Disclaimer: I didn't watch ABC's miniseries The Path To 9/11. I did watch about 30 minutes of it Sunday night, but I did not view the whole thing.
On the other hand, I did follow the controversy surrounding the miniseries with great curiosity. It seems the Democrats have suddenly discovered creative license, which has been a trademark of "historical" television shows and movies since the days of their inception. They also discovered that those who write the scripts for such entertainment often use sources that are somewhat controversial. History itself is controversial. Only the blandest of narratives usually passes without objection from one side or the other.
I found two conclusive statements about the miniseries that, for me, seemed to sum up what made the Democrats so angry.
From Rush Limbaugh:
Do you realize none of what we got in The Path to 9/11 was what we got throughout the 1990s? We had none of the staged good times of Bill Clinton. None of the nineties in The Path to 9/11 were portrayed as happy-go-lucky and carefree and a roaring economy and everybody just happy as they can be. We didn't see any trembling lip performance from Bill Clinton. They didn't use any of that video. We didn't see Clinton mesmerizing an audience ... What we saw in this movie was the real Bill Clinton: awkward, hesitating, unsure, faking resolve, and that, folks, is the real story behind the story. The image, the years of a crafted image has been laid bare for all who watched The Path to 9/11 to see.
And from John Podhoretz:
The one person who has no grounds for complaint is Bill Clinton himself.
"The Path to 9/11" gives the impression that, as president, Clinton never took bin Laden's declaration of war against the United States and the West seriously enough. And that is simply the unvarnished, undeniable truth.
Still, even here "The Path to 9/11" gets it wrong. The real truth about the failures of the U.S. government under both Clinton and Bush is not, as "The Path to 9/11" would have it, that the diabolical nature of the al Qaeda threat was obvious and unmistakable and that it was ignored by fools, charlatans and other downright unpleasant people who refused to listen to the Few Who Knew the Truth (meaning the late FBI official John O'Neill and that legend in his own mind, former counterterrorism official Richard Clarke).
The simple fact of the matter is that, with a million other things going on all at once - all of which seemed more pressing at the time, the threat went uncomprehended. (link added)
Hindsight is always 20/20. After 9/11, it was easy for anyone to look at the escalation of Islamic terrorism during the 1990's and conclude that we didn't do enough. But that is simply the risk of using a law enforcement approach to combat terrorism. No system is perfect of course -- Israel still suffers from random terrorism, and their system is probably the best in the world. But the caution traditionally associated with "innocent until proven guilty" obviously allows clever operatives to slip through the system. We have to decide if the risk posed by potential terrorists on the loose is greater than the risk posed by capturing or killing individuals without "absolute proof" of their intentions. Obviously the United States opted for the former until 9/11.
If this was indeed a fatal mistake, then we should learn from it and not try to pretend that it never happened.
In my opinion, the Democrats' gross over-reaction to a fictional TV miniseries can only damage them in the future. Even agenda-based celluloid crocks like Oliver Stone's Nixon and Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 911 failed to elicit threats of lawsuits and censorship from Republicans. Threatening ABC's broadcast license was probably the stupidest move that the Democrats could have made. This undoubtedly eroded an enormous amount of goodwill between broadcast television and the Democrats. And the chilling effect that would have resulted from ABC canceling the show could have been devastating to Hollywood.
Further, in their attempts to downplay the events portrayed in the film, former Clinton administration and Democrat party officials thoroughly savaged the official 9/11 Commission Report, which Democrats had previously been declared to be infallible, inerrant, and divinely inspired. In fact, a major 2004 Democrat campaign strategy attempted to portray the Bush Administration as lax with regard to fighting terrorism because the Bush Administration failed to reshape their entire foreign policy and terrorism strategies around the Commission's recommendations. But if the report is worthless, then maybe the Bush administration did the right thing.
9/11 is still near enough in the past for most of us to remember it vividly. Not just the horror of the terrorist acts themselves, but the reaction of Arabs and Muslims to news of the attacks. Their sheer joy at the suffering of Americans did not stem from emotions that surfaced only after Jan. 21, 2001. Animosity toward America has been building in the Middle East for forty years. The 1990's was a critical period during that time span. Woe to us if we forget that.
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