Ten years ago. The Iraq War in retrospect.

From WHYY Public Media.

One of Philadelphia's Gold Star Mothers, Celeste Zappala, was interviewed by WHYY on Tuesday, the 19^th of March and the tenth anniversary of the start of the Iraq War. Zappala lost her son Sherwood Baker in 2004. He was the first National Guard member to lose his life in Iraq. During the Vietnam War, the National Guard was so safe a place to be that the future president George W. Bush signed up for a six-year tour (Notthat he even served the full six years), but in Iraq, the National Guard was a vital supplement to the regular armed forces. Presidential candidate Senator John Kerry (D-MA) charged in 2004 that by keeping National Guard troops in their billets longer than they had planned and by using them as regular forces, the Bush Administration didn't have to impose a draft or to increase the size of the regular armed forces, and thus that using the National Guard in that way amounted to a “back-door draft.” Recruitment for the military to keep enough troops fighting in Iraq was a problem. In 2007, the Army had to spend $1 billion in bonuses to recruit and retain the soldiers it had. The economic collapse at the end of 2007 made it a good deal easier to do keep the military fully staffed.

Why did the Bush Administration depend so heavily on the National Guard during the occupation of Iraq?

Much of the planning for the occupation of Iraq was improvised, last-minute and inadequate. The Bush Administration didn't appear to think that many forces or much money would be needed after Baghdad had fallen. The problem then was very ably sketched out by Colonel Harry G. Summers, who built upon the theories of Carl von Clausewitz concerning war and national determination. Colonel Summers' book was entitled “On Strategy: The Vietnam War in context” and it was written in response to the failure of the US to win over the Vietnamese people to the cause of America. The military in both Iraq and Vietnam did everything that was asked of it and it carried out its assigned task with enthusiasm and professionalism. In neither case can America assign any significant blame to the military for the inability of the US to win hearts and minds in the occupied country. The Iraqi insurgents certainly deserve a great deal of credit for making an American victory after the fall of Baghdad impossible. Had all gone according to the plans made by the Bush Administration and had Iraqis quietly accepted the American occupation, there would have been no need for Bush and his people to whip up American enthusiasm and support for the war.

As it was, the left wing was proven correct by the failure to find any WMDs and was thus completely uninterested in supporting the war and the right wing was perfectly happy to keep their activities in support of the war very sharply limited. The right-wing columnist Jonah Goldberg was asked why he didn't join up and go to Iraq in uniform (Goldberg was at the very upper age limit for joining the military). He later apologized for this response, but it's worthwhile to remember what he said:

As for why my sorry a** isn't in the kill zone, lots of people think this is a searingly pertinent question. No answer I could give -- I'm 35 years old, my family couldn't afford the lost income, I have a baby daughter, my a** is, er, sorry, are a few -- ever seem to suffice.

The point here is that Goldberg's attitude was quite typical for right-wingers. People who supported the war didn't feel the need to actually go over to Iraq and spend years in a foreign land actually getting themselves involved in learning a foreign language and dealing with a very different culture. Patriotism only demanded so much.

According to Summers, yes, any military or any country's political leadership can carry out short, brief military actions without getting broad-based buy-in from the country's civilian population, but any war that costs significant time and resources must get the civilian population emotionally involved. People must be absolutely convinced that the war is of immense significance and that it's worth great sacrifice to win it. Bush failed to get civilians from the right wing to go to Iraq as civilian reconstruction personnel, which explains why $8 billion of the money allocated to Iraqi reconstruction was lost. Without on-the-ground personnel overseeing projects and with Americans attempting to supervise projects from desks inside the “Green Zone” in Baghdad or from the US, it wasn't at all surprising that the US reconstruction effort was a complete flop.

Getting Americans motivated

The first step to getting Americans enthusiastically involved in the conquest/occupation of Iraq wassupervised by Madeleine Albright in February 1998. Albright brought several fellow war hawks to a town meeting in Ohio. It was a PR disaster as citizens vigorously questioned why Iraq was considered to be a threat and why that threat had to be neutralized via a war. Albright and her people were unable to answer these objections and the Clinton Administration didn't make any further attempts to whip up the public to supporting a war against Saddam Hussein and his country.

