So, Was the Shrub So Obsessed With Saddam That He Ignored Warnings?
When I was in Journalism school in another lifetime, we were often reminded of the journalistic integrity and the general excellence of the Christian Science Monitor. I was quite pleased to find the paper offered as an RSS feed so that I could read the stories I was interested in at leisure.
So, after reading and thinking about all of this information regarding how Shrub might have known that Al Qaida intended to hijack aircraft prior to 9/11 yet did nothing whatsoever to beef up security, to possibly change guidelines for what was allowed on board aircraft, or do anything else. Why? Because, at least according to this story our President was too busy planning on avenging his father's bloody nose in Iraq to consider any other group as a terrorist threat.
The outgoing president counseled his successor that he would face five challenges in the international arena - the Israeli- Palestinian conflict, the Al Qaeda terrorist threat, a nuclear-armed North Korea, the India-Pakistan confrontation, and the Saddam Hussein dictatorship in Iraq.Clinton was surprised at Bush's response. He said he disagreed with Clinton's order - that he considered Saddam Hussein to be the primary threat that he would have to deal with.
So if this is true, it's relatively easy to believe how Bush the Younger would have discounted any threats that did NOT come from what he considered to be the One True Evil, Saddam Hussein. Could this possibly be the result of a fundamentalist Christian mindset that might have cast Saddam as the Antichrist, and therefore the only important thing to be vanquished, despite the possible loss of life in a terrorist attack? And then, complete overreaction with draconian measures and rhetoric about "protecting us at all costs" perhaps out of guilt from doing nothing at all to prevent 9/11?