The Essay

Dr. Strangelove: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bush Administration

With today’s release of Fahrenheit 9/11, filmmaker Michael Moore is back to firebranding—and his most recent target, the Bush administration, is the worthiest concern going.

Whether Republican or Democrat, voters need to understand that the abysmal series of failures—in both foreign and domestic policy—underscores the grave incompetence of our current leadership. The litany of mistakes and abuses of power by President Bush is too long to recount here but, to illustrate, we need look no further than the information coming from the 9/11 Commission regarding the failures of that day. The portrait that emerges from the findings is eerily reminiscent of Dr. Strangelove. Let’s see if you agree.

Why did Bush stand in the classroom for several minutes after the second tower had been hit?

Okay, we all remember that morning. The first plane hits, everyone is astonished and, understandably, confused. Still, we might expect the leader of the free world to have access to better information than what we’re all seeing on the television. Here’s what Bush knew, according to the Commission’s findings, as reported by The New York Times: “The president had been told minutes earlier about the first crash, but Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser, who was on the trip, said initially that the plane that crashed was a twin-engine aircraft.”

Some quick facts: The plane that crashed into the north tower was American Airlines Flight 11—which had been loaded with 81 passengers and 24,000 gallons of fuel before beginning its ascent out of Boston around 8 a.m. Fourteen minutes later, air traffic had lost all contact with the plane. At 8:24, Flight 11 changed routes and the FAA heard the hijacker’s voice (probably that of Mohamed Atta) announce, “We have some planes.” Some planes—as in, more than one.

With that knowledge, it’s unclear how anyone could have believed the first plane was a small, twin-engine craft. No one appears to have pondered Atta’s statement and it was more than 10 minutes before Boston contacted NORAD. NORAD decided to send up some fighter jets, but, unfortunately, they were not airborne until six minutes after Flight 11 hit the north tower. According to The New York Times, just as the second plane struck the south tower, “Military air defenders were only just getting word at that time that a second plane had been hijacked.”

Questions, anyone?

Here are three to think about: If the FAA and Boston knew the plane had been hijacked, why didn’t Rice and the president? Why could they not even correctly identify which plane it was? And, perhaps more importantly, if fighter jets were dispatched six minutes too late, then shouldn’t they have been circling the sky when the second plane hit?

Which is worse: Conspiracy theory or stunning incompetence?

You tell me. I’ve been entertaining grave suspicions and exercising more than a little paranoia that our government allowed the events on September 11th to take place because of their plan to gain world domination. This plan is outlined in a chilling 1992 document from the Project for a New American Century, a group (headed by Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz) whose mission is to return America to its imperialistic roots and which seeks nothing short of (further) world domination.

The Project’s RAD Report (Rebuilding America’s Defenses), written in September 2000 by Wolfowitz, among others, laments that winning public sentiment for the plan would be a long, hard fight “absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event—like a new Pearl Harbor.”

Chilling, yes. Eerie, certainly, but, there’s some comfort to be had in conspiracy theories—namely, minds are at work—plots are being hatched—someone is trying to gain something and, diabolical though this may be, at least there’s an agenda.

But if everyone is just an idiot and shit is just happening, just ‘cause no one has the brains to do their job properly, then, well, maybe that’s even worse than a conspiracy theory. Out and out incompetence in the “greatest land in the world”—what, are they all smoking pot? Are the brains behind the country on par with those of the characters in Dumb and Dumber?

Okay, so we’re back in the classroom where Bush is chilling out with the kids because, as he told the Commission, he wanted to give the appearance of calm. God knows, buildings are on fire, people are dying, so just keep hanging out—please don’t send anyone into a panic by racing forward to do your job.

So that morning, Bush is told about the first plane around 9. He’s informed the second plane has hit at 9:05. This, of course, was the moment when we all knew a pattern had emerged, and yet it took 61 minutes for the FAA to realize that a third plane had been hijacked. This happened at 9:21 and by 9:38 it had hit the Pentagon. And yet, astonishingly enough, “military officials did not even know about the frantic search for Flight 77,” according to The New York Times. Instead, they were looking for “a ghost plane headed to Washington. The F.A.A. had erroneously reported that American Flight 11 - the plane that had crashed into the north tower of the trade center more than half an hour earlier - was still airborne and heading for Washington.”

Is that why Rice told Bush that a twin-engine hit the north tower?

One minute before the plane hit the Pentagon, at 9:37, Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and others began a conference call. The FAA was not included. “The official who ultimately joined the call at 10:17 had no familiarity with hijackings, no access to senior agency decision makers, and none of the information available to senior F.A.A. officials by that time,” according to The New York Times.

But Cheney, in his bunker, ordered the shooting down of any threatening airliner. Before that order went out, Deputy Chief of Staff Joshua Bolten suggested Cheney call Bush to confirm the order. But no one in the bunker, when questioned, could recall any such phone call confirming Bush’s authorization.

Military officials, when given Cheney’s directions, expressed confusion and never passed the directive onto the pilots engaged in the skies above D.C. and New York.

Shouldn’t someone be fired? Wouldn’t normal people, in far less dramatic and tragic circumstances, lose their jobs at such displays of incompetence? I suspect we might just be living through a live re-enactment of the plot to Dr. Strangelove— but instead of discussing such malfeasance—that would be unpatriotic—we are told to stand behind the President. Only blowjobs, apparently, constitute an impeachable offense.

Which brings us back to Michael Moore and the opening of Fahrenheit 9/11. Here’s one man who’s trying to bring all this incompetence to light, to make someone answer for these gross lapses in judgment, and for this he is attacked, ridiculed and labeled a “liberal fascist” by the New York Press. Because in America, the land celebrated for free speech and free press, no one can dare to criticize Dubya. --A.M. McNary