It's generally accepted among many former skeptics that no, President George W. Bush and VP Dick Cheney didn't arrange for 9-11 to happen, but the belief was based on solid facts. Bush and Cheney both had oil industry roots, there was good reason to believe that the US oil industry would profit enormously via an American occupation of Iraq and 9-11 occurred just a few years after Albright's failed attempt to get American citizen buy-in for a war against Iraq. Al Jazeera points out that safeguarding civilians was certainly not on the agenda of the invading Americans:

The Iraq invasion cannot be reasonably described as a case of "humanitarian intervention" for three reasons. The means used in the war - a "shock and awe" bombing campaign, including the use of cluster munitions in populated areas - were clearly not designed with the objective of safeguarding Iraqi civilians. Secondly, there was no evidence of the triggering mechanism for a humanitarian intervention, such as mass slaughter or crimes that shock humanity. Saddam had a terrible track record but, during the run-up to war, no such crimes were ongoing or imminent. Third, humanitarian motives were clearly not dominant, as the war would probably not have occurred in the absence of the issues of WMD and/or the al-Qaeda connection. During his February 2003 presentation to the UN, even Colin Powell's slides related to Saddam's human rights violations were labelled, "Iraq: Failing to Disarm". 

Even if regular people didn't buy that Iraq had something to do with 9-11, the Washington DC press corps certainly did. What we do know for certain is that Bush & Cheney manipulated the information suppled by America's intelligence agencies to make it appear that Hussein had something to do with 9-11. 

The deleted paragraphs in the summary called "Key Judgements" read:

"Baghdad for now appears to be drawing a line short of conducting terrorist attacks with conventional or CBW against the United States, fearing that exposure of Iraqi involvement would provide Washington a stronger cause for making war.

Iraq probably would attempt clandestine attacks against the US Homeland if Baghdad feared an attack that threatened the survival of the regime were imminent or unavoidable, or possibly for revenge."

Many on the right wing have made their defense of the Bush Administration center around the allegation that Democratic Senators had access to the same intel that Bush had and that they reached the same conclusion. No, Democrats had access to the intel that Bush edited to make it look as though Iraq was a threat.

The consequences?  

As documented below, by the most scientifically respected measures available, Iraq lost 1.4 million lives as a result of OIL [Operation Iraqi Liberation], saw 4.2 million additional people injured, and 4.5 million people become refugees. The 1.4 million dead was 5% of the population. That compares to 2.5% lost in the U.S. Civil War, or 3 to 4% in Japan in World War II, 1% in France and Italy in

World War II, less than 1% in the U.K. and 0.3% in the United States in World War II. The 1.4 million dead is higher as an absolute number as well as a percentage of population than these other horrific losses.

The US absolutely must prevent anything like the Iraq War from ever occurring again. How are we doing on that? Unfortunately, not very well. The US leadership appears to greatly overestimate the effectiveness of sanctions, underestimates the usefulness of diplomacy and has far too much faith in our intelligence agencies. Also, people in Washington DC, both government officials and the press corps, appear to be talking about the deficit in much the same manner that they discussed Iraq in late 2002-early 2003. The good news is that US troops are very highly unlikely to go back into Iraq, no matter how badly the situation there deteriorates. The US couldn't do much there the first time and it seems our leadership knows that it couldn't do much on a return engagement. Could the US invade Iran? Certainly, elements want very badly to do so, but I think the public would be very highly likely to resist.

The assault on the needs of regular people

In their "Abbreviated Pundit Round-up" Daily Kos today details a few of the many ways Republicans are trying to cripple the government so that it's unable to assist regular citizens. One of the items that makes no logical sense from the perspective of regular taxpayers/citizens is Amtrak. The Staggers Rail Act of 1980 freed railroad companies to focus on freight lines and to pretty much ignore passenger rail via the founding of Amtrak. Passenger rail wasn't all that profitable as people appeared to prefer either driving for shorter distances or flying for longer trips. 9-11 led to increasingly tight and inconvenient rules for air travel (I had to dispose of several bottles of liquids before getting on a plane a few years ago, and no, the expense wasn't huge, but it was quite annoying to have to do that) and it made for lengthy delays at airports. Not surprisingly, that's led to increased popularity for Amtrak.

With other countries having high-speed rail, that's made airplanes even less appealing as long and medium-distance transportation. Could the US simply turn rail back over to private industry? Probably, but as the linked piece indicates, freight lines aren't really compatible with the new high-speed passenger lines.

[Freight railway] owners worry that the plans will demand expensive train-control technology that freight traffic could do without. They fear a reduction in the capacity available to freight. Most of all they fret that the spending of federal money on upgrading their tracks will lead the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA), the industry watchdog, to impose tough conditions on them and, in effect, to reintroduce regulation of their operations.

