us safe" meme is that the attempt to excise that one day from Bush's eight years in office cheapens the lives lost in those attacks. The 9/11 attacks and the nearly 3,000 souls lost in them are part of George W. Bush's legacy regardless of questions of fault. To elide those deaths is a vile insult to their memory.

http://www.usnews.com/opinion/blogs/...out-9-11-blame

The words "perpetrators would not have been in the country" has been lost in all the media discussions. He would not have permitted expired student visas and visas for prior problem people from that area of the world to be here in the USA. That is how
he would make and deep us safe - tighten up this outlandish open border and visa sloppiness.

Plus, Condoleeza Rice stated she repeatedly informed bush of communication picked up re airplanes into buildings - he was at his ranch and did not do anything about it. Conspiracy or not, it would not be the first time communication fell on deaf ears to initiate war/conflict that spends billions of dollars - somebody profits and cheyney's Haliburton did quite well moneywise.

Correct. In addition, 15 of the so-called "legal visas" were not legal. There's a write-up about them on the internet that shows those visa applications were not complete or accurate and should have never been issued to begin with. On Fox today, Trump is getting high praise from a lot of people for raising this issue, the issue nobody else has had the guts to raise, and they read some excerpts from a book Trump wrote in 2000 talking about his concerns and that of others with national security. Most people after the first attack on the WTC were saying "close the borders", stop all immigration. We said the same thing again after 2001. We don't have to issue visas of any kind to anyone, students or otherwise, and we don't have to issue green cards or tolerate illegal aliens. You keep your country safe by securing it and carefully vetting to the bone anyone you let in, ESPECIALLY from countries where we already know we have a problem.

It was a terrible thing to have happened, and it was so easy to solve it through proper immigration controls.