a continuing failure of imagination

Trying to explain rather than excuse Bush’s decisions since 9/11 is pretty much a losing proposition in the blogosphere (which is an entertainment arena as much as it is an information medium–and thus all the infotaining drama).

Nevertheless, one of Andrew Sullivan’s readers dared attempt it, and another one responded:

Your reader wrote: “What if 9/11 had been a nuclear attack?”

‘What if,’ indeed. On the first page of his excellent and disturbing book, “Nuclear Terrorism - The Ultimate Preventable Catastrophe” - Graham Allison, a former deputy secretary of defense under Clinton (and no fan of the Bush administration), relays the following anecdote:

On October 11, 2001, a month to the day after the terrorist assault on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, President George W Bush faced an even more terrifying prospect. At that morning’s Presidential Daily Intelligence Briefing, George Tenet, the director of central intelligence, informed the president that a CIA agent code-named Dragonfire had reported that Al Qaeda terrorists possessed a ten-kiloton nuclear bomb, evidently stolen from the Russian arsenal. According to Dragonfire, this nuclear weapon was now on American soil, in New York City.

Think about it. A month after 9-11, you are president Bush.

You are still struggling to get to grips with the 9/11 attacks when you are told that the same people who have just destroyed twin towers have a nuclear weapon in New York city. What do you do? How do you defend the country?

A big scare like this is, to me, the only reasonable explanation of why Bush and his cadre of advisers have been so willing to push their response to the 9/11 attacks so far.

I agree that this is the only logical explanation for the administration’s actions (the well-advised and the ill-advised ones). And I try to be satisfied with the explanation rather than judge their actions.

After all, none of us are privy to the information they had and none of us are responsible the way they were. I cannot even judge them for overreacting. I can’t say how I—or anyone else—would have acted in their stead, with the benefit of their knowledge.

Sullivan is much harsher:

My reader suggested that this extraordinary shift in America’s constitutional balance - the creation of an extra-legal dictatorship within a putatively democratic society - was explicable only if you believe that the very existence of the U.S. is in peril. I believe Cheney believes that. In the hours after 9/11, you can understand why. The question then becomes: what evidence did they have that the danger was that grave?

He then goes on to suggest that the evidence the administration acted on was derived through torture—a “torture regime,” in fact—and therefore obviously unreliable. That’s not a crackpot theory; it’s certainly within the realm of the plausible. What I dislike about it is that it presumes that the evil warriors Bush and Cheney,  acting in bad faith, against the interests of Americans and America, didn’t care how far they went, even if they had to turn America into a dictatorship.

Sorry, but that is hysteria. Beyond that, it assumes that some Prince of Light—such as Obama, for example—can come and turn things right around and make everything all okay again. Which of course is beyond ridiculous.

The other day, I was watching a silly but diverting British series, The Amazing Mrs. Pritchard, which puts a sensible woman who’s fed up with politicians’ incompetence into 10 Downing Street to succeed Tony Blair. (Yes. I did say it was silly, didn’t I?)

The screenwriter is not at all sympathetic to Blair or to the war in Iraq, but she is sensible. She shows, for example, just how many decisions, large and small, a political leader must make every day. It occurred to me that if only more people would watch this show, they would have a glimmer of understanding beyond their pet theories about BushHitler and the Vulcans.

But when people want to judge, to condemn, to castigate, and to punish, no amount of understanding will stop them. Their fury has a life of its own.

So it goes.