Just seems to me that conservative/right-wing plans to destroy Amtrak would give America the worst of both worlds, we'd keep our annoying and inconvenient restrictions on air travel, but we wouldn't be able to just use Amtrak as an alternative. Would private service be cheaper? Probably, but that's not because private service is inherently better than government service. The main difference is that private lines could concentrate on medium-distance services of 50 to 500 miles and not have to worry about longer-distance lines of over 500 miles (The Boston to Washington Northeast Corridor is 440 miles long) whereas Amtrak has to run much longer-distance lines that run from California to Illinois or from Chicago to New Orleans. So yes, privatised rail service would see a big drop in costs for rail passengers, but those relatively few people who use long-distance passenger rail would get clobbered with either very expensive service or no service at all, being forced to go by air or having to drive.

Last night, I was at the public meeting that was considering an occupation of Philadelphia, modelled on the successful Occupy Wall Street action. As a traditional-news reporter was asking questions, it occurred to me that one of the major reasons I was so excited about it was that it pushes the Republican assault on government off of the front pages and that it drives the Republican/Tea Party-inspired drive for austerity and cutting the budget onto the back pages and out of peoples' view. If we can keep the attention of American citizens focussed on what we citizens need as opposed to what the plutocrats and oligarchs want, we're far more likely to succeed.

Just as I said

In former Vice-President Dick Cheney's book, we learn:

The book opens with an account of Mr. Cheney’s experiences during the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, when he essentially commanded the government’s response from a bunker beneath the White House while Mr. Bush — who was away from Washington and hampered by communications breakdowns — played a peripheral role. (emphasis added)

Of course Bush was reduced to playing a peripheral role! As I said back in 2005 (I said it as early as 2002, but this is the earliest point in my blogging that I can locate this statement):

My conclusion that during 9-11, the President should have gotten himself to a command post, either at a base, to Air Force One or onto a ship is based on my Damage-Control experience.

And:

There are two reasons for the President to get to a command post:

1. Safety. A ship or a plane can get underway or take off and can promptly be surrounded by escorts, i.e. other ships and planes. Military bases are normally placed in safe, defensible areas and the base command post is usually well inside the base, able to be surrounded by troops. Of course, there's a reason to want the President to be safe. Being safe is not an end in itself. The President is only one person and there are 250 million other people in the United States for us to worry about. Accordingly, we're concerned about:
   
2. Communications. The other primary reason is so that the President can communicate with the Armed Services. Not just one-way communications. Both directions are needed. The President must be informed in real time as to what's going on and he should respond in real time so that the proper orders can be issued. An example would be during the September 11^th attacks in 2001.

As I said, for Bush to fail to get himself to a command post on the morning of 9-11 constitutes what the UCMJ refers to as Dereliction of Duty. When the President fails to do his job, that's when unauthorized people get the chance to muck things up.

Institutional privilege

On the balancing act between institutional privilege and credibility with the public. Is a "win-win" solution possible or is it a "zero-sum" or "win-loss" kind of "game"?

In a piece in the Inky, we learn of the Roman Catholic Church's response to Americans seeking to hold the Vatican, and specifically the current Pope, accountable for pedophile priests.

Court documents obtained yesterday show that Vatican lawyers plan to argue that the pope has immunity as head of state, that U.S. bishops who oversaw abusive priests weren't employees of the Vatican, and that a 1962 document is not the "smoking gun" that shows proof of a cover-up.

Would that the Vatican would concentrate only upon the last defense! That's the only part of their legal strategy that bears directly upon the Pope's guilt or innocence. The other two defenses are purely ones of institutional privilege. I can understand institutional privilege and can see why people defend it, but that's at direct cross-purposes with giving a credible explanation that would, in turn, build trust.

Wonkette reproduces a press briefing wherein the Press Secretary Tony Snow discusses the balancing act between institutional privilege and openness, transparency and credibility. Snow tries to convince the press corps that golly-gee willikers guys, we'd be open and honest and transparent, but hey y'know, Congress is seeking to impinge upon the institutional prerogatives of the President and associated subordinates.

MR. SNOW: What you’re saying is that every time somebody wants to try to mount a charge you ought to be able to get hauled up and testify under oath, with a presumption of criminality, rather than a presumption of goodwill. I’m not going to buy that.

