Atlanta, GA
September 13, 2026
On the anniversary of 9/11, we described the harrowing tales of two people who escaped the towers. These heroes deserve to be honored, as do the dead, their families, and the countless victims who carry scars.
But during these commemorations, there’s been a weird effort to revive the reputation of someone who deserves rebuke. Here’s a sample of a disturbingly high number of these sentiments posted this weekend:
For days we’ve (understandably) seen video of George W. Bush inspiring responders at Ground Zero and hurling the first pitch at Yankee Stadium.
I get the appeal. I had goosebumps watching those, and still do. It was moving. On those occasions, the president performed well. But they were about the only good things Bush did. Do they compensate for the ensuing calamities he precipitated?
Seeds of War
Like most of us, I was shocked when the attacks occurred. But I wasn’t surprised. After the reckless interventions of the prior half century, retaliation was a matter of time. Attempts on US soil had been made previously, notably eight years earlier at the same World Trade Center.
This doesn’t exonerate the perpetrators of these heinous acts; it’s an explanation for why they committed them. And it shouldn’t be a controversial one. It’s common sense, and the same one al Qaeda gave.
Like Reagan after the barracks bombing, after 9/11 I’d seen enough. Those horrific events exposed the folly of US foreign policy. Especially with the Soviet Union gone, it was time for the US to cut losses and come home, as it should’ve done a decade earlier. But rather than retrench and reflect, most Americans wanted blood.
That’s understandable. I did too. Three thousand innocent Americans were murdered. Many died heroic deaths, giving their lives trying to save others. Their killers deserved swift justice.
But the men who did the deed were already dead. Yet their sponsors remained at large. Who were they?
Within hours of the attacks we started hearing that Osama bin Laden was the ringleader. He initially denied involvement, and didn’t explicitly confess till three years later. The orchestrators of the attacks would obviously have been appropriate targets. But focus quickly shifted to unrelated “enemies”.
Of the nineteen hijackers, fifteen were from Saudi Arabia, two from the UAE, with one each from Egypt and Lebanon. None of those countries elicited official outrage. Nor were any targeted for retaliation. But Iraq was.
Why?
Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda detested each other. There was no collaboration between them. Something else was going on. The massacre of three thousand Americans was being exploited to launch a war against a regime that had nothing to do with their deaths.
This justification for invading Iraq was obviously dubious, so the Bush administration supplemented retribution with fear as rationale for war. Suddenly, “weapons of mass destruction” were imminent in Iraq. Yellowcake from Niger was coming into Baghdad. Mushroom clouds were evoked. If Saddam weren’t defeated, New York would be nuked.
All of this was utter (and obvious) nonsense based on forgeries and lies. But Americans were frightened and furious, the perfect fertilizer to sow seeds of war.
Bled to Bankruptcy
When passions flare, leaders are supposed to tame the flames. Instead, ours fueled them. After decades poking foreign hornets’ nests, they insulted our intelligence by saying we were stung “for our freedoms”… as if nineteen hotheads stumbled onto the Declaration of Independence and went berserk.
But 9/11 wasn’t envy. It was wrath. And it was met with pride… among other sins.
The tragedy called for introspection and humility. Instead we got bravado and arrogance. After telling us we were attacked “for our freedom”, the government proceeded to “protect” us by taking it away.
But our awesomeness isn’t what provoked 9/11. Years of bombing and sanctions did. So, naturally, the government responded to the attacks by doubling down.
In an Oval Office address the night of the 11th, President Bush said “these acts of mass murder were intended to frighten our nation into chaos and retreat”. Chaos was certainly an objective. But retreat wasn’t… at least not initially.
The US responded exactly how Osama bin Laden expected. He didn’t think 9/11 would convince Americans to turn the other cheek. He wanted the reaction he got. Why would he have expected any other?
Bin Laden’s son, Omar, explained to Rolling Stone in 2010, when his father was still living in Pakistan:
“My father’s dream was to bring the Americans to Afghanistan. He would do the same thing he did to the Russians. I was surprised the Americans took the bait…. They have spent hundreds of billions…. I was in Afghanistan when Bush was elected. My father was so happy. This is the kind of President he needs - one who will attack and spend money and break the country.”
