Revising history for political gain

kc — Wed, 06 Sep 2006 09:15:07 -0700

The coming 9/11 "docu-drama" which attempts to change the facts concerning this event points out a new line of attack from the right. They know that Iraq is a loser of an issue, so they need to turn attention to terrorism.

And there is no better boogeyman for them to trot out than Bill Clinton. They want to brand all Democrats as Friends of Bill, and blame him for 9/11.

Glenn Greenwald rips this apart:

But it is rank, deceitful revisionism to attempt to blame the Clinton administration for failing to be insufficiently aggressive with regard to Al Qaeda and Islamic terrorism generally. To make this argument with any plausibility, Bush supporters would have to be able to point to complaints made by Republicans at the time -- and especially during the 2000 election -- that the Clinton administration should have been more attentive or aggressive towards Islamic terrorists. The threat posed by Al Qaeda and bin Laden was well known throughout the 1990s. To pretend that Republicans wanted a more aggressive stance than Clinton took is blatant revisionism.

Greenwald goes to to carefully detail what was said in the 2000 campaign and how Bush literally said nothing about this threat of terrorism. If anything, Bush and the Republicans were playing down the threat.

What the record actually shows is that Republicans were against fighting terrorism before they were for it.

Looking at the entire history, it's clear that neither party did enough to stop 9/11. But that is why hindsight is 20/20.

In this respect, what Bush says about 9/11 changing everything is correct. Without an attack of this magnitude, there was no way that any president, Democrat or Republican, could have mustered the political capital and public opinion needed to have sent troops to Afghanistan to fight Bin Laden.

Bush himself spoke of restraint prior to 9/11. Here is a line from his acceptance speech at the GOP convention:

A generation shaped by Vietnam must remember the lessons of Vietnam: When America uses force in the world, the cause must be just, the goal must be clear, and the victory must be overwhelming.

For Bush, it seems that 9/11 made him forget those lessons. And because of the mess that has been made since, he and his party are now facing defeat in the midterm elections, so out comes the dirty tricks squad to save the day.

To have desparate Republicans coming back now to revise the history to make themselves out to be tougher on terrorism than they really were is an insult to those who died on Sept. 11.

To have ABC air this fictional account of 9/11 as a part of this effort to spin the blame is worse.

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Revising history for political gain