Of course, as 911truthmovement.org makes clear, the people who wanted haul up Bush & Cheney upon "a presumption of criminality," were actually on very solid ground to make that presumption. About a year after Snow's scolding of the press corps, Secretary of Transportation Norman Mineta confessed that there were several war games that were being conducted on 11Sep01, at the same time that the 9/11 attacks were taking place. The question this raises is:

...did the NORAD war games (Vigilant Guardian, Vigilant Warrior, Northern Vigilance) being run on 9/11 impact in any way, positively or negatively, the response by the military that morning?

But

[Richard Clarke] denied that there were multiple exercises.

The georgewashington.blogspot.com concludes that:

...the dedicated rank-and-file personnel at Norad were misled, intentionally, by the planners of 9/11. Specifically, the good and dedicated lower-level military people were confused by the events of 9/11 because 9/11 occurred at the same time as the multiple war games with their live fly exercises, plane into building scenarios, false radar inserts, and apparent interference by Cheney. [emphasis in original]

Were there any such war games taking place? That's hard to say because institutional privilege allowed Bush & Cheney to testify under the following conditions:

The two leaders were not under oath and no recording was made of the private session at the White House.

--snip--

It was eventually agreed that the meeting would be held in the Oval Office, alongside Mr Cheney. There were no television cameras and also no photographs or transcripts of answers given by the two men.
Democrats had suggested the president's joint appearance with Mr Cheney might be an attempt to eliminate the possibility of providing contradictory testimony over whether the White House did all it could to head off the attacks.
But Mr Bush laughed off the suggestion.

It's very difficult to have any confidence that candid answers were given at the 2004 meeting considering that the record, even years later, still has so many troubling holes in it. By the same token, how are either Catholics or non-Catholics supposed to have any confidence that the problem of pedophile priests was properly or will ever be appropriately dealt with? The current, decades-old problem first came to the attention of the public in 2002:

Ultimately, it became clear that, over several decades in the 20th century, priests and lay members of religious orders in the Catholic Church had sexually abused minors on a scale such that the accusations reached into the thousands. Although the majority of cases were reported to have occurred in the United States, victims have come forward in other nations such as Ireland, Canada and Australia. A major aggravating factor was the actions of Catholic bishops to keep these crimes secret and to reassign the accused to other parishes in positions where they had continued unsupervised contact with youth, thus allowing the abusers to continue their crime. [emphasis added]

The real damage to the Church's credibility wasn't simply that it was embroiled in a scandal about adults abusing their positions of authority for their own sexual pleasure, it was in the fact that these crimes were enabled by a hierarchy that should have put the interests of the young people first. So, while I fully understand why the Church puts its institutional privileges first and acts to protect its "chain of command," the price of such protection is their credibility with the public.

-----------
The author is a Congregationalist Protestant, a New England denomination that is a direct theological descendant of English Puritanism. As such, he's mildly suspicious of the Roman Catholic Church in general, but only as an institution. He doesn't go so far as to hold Catholicism against anyone in a personal manner.

Rush Limbaugh: "The White House is politicizing 9-11!"

Rush Limbaugh claimed on his radio show that the White House, by calling for the date of September 11th to be observed as a day of service to the community, was "politicizing 9-11." Erm, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said:

With the intelligence all pointing toward bin Laden, Rumsfeld ordered the military to begin working on strike plans. And at 2:40 p.m., the notes quote Rumsfeld as saying he wanted "best info fast. Judge whether good enough hit S.H." – meaning Saddam Hussein – "at same time. Not only UBL" – the initials used to identify Osama bin Laden.

People in Washington DC first started hearing about the four hijacked aircraft at around 8:30am on the morning of September 11th. Apparently, Rumsfeld first became aware of Flight 77 when it crashed into the Pentagon at 9:37am. Rumsfeld was fitfully in and out of touch with the chain of command starting at around 10:00am (He had gone outside to view the crash scene). "Rumsfeld later claims that he only started to gain a situational awareness of what was happening after arriving at the NMCC" at 10:30am. The military was put on high alert at around 10:45am. At 1:02pm, Rumsfeld "tells Bush, 'This is not a criminal action. This is war.'"

So let's keep in mind when Limbaugh tells his listeners that President Obama is "politicizing 9-11," that it was politicized by a high-ranking member of the Bush Administration long before the fires were out and before President Bush had even made it back to Washington DC upon that date. The Bush Administration suggested to the public so many times, both directly and indirectly, that the Iraqi dictator, Saddam Hussein, had something to do with 9-11 that:

In his prime-time press conference last week, which focused almost solely on Iraq, President Bush mentioned Sept. 11 eight times. He referred to Saddam Hussein many more times than that, often in the same breath with Sept. 11.

