Yes, George W. Bush Deserves 10% of the Blame for 9/11, and 110% of the Blame for His Execrable Performance as a President After
Live from Where the Willamette Meets the Columbia: There is no honor anywhere in the Bush clan, and no pride in their deeds at all:
"Does anybody actually blame my brother for the attacks on 9/11?...
**:...If they do they're totally marginalizing our society. It's what he did afterwards that matters. And I'm proud of him....
You don't have to have your last name be Bush to understand that. Next week Mr. Trump is probably going to say that FDR was around when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor...
There is no honor or pride in what George W. Bush did after 9/11.
George W. Bush took his eye off the ball. Letting Osama bin-Laden escape from Tora Bora, claiming that catching and punishing Osama bin-Laden and Al Qaeda wasn't the top priority, neglecting the task of protecting us against people who had attacked us to go and attack people who had not--and to waste 40000 American lives Breaking Iraq, taking a bad situation and making it much worse...
There is no honor or pride in that.
There is no honor or pride in what George W. Bush did before 9/11.
Bill Clinton had a pretty good anti-terrorism policy framework--a NSC cabinet-level focus on counter-terrorism, managed by Richard Clarke. Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, Wolfowitz, Perle, and company told Bush that was a mistake. And Bush believed them rather than Tenet. Hence the bureaucracy was told throughout the first three-quarters of 2001 to focus on threats from state actors like Iraq and China, not on non-state actors like Al Qaeda.
If Bush had had half a brain or half a gut, he would have fired more than half of his NSC principals after 9/11: they had made a big call to change Clinton administration priorities, and that call had been wrong.
There is no honor or pride in what George W. Bush did before 9/11, or in how he failed to deal with his NSC principals team in its aftermath.