This Is Journalism?

One of the editorials in today's Minneapolis Star Tribune truly is mind boggling. Check out some of these excerpts; see if you think that they bear any minor relationship to reality:

When President Bush took office, an imminent threat against the United States indeed existed, but it wasn't from Saddam Hussein. It was from terrorism worldwide -- most immediately from Osama bin Laden and Al-Qaida.

The Bush administration was apprised of that threat by the outgoing Clinton administration and presented with a plan of action for taking the fight aggressively and soon to Bin Laden. The White House all but ignored the warning. Instead, counterterrorism funding was cut and, as former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill has disclosed, the president and his national security team focused on removing Saddam Hussein from power.

Oh! How unfortunate that the Constitution was ever amended! Too bad that Clinton & Company couldn't have remained in office; sounds like they were just days away from capturing Bin Laden.

At the beginning of the Bush administration, the United States enjoyed immense amounts of what Harvard University's Joseph Nye calls "soft power" -- respect, admiration, friendship. That soft power increased dramatically in the days and weeks following 9/11. The Bush administration failed to use that soft power before 9/11 and caused it to evaporate after 9/11, first by attempting to go it alone in Afghanistan, then by lurching away from the focus on terror to invade Iraq -- where no imminent threat existed, where containment was working and where most of the world didn't want the United States to go. As many critics have emphasized, Iraq was a distraction from the war on terror, not part of it.

That idiot, George Bush! Everyone around the world wanted to help him. Instead of going where the real trouble was, he sends troops to Iraq, where everything is A-OK. (This is, of course, as long as you aren't one of the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis being tortured and/or murdered.)

Imagine a different scenario: Instead of unleashing a radical neoconservative foreign-policy agenda focused on Iraq, what if the Bush administration had spent its first months taking the terrorism threat seriously and building a very strong international coalition that included France, Germany, Russia, China, India, Spain, Britain, Italy and others?

What if such a coalition had sought to take preemptive action not against Iraq, but against known terrorist groups that had already bombed U.S. embassies, attacked the USS Cole, and so on? What if that coalition had followed every lead, every link, every money transfer and arms purchase? What if the coalition had sought to root Al-Qaida out of its Afghan base? Would that coalition have been capable of preventing 9/11? Would it have led to discoveries that might have foiled the attacks in Bali, or Istanbul or Madrid?

What if GWB had "taken terrorism seriously?" Are the Star Tribune editors using hallucinogenics?

I could list dozens - no, hundreds of ways in which the President "took terrorism seriously" - not to mention how he and his administration went to the international community to inlist additional aid.

And how gracious of the editors to imply that terrorist attacks around the world most likely could have been avoided had Bush only taken the proper steps ....!

But these are the Serious Bush Haters. Facts and rational argument are merely ignored. No need to go through the motions with them. Their goal is the destruction of George Bush. If truth, accuracy and reason go by the wayside in that pursuit - so be it.

Comments

[d]

If the critics of Bush are so smart, why didn't them mail him a letter expressing their concerns before 9/11? The critics seem to imply that knew 9/11 was coming, but they did nothing about it.