Bush never pinned blame for the attacks directly on the Iraqi president. Still, the overall effect was to reinforce an impression that persists among much of the American public: that the Iraqi dictator did play a direct role in the attacks.

So strongly was the case made that Saddam Hussein and 9-11 were linked that two years later, 70% of the American public was convinced there was some sort of link.

Finally, former Vice President Cheney said in July 2009 that:

"I do not believe and have never seen any evidence to confirm that [Hussein] was involved in 9/11. We had that reporting for a while, [but] eventually it turned out not to be true," Cheney conceded.

So to say that the Obama Administration is "politicizing 9-11" is sorta like saying that a porn star is "sexing up" an adult movie or that an actor who plays a warrior is making a war movie violent. It's kind of a ludicrous charge. Personally, I think the idea of making September 11th into a day of community service is an absolutely wonderful idea.

Very disturbing to see Van Jones retire under pressure

Van Jones has resigned as Special Advisor for Green Jobs at the Council on Environmental Quality, he claims that "opponents of reform have mounted a vicious smear campaign against me." Glenn Beck, who has very fortunately lost 57 advertisers due to his hysterical on-camera campaigns that have begun to enter very dangerous territory by using "analysis" that the fascists of mid-century Europe would have been comfortable with, has been the primary reason that Van Jones was under attack.

Thankfully, the Obama Administration does not appear to be giving way on the President's televised speech to schoolchildren scheduled for the first day of school, despite screeching and hollering by the right wing over it.

Then there was Michael Savage, the third most listened to radio host in America, who put it this way: "Hitler had the Hitler Youth, and Obama would like to have the Obama Youth."

Seems one of the "problems" that has caused the Obama Administration to pull back on defending Van Jones is that he also signed a "911Truth" statement.

Jones recently issued two apologies. One was for calling Republicans "assholes." The other was for signing a statement in 2004 supporting a call for further investigation of 911, which suggested that the Government might have had a role in the 911 attack. The original document can be found here, with Van Jones the 46th signatory (and this writer [Rob Kall of OpEd News] was the 47th.) Ironically, one of the most vocal "birthers, who question the validity of Obama's birth certificate, Phillip J. Berg, was also a signatory of the same statement, 8th on the list.

As there are significant numbers of American citizens who feel that there are numerous unanswered questions concerning 9/11 (A above-cited poll puts the percentage at 40%), this placed the Obama Administration in a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" type of situation. On the one hand, they appear to be surrendering to a TV personality who really seems to have gone off the deep end, on the other hand, throwing a staffer under the bus at a time when people are questioning Obama's commitment to really pushing for a health care bill that will serve something other than wealthy financial interests makes the timing very poor.


Update: Jane Hamsher's view - The proprietress of the progressive website FireDogLake.com weighs in on the Van Jones case with a piece that urges liberals, progressives and leftists and their associated watchdog institutions to remain at an arm's distance from Democratic administrations.
Being too close to the Obama Administration has penned in those who need to maintain a skeptical view.
Oh, and she cites a poll that says that those members of the Democratic Party who believe 9/11 was an inside job constitute about 30% of the party as of 2007. Yes, Van Jones is in a minority, but it's a pretty big chunk of the party's base. The statement that Van Jones signed.

Bush Administration on warrantless wiretapping

White House Press Secretary Dana Perino responded to a WaPo op-ed written by Democrats:

"There is an old rhetorical tactic in Washington: you repeat something often enough, regardless of whether it's true, and hope people will start to believe it."

As [the WaPo's Dan Froomkin has] often noted, this tactic is one of the White House's signature approaches to communication. But Perino wasn't talking about her boss.

"This has been the preferred tactic of many Democrats involved in the FISA debate," she said, "and the Democratic chairmen of the House and Senate Intelligence and Judiciary committees employ it again in an op-ed published today in the Washington Post. . . .

"The President has listened to the judgment of these same professionals that the absence of long-term legislation creates uncertainty that poses a risk to those tools and could lead to the loss of intelligence information and that further short-term extensions of the PAA do not solve the problem. Stating that fact is not a scare tactic -- it reflects the considered judgment of the intelligence community, whose principal concern is not politics, but doing their jobs."

