As we approach the 10th anniversary of 9/11, I am haunted by the specter of what happened in U.S. governance over the past ten years. By now, most informed people in the world know about Japan's Lost Decade - the decade of the 90s, when the Japanese economy collapsed and nothing that the Japanese authorities did could bring it back to life.
What we don't know, and what is not generally acknowledged, is that the Bush years were probably the years when we started a downward spiral from which we have not recovered, and may not be able to recover for a long, long time.
It all started with Bush's first Mulligan. A Mulligan, as we all know, is a golf term that refers to the second chance awarded to a golfer who muffs a swing because of an unexpected startling event that occurs on the course, i.e., someone sneezing, a bird landing near the ball on the tee.
How does a Mulligan apply to 9/11? Well, Bush did not exactly get a do-over in terms of the 9/11 airline hijackings by Al Qaida terrorists. That was simply not possible, or acceptable. He got a do-over on the job of protecting America from the terrorists.
Recall that Bush had no focus on terrorism in his first seven months in office. He appointed Vice-President Cheney as head of the anti-terrorism task force, which never met in the months preceding the 9/11 attacks. When Bush got a top secret memo stating that the Al Qaida people were focused on an attack on U.S. soil, Bush ignored the memo and continued bicycling and clearing brush in his Texas ranch, where he had been on vacation during the month of August - the month immediately preceding the 9/11 attacks.
Bush was also victimized by a brilliant chess game that Al Qaida was playing. What Al Qaida did - on hindsight - was similar to the Chess Opening known as Queens Gambit. Queens Gambit is an attack in the game of chess in which the White player offers Black a pawn on the board's queen side. If Black takes the pawn, it creates an opening for White to mount a winning offensive on the king side.
Recall that during the Group of Seven meetings in July, 2011 in Milan, Italy the whole world knew that Al Qaida was poised to attack the heads of state that were meeting in that city by crashing planes into the buildings where the meetings were being held. The City of Milan closed the skies - no planes were allowed to fly - for the duration of the meetings.
No attack took place. Al Qaida's plans were widely believed to have been foiled. That turned out to be the queenside pawn that Bush accepted.
When Bush got back to the U.S. from those Group of Seven meetings in Milan, he undoubtedly felt relieved that Al Qaida's plans had been foiled. He immediately went to his ranch in Crawford, Texas for a month-long vacation. Bush still had daily briefings, but he was apparently convinced that there were no imminent threats from Al Qaida, and he pooh-poohed an August 2nd memo that urgently warned Al Qaida was still focused on an attack on U.S. soil.
A little over a month later, Al Qaida attacked the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and would have been able to attack the Capitol or the White House if the passengers on United Airlines Flight 93 had not bravely sacrificed their lives to stop the terrorists that had hijacked their plane.
Normally, a President who commits such a huge blunder - especially one that cost the country nearly 3,000 innocent American lives - would have been dragged to Lafayette Square, next to the White House, and flogged like a fallen tyrant. But Bush, on the strength of a dramatic and rousing performance at Ground Zero a few days after the attacks, was given a Mulligan by a nation that was hungry for a leader who would personify their rage and who would promise them that heads would roll, that we would get our revenge, that there's hell to pay for the slaughter of nearly three thousand American citizens and nationals.
The country overlooked the fact that Bush had failed to protect the country because he had not been focused on the fight against terrorists whose enduring dream was to kill as many Americans as possible in a spectacular game-changing attack.
Bush was given another chance, and he took advantage of that chance masterfully. We Americans got visceral satisfaction out of the sustained bombing of Kabul and other Afghan cities, and later the raining of missiles on Baghdad. We killed many more Afghans and Iraqis than Al Qaida killed on that day of infamy, 9/11/2001.
The man who was AWOL in the fight against terrorists during the first seven months of his presidency was now the rallying symbol in that fight.
Bush's second Mulligan was the Tax Cuts. Bush in late 2011 already knew that the country had a massive expenditure staring in its face. There was definitely going to be a war against Afghanistan, and, unbeknownst to most Americans, also a war in Iraq. That meant that the country would need to raise taxes to finance the wars. Inexplicably, Bush still insisted that his tax cuts - which would mainly benefit the rich and super-rich - would have to proceed. His justification was that the economy needed a boost. The country was poised to go to war on two fronts, which would definitely give the economy a boost, did it still need a boost from the tax cuts? Most economists, in hindsight, do not think so.
