THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

Trump’s 9/11 Truthing

Does he know anything about the history of al Qaeda?

 

October 20, 2015

Donald Trump is running for the Republican presidential nomination, but sometimes it’s hard to tell. On national security the businessman often sounds closer to Bernie Sanders than he does to the GOP policy of active global leadership that has prevailed since the 1950s.

Mr. Trump’s latest walk on the wild left side is his attempt to rewrite the history of 9/11. In his campaign against Jeb Bush, the New Yorker is blaming George W. Bush because the hijackers struck during his Presidency. “The World Trade Center came down during his reign,” Mr. Trump said Friday, adding a day later that, “Do I blame George Bush? I only say he was the President at the time, and you know, you could say the buck stops here.”

Recall that during the last debate Jeb Bush received the biggest applause line of his campaign when he defended his brother’s antiterror record by saying “he kept us safe.” Mr. Trump is now trying to blunt that rebuke by distorting the truth about the hijackers and the Osama bin Laden era.

Blaming George W. Bush for the 9/11 attacks is like blaming President Obama for the recession that followed the 2008 financial panic. The rise of al Qaeda had been going on for years, and its first attack on U.S. soil was its bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993. Attacks on American targets overseas followed in 1996, 1998 and 2000.

Mr. Bush didn’t take office until 2001, after the 9/11 plot was underway and some of the hijackers were already in the U.S. Mr. Trump tries to blame immigration for the presence of the hijackers, but several arrived here legally on tourist or other visas.

The real U.S. failure was of intelligence and policy imagination during the Clinton years. Despite the growing evidence, U.S. officials refused to believe that Islamist terrorism posed much of a threat to Americans. Mr. Trump could bone up on this by reading the 9/11 Commission Report. Start with Chapter 4: “Responses to Al Qaeda’s Initial Assaults.”

Mr. Bush is responsible for his response to the 9/11 attacks, and on that score he did make us safer. He broke down barriers that the Clinton Administration had built between law enforcement (FBI) and intelligence (CIA). His spooks developed eavesdropping programs to uncover plots before they became attacks. His Administration captured and interrogated 9/11 plotters to collect information that kept al Qaeda on defense.

Mr. Bush also called state sponsors of terrorism to account and took the fight to the jihadists in their havens overseas. Other than the glib, wisdom-in-hindsight line that invading Iraq was a mistake, is there some part of this antiterror strategy that Mr. Trump opposes?

Mr. Obama has dismantled the CIA’s interrogation program and eroded some of the government’s intelligence collection capability, but he has retained most of what Mr. Bush assembled. If Mr. Trump thinks some or all of this is unnecessary, he ought to tell voters while he’s running to be Commander in Chief.

On that score, who knows what Mr. Trump believes on national security? He claims to be tough enough to stare down Vladimir Putin, but to what strategic end he won’t say. He wants to let everyone kill each other in Syria, which is also President Obama’s policy and has created a haven for Islamic State and a refugee deluge into Europe. The next President will inherit a world that is more unstable than at any time since the 1970s. He ought to know more about the threats than MSNBC clichés.

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 22nd, 2015 at 1:37 am and is filed under 9/11, American History, Clinton, Donald Trump, Election 2016, Foreign Policy, George W. Bush, History, Radical Islam, Terrorism. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.