Well, it may very well indeed be the "considered judgment of the intelligence community" that the Constitution has to be stomped on with muddy, hobnailed boots in order for them to do their jobs the way they'd like to do them, but that doesn't mean we American citizens have to consider their judgment to be the final word. What Bush doesn't want to include in any surveillance program is any measure that prevents him from listening in on or rifling through any communications that he gosh-darn jolly well wants to listen in on or rifle through.

The problem with Perino's statement is that there's simply no room for the considerations of American citizens who would like to not have their communications placed under the Bush Administration's baleful glare. We don't know what the Bush Administration is surveilling and it's certainly not necessary for regular citizens such as myself to know. What IS necessary is for non-administration figures, both for Democratic partisans and for professional non-partisans, to keep a careful eye on just what communications are being read or listened to. As an American citizen, I very proudly do not trust my government. We've always been a "Show me the books" nation, where the government is responsible to the people and needs to be kept on a leash. As a democracy, we've never blindly trusted our government in the past and there's no compelling reason to do so now.

Yes, 9-11 occurred several years back, but even if we set aside the findings of 911Truth.org, even if we put aside all of the conspiracy theories, the fact remains that 9-11 was a one-time, non-repeatable event. Hijacking jet airliners is an operation that requires passengers to remain in their seats and obviously, they will only do that if they are convinced that all will be well if they cooperate with the hijackers. If passengers feel that sitting quietly in their seats means that their aircraft will be flown into a building, they have every reason in the world to jump up and to stop the hijackers at all costs. Even if half a dozen passengers are shot by the hijackers, the rest of them still have every motivation to press their attack. Could terrorists attack a nuclear power plant with equally spectacular results? Yes, but my brother took a tour of a nuclear power plant a few months after 9-11 and reports that such an attack would be next to impossible to carry out successfully.

As to the NSA surveilling all calls and emails, the question remains: Was it absolutely necessary for the NSA to have had unlimited surveillance capability in order to prevent 9-11 from happening? The testimony of the 9-11 Widows or Jersey Girls makes that awfully doubtful. They list ten separate reasons for the Bush Administration to have been aware that an attack was imminent, yet "...post 9/11 reports and commissions found no evidence of any action taken by appropriate officials." Why did the Bush Administration spend August 2001 sitting around, chilling out, their feet up on their desks, clearing brush on the ranch and generally yawning as if nothing required their urgent attention? Well, such a lackadaisical response to an upcoming disaster would not be unprecedented.

Hitler’s original plan called for the invasion of Russia to begin on May 15, but logistical problems and the need to rescue Mussolini’s forces in Africa and the Mediterranean forced a postponement. When the Blitzkrieg finally came, the Russian people were surprised; however, Stalin had ample warning of the German attack.

A variety of intelligence sources relayed information to Stalin that an invasion was imminent. Richard Sorge, his spy in Tokyo, who had access to the German ambassador’s messages, sent word of the date of the invasion. Both the British and Americans passed on a variety of warnings and details about German troop movements. However, Stalin could not be persuaded that Hitler would turn on him and did not want to provide an excuse for him to do so. He continued to ship strategic materials as agreed in his economic treaty with Germany up until the moment Wehrmacht troops crossed into Russia.

The Bush Administration's actions prior to 9-11 could be chalked up to simple negligence, incompetence and dereliction of duty. The fact of the matter is that if the NSA's apparent lack of capability to intercept and read all conceivable messages was a factor in 9-11, it was only one of many factors.
Froomkin then cites a radio address given by Bush where Bush does indeed acknowledge the issue of the government grabbing an excessive amount of information on citizens, but he doesn't acknowledge it as a civil rights or Constitutional issue. Bush identifies it purely as a method of enriching trial lawyers. He cites the patriotism of those intelligence agents and cooperating telecommunications companies, saying that they are simply trying their best to "protect America," but views the issue as an entirely one-sided problem, with the Constitution's historically-justified restraints on government snooping counting for nothing. Bush then gave a speech to governors of various states in which he movingly cited the problems of those agents and companies who trusted their government to give them sound legal advice and who were now in jeopardy of being held accountable for violating the rights of citizens.
Well, sorry if I'm kinda hard-hearted about that issue, but as a sailor (PN3(Ret), USN) I was taught the distinction between lawful and unlawful orders. I was expected to know the difference and the first kind of order you needed to obey, the second, not so much. Telecommunications companies have large legal staffs with decades of experience in FISA. They know full well the difference between lawful and unlawful government requests.
Bush wants to "go forward." Well, that sounds like a marvelous thing to do, but many millions of US citizens would like to go forward with our Constitutional rights being respected in the process.

