Trump marks anniversary at Pentagon, frames Iran war as terror fight
The four former presidents stood somberly side by side in the morning air at the memorial site, accompanied by the four former first ladies and other dignitaries, as the names of the nearly 3,000 people killed in the attack began to be read aloud with a cello playing in the background, according to The Wall Street Journal. Former President Biden shook hands with former first lady Laura Bush. Vice President JD Vance walked alongside the former presidents. Trump paid his respects at the Pentagon, where one of the September 11 planes killed 184 people.
The former presidents’ presence at Ground Zero was not only a signal of a bygone era of national unity but also a reunion of leaders who have shared private moments during key turning points in the battle against terrorism, the Journal reported.
As Bush prepared to take office, President Bill Clinton warned him in a personal meeting at the White House that bin Laden and al Qaeda would be his top national security problems, Clinton wrote in his memoirs. He had begun refocusing the national security apparatus on al Qaeda after early signs of its potency: the 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, which killed more than 200 people, and of the USS Cole in 2000 in Yemen, which killed 17 people.
Two weeks after U.S. forces killed Osama bin Laden, Obama dispatched top national security officials to Dallas to brief Bush on the military operation that killed the man who directed the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. Over 2½ hours, the officials laid out the specifics. “For Bush, it was fantastic. He wanted to know every detail,” Michael Morell, a former CIA deputy director who had been Bush’s intelligence briefer on the day of the attacks, told the Journal, describing Bush as “like a kid in a candy shop.”
Obama personally phoned Bush after the bin Laden mission, before addressing the nation, knowing that Bush himself had worked to capture America’s most-wanted enemy. Bush said of the raid: “Good call.”
Years later, Biden called both Bush and Obama to give them advance word of his decision to withdraw U.S. forces from Afghanistan — nearly 20 years after Bush attacked that nation in an effort to root out al Qaeda.
“Only they can understand the pressure that each one of them faced,” William Wechsler, a senior counterterrorism official in the Clinton and Obama administrations who is now with the Atlantic Council, told the Journal. “So, for most former presidents, there’s a degree of camaraderie across the aisle.” Their joint appearance on Friday, he said, “is perhaps one of the last remaining vestiges of a different time in American politics, when people were able to separate strong policy differences from equally strong personal respect and even admiration.”
The former presidents are an older generation now — all but Obama, 65, have reached their 80th birthday. The legacy of the attacks, which undermined some of their initial goals, has far less resonance with the estimated 100 million Americans who were born after September 11, the Journal reported.
The years since the attacks have surfaced details of how the attack and its aftermath shaped the presidents personally. Clinton said several times after leaving office that he was riven with regret for not stopping bin Laden before the attacks. “I didn’t get him, but at least I tried,” Clinton said in a contentious 2006 Fox News interview. “When I failed, I left a comprehensive antiterror strategy.” He said his efforts had hit bureaucratic hurdles and faulted the Bush administration for focusing more on its war with Iraq than on Afghanistan, which had housed al Qaeda.
Bush’s presidency was marked by leadership that brought a sense of resolve and unity to the nation after the attacks, and by his decision to strike Iraq in 2003 based on flawed evidence that it harbored weapons of mass destruction, the Journal reported. His decision to invade Iraq led to hundreds of thousands of deaths and left Bush’s job approval rating — once at a remarkable 90% — plummeting into the low 30s. It also touched off a debate about whether the global War on Terror violated civil liberties at home with broadened surveillance efforts and human rights overseas with its enhanced interrogation techniques.
At the same time, Bush’s speech at Ground Zero three days after the attack, delivered through a bullhorn and with his arm around a firefighter, has become an icon of American resilience, the Journal reported. “The people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon,” he said.
At a Bush library event in Dallas on Wednesday, former Secretary of State Colin Powell told Bush, before he spoke to the nation at a prayer service three days after the attacks, that it was acceptable to show emotion privately but not publicly, according to recollections shared by Condoleezza Rice, the former national security adviser. “It’s all right to do it in here, but don’t do it in front of the whole country,” Powell said, according to Rice. “Colin was right,” Bush said at the library event. “The nation didn’t need a blubbering president. The nation needed someone to show some strength, and I gave it my best shot.”
Also weighing on the president: On September 11, after the attacks took place, he was given intelligence from a European country that a second wave of assaults was planned. “It absolutely affected him. I saw it,” Morell, who presented the information to Bush, told the Journal.
Obama came to office saying he would end the Iraq war, which he had called a “dumb war,” and focus on rooting out al Qaeda in Afghanistan. He accomplished neither. He ended the Iraq war in 2011, only to have to restart military operations in 2014 to stop the rapid rise of ISIS, which was thriving in the power vacuum left by the war. In his first days in office, Obama signed an executive order to restrain the government’s use of harsh interrogation methods.
Biden had voted as a senator in 2002 to authorize the Iraq war. As vice president, he was skeptical of Obama’s decision to send a surge of troops into Afghanistan. Over Thanksgiving in 2009, he faxed a handwritten message to Obama opposing the surge as too expansive, according to reporting at the time.
Twelve years later, Biden, as president, ended the nation’s longest war by withdrawing U.S. forces from Afghanistan as the Taliban were speedily retaking control of the country, a chaotic action that left 13 U.S. military personnel dead. Biden’s decision was widely criticized as a precipitous withdrawal, and his job approval ratings never recovered, according to the Journal.
Trump came to office promising to end the “forever wars,” drawing down U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan in his first term and signing an agreement with the Taliban to withdraw all U.S. military from Afghanistan, which Biden later carried out. Trump is now engaged in the war he and Israel instigated against Iran, which the president’s aides caution could last until the end of his term, the Journal reported. Among some supporters, the war is viewed as a betrayal of his campaign promises and “America First” philosophy.
At a Pentagon ceremony on Friday, Trump placed the Iran war in the context of the 25-year War on Terror. “We salute the servicemembers working right now to ensure the world’s No. 1 sponsor of terror, the Islamic Republic of Iran, will never, ever have a nuclear weapon,” Trump said.
Since leaving office, Bush has painted portraits of servicemembers, a task that entails looking deeply at their faces, and invited veterans on bike rides. The four former presidents have at times cautioned that America’s safety relies on keeping alive the memory of September 11.
“Our nation occasionally goes through isolationist periods, where the attitude is, ‘We’ve got too many problems at home. Therefore, who cares what happens overseas?’” Bush said Wednesday, according to the Journal. “Which really means to me, they just don’t pay attention to the lesson of 9/11. Because what happens overseas matters to our national security at home.”