The tax cuts were clearly a bone-headed economic policy, but in those days Bush could do no wrong. Years later, it became clear that the Bush tax cuts did nothing for the economy. They created a few jobs, they merely erased the Clinton legacy of budget surpluses "as far as the eye can see." But all was forgiven for Bush, because he was the Al Qaida fighter that the country needed.
The country's focus on the "war on terrorism" was the smokescreen for many Bush errors in judgment. The country was hemorrhaging jobs to China, India, Ireland, Mexico and other countries, but Bush's hands were handcuffed, assuming that he was inclined to do something about the hemorrhaging. He could not make waves because the biggest financiers of his two wars - and later his unfunded Medicare prescription drugs benefit - were the Chinese. He knew that America was committing economic hara-kiri by allowing factories to close plants in the U.S. and open new ones in foreign countries, mainly China, but did not use the enormous powers of his office to intervene.
Bush had painted himself into a a corner and could not do anything about the American multinationals' abandonment of America in favor of countries that paid their workers coolie wages by American standards. The country forgave him, giving him another Mulligan, because the country was aware of the huge distraction known as the Iraq and Afghan wars.
During Bush's two terms, the Republican-dominated Congress passed many bills that increased the Federal budget and ballooned the deficit, but Bush never saw the need to veto any of those budget-busting bills. Bush clearly was in the pocket of the U.S. Congress, which allowed him to spend money on the Afghan and Iraq wars off the books, meaning the expenses on those wars would not be a part of the official U.S. budget. This assured that the official annual deficits that were being recognized by Congress were $300 billion give or take. This of course, was sleight-of-hand because the federal deficit doubled during Bush's term from about $5.5 trillion when Clinton left office to about $11 trillion at the end of Bush's second term. Bush also signed TARP into law, which assured that Obama's first year would start being in the hole for close to $1 trillion. That $1 trillion would be credited to Obama since the monies would have to be spent in Obama's first year.
Bush got another Mulligan, but this time the blame was not erased; it was, rather, placed on Obama's shoulders.
How did Bush get away with all of these? I have struggled with this question over the years, finding myself in dead ends mainly. Recently, I came upon a possible explanation.
It was the Lewinsky scandals. The country was so shocked and bewildered by the Lewinsky scandals that they temporarily forgot that Clinton had brought the country into its second golden age, when life was easy, especially the part about making money.
At the subconscious level, Americans wanted to bring back the old George Bush whom they had jilted mistakenly in favor of the dashing and glib Bill Clinton in 1992. Americans longed for a leader who would not break their hearts, someone who would bring back the sense of decency and the "thousand points of light" and "gosh and golly" Americanisms of the George Bush, Sr. days. And who better to take the place of the old George Bush than his son, a vastly imperfect man at that.
This was probably the explanation for why Americans were so forgiving of George Bush, who had spent American taxpayer money like a drunken sailor, who had lied the country into a needless war in Iraq, who had allowed the Chinese to dismantle our manufacturing industry and take it all to China, who had given his friends and cronies the huge tax cuts that put the country into a trajectory towards financial ruin, whose religion of laissez-faire and deregulation had led to the Enron, Madoff and mortgage meltdown scandals.
Bush in his last two years at least had enough intelligence to realize that he had wrecked the well-oiled and beautifully running Cadillac that Clinton had handed him. Bush kept to himself, dared not show his face during the two years of campaigning leading up to the 2008 elections so as not to remind voters how a Republican - Bush - had used his dirty old hands to mash up the American economy as though it were potatoes that needed to be mashed by hand.
And so, as we count the days to the tenth anniversary of 9/11, let us finally realize that the greater tragedy was the wholesale murder of the American economy and the scuttling of America's future that occurred during the Bush years.
And let us not forget that it was us, the American people, who had kept giving Bush the mulligans that he never deserved. And that, friends, was by far a greater tragedy than 9/11.