Poll on 9-11 and Bush Administration foreknowledge

Firedoglake points out that two-thirds of Americans believe that the Bush Administration knew that 9-11 would occur before it happened. Author of the post doesn't really believe it, but concedes that Americans have excellent reasons to consider that to be the truth.

The Bush Administration had the Patriot Act ready to go by 19 September 2001. The written-out act clocked in at 83 kilobytes (Personal letters are about three to seven kilobytes, a newspaper editorial is about eight to 12 and 20 kilobytes constitutes a lengthy article) and it had 51 sections. There was nothing in a Houston Chronicle article of 7 October 2001 about the Patriot Act existing in draft form before being introduced. Why was the draft rejected as it stood? "However, due to Congressional opposition [to] its broad powers, the act is revised and reintroduced on October 2." And yes, comparisons have been drawn between that and Germany's Enabling Act of 1933, passed a very short time after the Reichstag Fire.

What is President Bush's general attitude towards democracy? See Mary Shaw's description of Bush's relationship to Pakistan's General Pervez Musharraf where Musharraf appears to take very strong actions against democracy in Pakistan and yet, according to Bush "hasn't crossed the line" and My reproduction of a US News paragraph where I highlighted several pertinent passages, all of which suggest democracy is a tremendous bother and really, just too boring and restrictive for Bush's taste. In other words, he doesn't think much of it.

NSA warrantless surveillance began about half a year before 11 September, indicating that 1.) The Bush Administration was interested in engaging in intense surveillance long before their alleged provocation occurred and 2.) This broad and intense surveillance, strangely, did NOT prevent 9-11 from taking place.

And remember, Bush fought the creation of the 9-11 Commission:

Kristen [Breitweiser]: "With regard to the 9/11 Commission, President Bush fought the creation of the commission, fought the legislative language to make sure the commission was set up in a bipartisan manner, fought the funding of the commission, fought an extension for the commission, fought access to individuals and documents."

And refused to publicly testify on his recollections of that day and before for the public record:

The two leaders [Bush & VP Cheney] were not under oath and no recording was made of the private session at the White House.

"I'm glad I did it. I'm glad I took the time... I enjoyed it," Mr Bush said after the conversation lasting more than three hours.

Three years after Bush's & Cheney's behind-closed-doors testimony, the public still has no idea as to exactly what anyone in his administration did to stop the attack before it occurred or what they did when they realized that the attack was underway. Notably, the then-National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice also refused to testify publicly and under oath.

When reading the following passage, keep in mind that it only takes a nuclear missile 30 minutes to make it from Russia to the US. It is EXTREMELY important for the President to be kept informed of threats on an immediate, real-time basis:

Two accounts explicitly state Bush was told while in the motorcade. "The President was on Highway 301, just north of Main Street… [when] he received the news that a plane had crashed in New York City." [Sarasota Magazine, 11/01] (See adjacent map for the location where he is told.) Another account states, "Bush was driving to the school in a motorcade when the phone rang. An airline accident appeared to have happened. He pressed on with his visit." [Observer, 9/16/01]

The first media reports of Flight 11’s crash into the World Trade Center began around 8:48, two minutes after the crash happened. [New York Times, 9/15/01] CNN broke into its regular programming at that time [CNN, 9/11/01], though other networks, such as ABC, took a few more minutes to begin reporting. [ABC, 9/14/02] So within minutes, millions were aware of the story, yet Bush supposedly remained unaware for about another ten minutes.

Sorry, but the idea that Bush was unaware of the attack as it was taking place well before he arrived at the Emma Booker Elementary School is very, very hard to credit.

Nah, sorry, but it's been my belief for quite some time that the Bush Administration knew full well that the 9-11 attack was on the way and consciously and deliberately decided to do nothing to stop it.

Philadelphia columnist and 9-11

The Philadelphia Daily News' Stu Bykofsky suggested in a column on 9 Aug that the current morale problems in America were due to 9-11 being so far in the past. His solution? "Another round, barkeep!" Yup, Bykofsky would like to see another 9-11-type attack with another 3,000 dead Americans. According to Bykofsky, Americans were united and energized after the 9-11 attack and that the US needs to get back that unity and sense of purpose.

