Sept. 11 Was No Republican Conspiracy

But Bush team is milking terror war for all it's worth

by Andrew Greeley
The Chicago Sun-Times
February 8, 2002

 


In the months after the Pearl Harbor attack, the Republicans fashioned a theory to blame President Franklin Roosevelt, for whom they had a hatred that makes their descendants' hatred for President Bill Clinton look like deep affection. Roosevelt knew the attack was coming, they argued, and did nothing to alert the commanders in the Pacific. He wanted a disaster because he knew that the American people would need motivation to enter a war on England's side.

Most historians, acknowledging the bureaucratic incompetence that made the surprise attack the success it was, reject this conspiracy theory. They point out that what brought us into the European war was not the attack on Pearl Harbor but Hitler's subsequent declaration of war on the United States, one of the Fuhrer's worst mistakes. If he had not declared war, then the United States would have had to concentrate on the Pacific, and England would have been in far worse danger. Many history books omit this critical truth. Those Republicans who promote the theory blaming Roosevelt, even to this day, omit the other fact that their hero Douglas MacArthur, knowing of the attack in Hawaii, had his planes all neatly lined up at Clark Field for Japanese attackers 12 hours later.

Now, a similar conspiracy theory is emerging in left-wing e-mail postings. The people around Bush, they say, knew the attack was coming and let it happen because that would make Bush a popular wartime president. There were plenty of warnings, they say. The British, the Germans, the Russians all told us what might happen. The FBI in Minneapolis warned of Arabs wanting to learn to fly planes without bothering to know how to take off or land. The FBI was warned by the flight school that planes could be used as bombs. Using the same logic as the Pearl Harbor conspiracy theory, Washington must have known what would happen. Why didn't they stop it?

I don't believe this stuff any more than I believed the Pearl Harbor conspiracy theories. Roosevelt was not about to sacrifice the Pacific fleet to get us into a war. Bush was not about to sacrifice several thousand lives to increase his ratings. One has to be really sick to believe such things. The people around Bush might be mean enough to steal an election, but they are not, no more than Roosevelt's aides long ago, monsters. In both cases there were plenty of warnings and lots of bureaucratic incompetence. Stupidity explains a lot more than conspiracy.

That said, it is also true that the president and his staff and allies are using the World Trade Center disaster to push their right-wing agenda. To fight terrorists, the United States must transfer more of the national wealth to the rich, erode the Bill of Rights, permit the president to hide his documents, elect Republicans to Congress in the fall and not investigate the connections between the White House and the Enron stench. Anyone who questions aspects of the so-called war on terrorism is as bad as the terrorists themselves. Americans must support their president, right or wrong. Then go sing "God Bless America."

Bush's bellicose State of the Union speech is a perfect example of using terrorism as a technique for demanding support for his whole agenda. Unless North Korea, Iran and Iraq shape up, we'll go after them, too. Loud applause from Congress and from the American people still in the grip of war fever. Nuke 'em all.

When other countries expressed some concern about these threats, the president--on a tour to stir up more war fever--warned the rest of the world that it had better shape up, too, and decide whether it is on our side or on the other side.

The difficulty with this approach is it can have only a short-term payoff, absent any more terrorist attacks (the prospect of which seems to delight the secretary of defense). If the struggle to reduce terrorism must be a long-term effort, and there's no reason to think it will not be, the country needs something more than injections of jingoistic fever. It needs more and better intelligence of the sort that would have taken seriously the Minneapolis warning, as well as a calm and rational population. Such a style, however, will not elect a Republican Congress in November.

E-mail: agreel@aol.com

 

Copyright 2002 Chicago Sun-Times, Inc.

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