After 9-11: What Could Have Been

9-11 has rolled around again, as it will every year until time rolls no longer. With this day comes the inevitable grief and sadness. We all know what happened, no American could forget that. We all live with the tragedy. There is grief and there is sadness and there is great frustration.

The mastermind behind the act is still free to roam the earth and that's because the Cowboy in charge at the time talked it, but did not walk it. He had attention deficit disorder and took his eyes off the prize, the real prize not the one they found in a spider hole.

On September 11, 2001 George W. Bush was at a crossroads in history.

Go down the path of FDR and Churchill and rally the free world to the fight against terrorism, which is truly a global problem just as the Nazis were in the dark decade before World War II. The days after 9-11-01 saw more sympathy and solidarity for the US than there ever had been before and there may never be again. Thus, the time to unite the world was then. The time to conquer the enemies of freedom and democracy and civilization itself was then, at that moment.

Had that path been taken George W. Bush would now be thought of as one of the greatest presidents ever, perhaps one of the great world leaders of history.

Instead, he choose the Cowboy path, talking tough through gritted teeth, with eyes narrowed into slits. "Fer us or agin' us." But a weak cowboy he was. He told us all to go shopping. Go to the malls, else the terrorists win. He removed a dictator from Iraq, which was a good thing, but it was a diversion, ultimately a much bigger and more distracting diversion than Bush thought it would be. It took US away from the hunt for Osama bin Laden, and the creation of a world united to destroy Islamist terrorism forever.

Bush took us down the path that led to distrust of American motives and a world that tries to pretend the problem of Islamist terrorism is no real problem at all.

George W. Bush is a tale of what could have been. That's one of the greatest tragedies of 9-11. What could have been.