Bykofsky veers off a bit and discusses the Persian Gulf War of 1991, which he says was an example of how to do a war right - it took less than 100 hours of on-the-ground fighting and fewer than 300 American troops died.

Bykofsky veers off yet again and opines that Americans aren't as tough as the British, who sustained a guerrilla-type war in Northern Ireland for 40 years.

Does it sound here like Bykosky is making a coherent argument? Not to me, it doesn't. What do 9-11, the Persian Gulf War of 1991 and "The Troubles" in Northern Ireland have to do with American lack of resolve to keep fighting the current Iraq War that began in 2003?

Patrick Cockburn of The Independent sums up the essential problem the US has in occupying Iraq:

"The US dilemma in Iraq goes back to the Gulf War. It wanted to be rid of Saddam Hussein in 1991 but not at the price of the Shia replacing him; something the Shia were bound to do in fair elections, because they comprise 60 per cent of the population. Worse, the Shia coming to power would have close relations with Iran, America's arch-enemy in the Middle East.
"This was the main reason the US did not press on to Baghdad after defeating Saddam's armies in Kuwait in 1991. It then allowed him savagely to crush the Shia and Kurdish rebellions that briefly captured 14 out of 18 Iraqi provinces.
"Ever since 2003, the US has wrestled with this same problem. Unwittingly, the most conservative of American administrations had committed a revolutionary act in the Middle East by overthrowing the minority Sunni Baathist regime."

It's apparently true that on 1 May 2003, Bush the Younger thought he had achieved a rapid victory akin to the one that Bush the Elder actually achieved back in 1991 (Because Bush the Elder settled for much more modest goals), but it's not at all clear that another attack on Americans will boost our sense of urgency enough to overcome the basic problem that Cockburn points out.

The real problem with Bykofsky's thesis is that it's no longer just his opinion. Matt Drudge gave Bykofsky a big thumbs-up with a listing on his top row in the center column of The Drudge Report. "Radio host Mike Gallagher, who claims to have 'over 3.75 million weekly listeners' across the country, hosted Bykofsky" and John Gibson of Fox News interviewed him (The ThinkProgress piece features a YouTube video of the John Gibson interview).

Of course, as Atrios points out, if another 9-11 attack occurs, it won't prove the "Dirty (Effing) Hippies" wrong, it'll prove that President Bush was wrong. Bush, after all, promised Americans that he wouldn't let another 9-11 attack occur. "President Bush pledged anew Friday that Osama bin Laden will be taken 'dead or alive,' no matter how long it takes."

As to the 9-11 attack itself, there are quite a few questions about that, 40 questions as compiled by 911Truth.org. And as of this May, Rasmussen reports that 22% of the American public believes that the Bush Administration knew of the 9-11 attack in advance. Republicans overwhelmingly reject that point of view, Democrats are 35% in favor of that view and 39% reject it.

A generation's call to duty

Glenn Greenwald quotes a writer from the Weekly Standard:

In the 1960s, history called the Baby Boomers. They didn't answer the phone.
Confronted with a generation-defining conflict, the cold war, the Boomers -- those, at any rate, who came to be emblematic of their generation -- took the opposite path from their parents during World War II.
...
Few of the leading lights of that generation joined the military.
...
But now, once again, history is calling. Fortunately, the present generation appears more reminiscent of their grandparents than their parents.

Er, sorry, but no, the young people of the "9-11 Generation" are no more likely to join the military than those of the Vietnam Generation were. In 1996, the number of personnel in the Army was a little over 490,000, in 2005, it was almost 489,000. The number stayed between 475,000 and 500,000 between those years.

Total numbers for the armed services as a whole were
1996: Over 1,470,000,
2005: Over 1,378,000.

We're constantly hearing stories like the following:

...as the war in Iraq rolls into its fifth year, the escalating cycle of combat deployments is wearing on the children and their families...

In other words, not only have the armed forces not expanded, they can't even bring in enough new people to replace those who are worn out and who are suffering from PTSD and really need to quit and allow others to take their places.

Nah, Greenwald accurately nails the problem. The Vietnam Generation had three components, those who went off to fight the war, those who stayed home and opposed it and the third, least honorable group, the chickenhawks, who enthusiastically supported the war, but who remained at a safe distance from the battlefield. Unfortunately, it's the chickenhawks who now run the country and the Iraq War. The "9-11 Generation" was told by their President to "Go shopping," so they did. There's nothing particularly wrong with the 9-11 Generation, but nothing particularly heroic, either.