HE KEPT US SAFE

Defenders of W, the outgoing President, 43, Bush 2, Cheney’s mouthpiece, say that whatever his mistakes, at least he kept us safe.

This is ludicrous. Whoever happened to be President on September 11, 2001, would have “kept us safe.” Al Gore, Hillary Clinton, John McCain, Bill Clinton, Elmer Fudd (wait, he was President), any semi-competent individual would have “kept us safe.” The world changed on that day. Domestic security didn’t just step up a notch, it expanded exponentially. And it would have done so no matter who was in charge.

You think George was the only guy or gal under whom you would be taking off your shoes in order to board a plane? You think only George perceived the need to increase border security, to better monitor potential domestic terrorists, to make the CIA talk to the FBI?

Who was the enemy on September 11? A bunch of guys with box cutters who took over airplanes and crashed them into buildings. This tactic didn’t even survive until noon on that awful day, and it wasn’t George who led the way in countering it. A handful of citizens on the fourth hijacked plane gave their lives, but they prevented their plane from being used as a missile. The box cutter-airplane-building tactic worked for a few hours one morning, but a repeat is unlikely.

Would another President’s expanded domestic security program have taken a different shape? At the margins, certainly. And with more concern about Constitutional niceties, hopefully. But anyone who thinks things would have returned to pre-9/11 conditions has a screw loose. Whoever the President, a massive expansion of domestic security programs would have occurred, and their short-term success would have been very probable.

The world remains an unsafe place. The real dangers are not guys with box cutters but guys with nukes or germs. Preventing the bad guys from getting their hands on these types of weapons is the challenge for the years and decades ahead.

In the domestic security field, W deserves credit for doing his job, for doing what any competent individual in that position would have done. But implying that he did something extraordinary is nonsense