Bin Laden expected the US government to react recklessly to the crisis he’d created, with imperial overreach that would “bleed them into bankruptcy”. As he’d hoped, Bush “took the bait”.
With predictable originality, the president invoked World War II by lumping Iraq, Iran, and (as if to prove this wasn’t a crusade against the “religion of peace”) North Korea into a ludicrous “Axis of Evil”. This tripartite coalition included two countries that hated each other and a third that had little to do with either of them.
The Usual Suspects
In the run-up to war with an Iraqi regime that hadn’t harmed us, we were told we must “fight over there so we wouldn’t have to fight over here”. But the 9/11 attacks occurred here only because we’d been over there. Yet the fight came here anyway. Only it wasn’t “the terrorists” who targeted us… but our own government.
Before the smoke cleared from Ground Zero, the Constitution was already in ashes. After a half century of misadventures in the Middle East, the US government reacted to the predictable blowback by clamping down on the usual suspects:
Us.
The Patriot Act came off the shelf. A new Department of “Homeland Security” was created to protect the domestic United States, which is what we’d thought the Department of “Defense” was supposed to do. Even the word “homeland” was a creepy addition to the lexicon, reminiscent of totalitarian language from repugnant regimes.
Suddenly every grandma and Girl Scout was nuked or groped to board a plane. Without warrants, phone calls were tapped, correspondence was surveilled, and bank accounts were monitored as the Bill of Rights was put in the bin. To evade the Fourth Amendment, the government has corporations and contractors do most of its snooping (as John Hunt describes here).
All of this was done in the name of “safety”, which is almost always the most dangerous threat. Innocent Americans were humiliated and demeaned as if they were inmates, which is exactly how they were supposed to feel. Suspicion was encouraged and trust eroded. If we saw something, we were supposed to say something. In the fertile soil of ubiquitous fear, the snitch society began to take root.
Not that we didn’t “fight them over there” too. September 11 became the rationale for a litany of catastrophic wars against countries that had nothing to do with that awful day: Iraq, Libya, Syria, Somalia, Yemen, and (now) Iran twice. None of these misadventures made Americans “safe”.
To the contrary, they’re the exact type of aggression that provoked the attacks they were presumably punishing. They created millions of fresh corpses, trillions of wasted dollars, and more enemies we didn’t need.
These wars precipitated an influx of refugees from the same region that produced the hijackers. Spending accelerated and debt mounted. Last month it eclipsed $40T, about seven times higher than when the towers fell. The military budget alone is $1T, with the “peace president” wanting a 50% increase. The bleeding proceeds as bin Laden intended.
The Lessons
Because George W. Bush gave an uplifting address atop the rubble and threw a strike from the mound, we’re supposed to believe he “met the moment”. I guess he did.
But then he decided to kidnap it, with a ransom of catastrophic wars, a surveillance state, a doubled debt, and lost liberties… all of which were continued or exacerbated by every subsequent administration. More than two decades later, based on the same lies that precipitated Iraq, we’re now in a war even dumber than the ones Bush started.
After the trauma of 9/11 and all the debacles we’ve endured since, the only “lessons” we seem to “learn” are ones that keep giving us what we’ve got.
JD
PS - Anyone interested in an elaboration of what made George W. Bush and ten other presidents so awful, balanced with overviews of those who did the job well, can find it here, or by clicking the image below:
I will be watching with interest as to the rebuttals of Your write up. You know TDS versus TDS. Truth is truth and truth always hurts the ones that believe other wise.
Brilliant! A woefully needed account of what prompted 9/11 and the nefarious response to the incident, the effects of which have rendered us "suspects" of our Patriot Act-fueled police state and even indoctrinated cheerleaders for the forever wars initiated by our Aggression Industry. Your sane indictment of our government's insanity, Mr.Breen, makes you the August Landmesser of our time. Thank you.