I'm doing my dissertation at university on this...the following makes some interesting reading...
do? For Bush, there were
two fundamental things that had to happen. First the US had to be strong. America had looked
weak in the 1990s. We did not finish the war against Saddam or remove Saddam. I was in the
government then and I thought it was a big mistake at the time and morally problematic too, to
encourage the rebellion and then just leave them there. We did not remove Saddam, however,
for various reasons having to do with UN authorization, and perhaps having to do with our
belief that a weak Saddam would encourage stability in the region. In retrospect, however,
it looked weak; you are a dictator, you invade your neighbor, you kill and slaughter lots of
people; you get kicked out – and you are still in power. What kind of a lesson is that?
In the Balkans, Milosevic took that lesson right away – that you could get away with ethnic
cleansing and murder, and we didn’t do anything there in 1991 or 1992 either. In Somalia, we
were kicked out by a small group of terrorists and thugs. In October 1993, we retreated aer
suffering 19 casualties. Then, of course, we did not intervene in Rwanda in 1994, and we did
nothing about the terrorist takeover of Afghanistan in 1996. We threatened Saddam in 1998 but
we did not move against him; we were threatened in Africa by Al-Qaeda in 1998, and the USS
Cole was aacked in Yemen in October 2000. We carried out a few lile air strikes aer some
of those aacks, but basically we did not look powerful. As Osama Bin-Laden said in one of
his video-tapes, “The US is a weak horse, not a strong horse.” He was wrong, thank God, and
the US turned out to be a stronger horse than he expected and the American people turned out
to be willing to pay the price of going aer terror, of going into Afghanistan and going into
Iraq.
Bush’s first decision was that the US had to be strong. The mistake of the 1990s, with all the
talk about US Wilsonianism, American empire, American overreaching and the mistakes aer
the end of the Cold War, was not that America was too strong, or intervened too much or too
early, or that America imposed democracy all over the world. The mistake of the 1990s was
that we did nothing in the Balkans, we did nothing in Rwanda, we were late in dealing with
terror, and we did not remove Saddam. Bush decided we would be strong, and we would act
more quickly and we would not continue to let it appear we were weak and unable to act.
Secondly, Bush decided we needed to change our strategy in the Middle East; we needed
to be serious about promoting democracy, about insisting that regimes not tolerate terror. We
all knew this to be a very complicated process which could not happen overnight, but we
took heart from what happened in Asia, where people said Taiwan, Korea and the Philippines
were not ready for democracy, and from what happened in Eastern Europe where people
said Poland, Slovakia, Romania and countries like that were not ready for democracy; and
Bush thought it was reasonable to begin pushing toward liberal democracy in the Middle
East: if not now – when? That does not mean that Bush is a Wilsonian who thinks he can snap
his fingers and transform the whole region and ignore its culture and history. But what was
the alternative – to bet on the next generation of Mubaraks, or the next generation of Assads
and prop up these dictators who were increasingly weak and increasingly erratic, and whose
countries were increasingly becoming hotbeds of anti-Americanism and extremism, either
because the dictators fostered it or because, by reacting to the dictators, popular movements
became anti-American because America looked as though it was propping up dictators?"
Quite interesting really
And I totally do not believe that 9-11 was a conspiracy theory at all.
