If George Bush had listened to Joe Biden instead of Donald Rumsfeld, the history of the past seven years would have been very different. We might have prevented 9/11.
On September 10, 2001, Senator Biden, then (as now) chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, prophetically warned of the new Bush administration's exclusive focus on missile defenses in a speech at the National Press Club. He said, "We will have diverted all that money to address the least likely threat while the real threats come into this country in the hold of a ship, or the belly of a plane, or are smuggled into a city in the middle of the night in a vial in a backpack."
A major reason why the Bush administration was unprepared for the terrorist attacks was that its senior officials had consistently looked for threats in all the wrong places. In addition to the now well-known (but then secret) obsession with Iraq, the top national security priority of the administration was breaking out of the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty and deploying what it claimed would be quick, cheap and effective anti-missile weapons.
Donald Rumsfeld, as chairman of the 1998 Commission to Assess the Ballistic Missile Threat to the United States, had warned that America faced an urgent threat of attack by ballistic missiles that could be fielded within five years by Iraq, Iran or North Korea .
When Rumsfeld became secretary of defense in 2001, this threat inflation became official doctrine. Budgets for these weapons soared from $4 billion a year to $8 billion (to $12 billion requested this year). Senior officials and members of the cabinet made it their top agenda item in countless meetings with NATO allies, Russia and China. Just a few months before September 11, five cabinet members, including National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, went to Moscow to convince Russia to agree to tear up the ABM treaty.
Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith was in Moscow the same day Joe Biden was speaking in Washington. Biden was pleading for action to prevent a catastrophic terrorist attack; Feith was demanding Russian acquiescence to new anti-missile weapons.
As Maureen Dowd wrote in the September 5, 2001 New York Times, "Why can George W. Bush think of nothing but a missile shield? Our president is caught in the grip of an obsession worthy of literature."
Biden was not clairvoyant. He just paid attention.
Experts--apart from the neoconservatives--had warned for years of the terrorist threat. The Commission on National Security in the 21st Century, chaired by former senators Gary Hart and Warren Rudmen, said in February 2001 that America was increasingly vulnerable to hostile attacks on the homeland, and U.S. military superiority would not protect us. That same month Admiral Thomas Wilson, director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, told Congress that he feared a "major terrorist attack against United States interest, either here or abroad, perhaps with a weapon designed to produce mass casualties," over the next twelve to twenty-four months.
Biden understood what the real experts were saying. He had been warning of the misplaced priorities for months. He knew that just because Bush officials trumpeted their national security credentials that did not mean they knew what the real threats were or what to do about them.
They should have listened to Joe.
Follow Joe Cirincione on Twitter: www.twitter.com/Cirincione
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Here's a portion of Biden's speech on 9/10/01. This points to a much deeper understand
Biden, 9/10/01 - "Sure, we'll do all we can to defend ourselves against any threat...b
"I ask you, you want to do us damage, are you more likely to send a missile you're not sure can reach us with a biological or chemical weapon...w
"Which are you more likely to do? And what defense do we have against those other things?"
9/10/01. Biden's NO lightweigh
On the morning of 9/11/01, the Bush administra
It will be such a fantastic era when BO gets elected. With JB on board how can we go wrong.
No more right to work states, those great economic growth number for those states; lies, all lies. No more Katrina disasters (Federal hurrican insurance!
Health care and housing for everyone. No more crime, wars, or strife. We will finally all be equal.
My god it will be like we died and went to heaven.
Just imagine life with more and more government
Are you looking forward to paying back all the $$ Bush has borrowed to pay off his contractor buddies?
No one will ever be sure, but I'm pretty well convinced that Al Gore's people would not have been chasing prostitute
It's just possible that an administra
There's a right track we should be--should have been--emba
Please god we are not too late.
Anita
But the gap will be too great this time, and the GOP's election stealing efforts will fail.
9/11 never had to happen and Bush and Rice let it happen due to their arrogance a trade mark of the Neo Cons..then Bush allowed bin-Laden to escape Tora Bora even gave him a truce to do so..!
Most training occurred during Bush's watch. Clinton warned Bush of the danger. Bush ignored the warnings, and, in fact, demoted Richard Clarke, the most vocal of those giving warnings.
No President in our history has taken as much vacation time as Bush. And yet he is the one claiming that we are at war. He was on vacation when he was warned about al Queda. He is on vacation now. His mind has been on vacation since he was born.
Saddam has WMD
Atta met Iraqi agents in Prague
Who is kidding whom?
Semper fi
Bush might as well have spent the last six and a half years wandering around a Wal Mart parking lot searching for Osama bin Laden.
OBL isn't the problem. America's misguided imperialis
Semper fi
But its not their fault, these military guys who believe in patriotism and really are so much more brave than the rest of us; it's the leadership of this country that keeps selling them down the river in every sad war. Lives lost when they didn't need to be. That's the tragedy of it all. Brave men wasted.
And you're right about misguided American imperialis
But Mc'Cain's memory is rapidly emptying, so it may not be true.
I'm still getting over not being able to read the insightful reports Joe Cirinicion
Anyway...v
Well laid out in this article:
http://www
I'm a big Joe C. fan, when he ain't carrying the Democrat's water.
You should check out the transcript
You would be better advised to ask why the party of this crew sits at the level of support it enjoys today, with most of that support, incomprehe
I knew at the time why those Democrats stood on the White House lawn with Bush that fateful day when they sided with him on Iraq. Many of them were up for re-electio
I wish it weren't so, but anyone who opposed Bush and this war at the time could see it. Oddly enough, many of the Dems who sided with Bush lost their elections anyway.
Politician
Conversely