Ignatius on 9-11 Report

I concur. The 9-11 report isn't structured like an attack on the Bush administration, and that's certainly not it's tone, but the facts make Bush look quite bad:

The report's tone is evenhanded and nonpartisan, but the facts gathered here are devastating for the Bush administration. The Clinton team may have dithered over plans to kidnap (or kill) Osama bin Laden in 1998 and '99, but they did manage to mobilize the government at every level to deal with al Qaeda's Millennium Plot. The Clinton administration gathered a small crisis group at the White House that made sure every agency worked to thwart al Qaeda's planned terrorist attack. The Bush team, in contrast, didn't get serious about bin Laden until those planes hit their targets. Indeed, it's shattering to read the report's account of the summer of 2001, well before the assault, when al Qaeda operatives couldn't stop chattering about the big, big terrorist attack they were planning -- and the Bush administration never went into full crisis mode. "Many officials told us they knew something terrible was planned, and they were desperate to stop it," the report notes. But they didn't, in part because the White House didn't take control.

Even after 9/11, some senior Bush officials didn't seem to get it. Another of those little-noticed footnotes describes a Sept. 20, 2001 memo prepared by undersecretary of defense Douglas J. Feith, apparently for his boss, Donald Rumsfeld. According to the commission, "the author expressed disappointment at the limited options immediately available in Afghanistan and the lack of ground options. The author suggested instead hitting terrorists outside the Middle East in the initial offensive, perhaps deliberately selecting a non-al Qaeda target like Iraq. Since U.S. attacks were expected in Afghanistan, an American attack in South America or Southeast Asia might be a surprise to the terrorists." If Feith really wrote such a memo, how is it possible that he is still in his job?

And to be clear, you'll get no argument from me that the Clinton administration fell short in a number of ways. Basically, they decided to simply accept the prevailing political climate of the time, which held al-Qaeda to be a "serious problem" but not so serious that any of the ordinary constraints of US politics should be set aside or challenged in order to deal with it. Of course the attitude of the GOP at the time didn't help with this, but the reality is that on foreign policy issues like Kosovo where Clinton really decided that he'd had enough he managed to lead public opinion and break outside the box. On terrorism, this never really happened. Bush, from January 20, 2001 to September 11, 2001 made things considerably worse. And even worse, after 9-11 when it didn't take much to move public opinion in whichever way the White House wanted, there was a consistent push to move it in the direction of (a) invading Iraq, and (b) boosting executive authority, rather than galvanizing support for initiatives that could really make the difference in the long term.

On the subject of things that aren't designed to make Bush look bad, it's worth noting that much of Mike Scheuer's critique of the administration's conduct in Afghanistan is drawn from reading Bush at War and contrasting that extremely favorable account with what he says a reasonable approach would have been.